Sofia pulled up the chair where she’d been sitting earlier, at the big table in the open space by the kitchen. They ate their meals here. There was no dining room, no separate living areas in the house. Just their bedrooms, the combined bathroom–laundry, and the communal room here. She found it annoying sometimes, having nowhere she could be alone save for her room. But such thoughts were always followed by a flush of shame that the only reason she could truly be alone these days was because, apart from Papa, her whole family was gone.

She sat down in front of the textbooks she was supposed to be studying and tried to settle herself into a more academic frame of mind. The snow was falling so heavily now, whipped into twisting curlicues and sheets of white that the park was almost entirely obscured. She shook her head and pulled the thickest textbook, which wasn’t very thick at all, over to her.

She opened it at the chapter relevant to her assignment. The history of the Great Depression. Like anyone cared.

Sofia tried to read a short passage, an interview, in which a man described how he’d worked seven hours to earn the money to buy a bottle of baby formula for his kid, and how he’d run three miles to the drugstore for it, only to find the place was closed. As much as she could see that the situation sucked big-time, his story still didn’t compare with what she’d been through.

Hey, try running to the store chased by half-a-dozen of Blackstone’s road agents, she thought.

Sofia flinched away from remembering the day the gang attacked their hacienda while she and her father had been out checking the back pastures. She could only ever recall those awful moments in her nightmares. Trying to think about them while conscious was impossible, like stabbing yourself slowly in the eye. But she had no trouble remembering other times, some of them just as bad.

An observer watching Sofia Pieraro over the next few minutes would have been astounded by the change that came over the teenager. Psychologists would call it a fugue state. For Sofia, it was akin to time travel. It was what happened when she found herself zoning out at school. She wasn’t simply recalling events. Her mind, her whole consciousness, was back there.

The moaning wind that bent the leafless branches of the trees in the park, she heard no more. She did not see the great white rectangle of the picture window nor the complete white-out brought on by a blizzard for the ages. The Great Depression had never happened. The poor man with the hungry child altogether vanished from history.