“Let her be,” W said. “Stop wiggling, little girl.”

When it was done, W lifted me and set me on the bar, facing the mirror. “What do you think?” she said.

She’d given me bangs and cut straight across the top of my ears, trimming it shorter in back.

“Samantha,” you said, touching the ends of my hair gently so that my scalp tickled. Where in your brain did that name come from? You touched yourself at the base of your throat. “And Theresa. Like Mother Theresa.”

“OK.” W hugged me, and I thought she was going to lift me off the bar, but she didn’t. “We’ll call you Sam, for short.”

“I want to go home,” I said.

“This is where we’ve always lived.” You ran your fingers through my hair and grabbed a handful. You smoothed it down and kissed the top of my head, a hard kiss that made me draw my elbows together and push you off me. “Sam,” you said, trying it out.

My anger was a knot at the back of my neck. I wanted to keep my name.

Hair had piled up on the floor. Your black hair, my black hair—who could tell the difference? W folded up the newspaper and swept up the hairs that had escaped its borders. She squatted and held the dustpan between her feet, the long handle of the broom bobbing above her head. Tiny hairs stubbornly stuck to the vinyl floor. I pressed my finger against one. On my skin, it looked like a paper cut. You blew, and the imaginary cut was gone.

“Make a wish,” W said.

ASPIRATION

1980

HACIENDA ROAD

In Aspiration, California, Theresa changes her name to Lara and Sam’s to Emma. She gets a job working the register at the plant nursery on Hacienda Road, and from Jimmy, her boss, she learns to grow succulents and how to break the tip of the aloe and rub its gel onto the sunburned skin at the edges of Emma’s tank tops. She rents a yellow bungalow with green trim and a weedy front yard, and from the hippie couple that lives next door she learns about the other kind of weed, which they grow in a hidden corner of their backyard.

“Shhh,” the husband says. “We call them ‘Mexican tomato plants.’”

The smell of those plants.