Once, when she was in kindergarten, a teacher had asked, “Who knows how to draw a star?” Josefa raised her hand along with all the other kids and went to the blackboard, smiling and confident, and with the chalk she drew a kind of circle with points. All the kids laughed and shouted that that wasn’t a star, and then Josefa looked at the chalkboard again and realized it was true, that what she had drawn wasn’t what she’d seen in her mind, it wasn’t a star. In the afternoon, at Mauricio’s house, she started to cry. Mauricio was the son of the neighbor who took care of her in the afternoons, and he consoled her, telling her not to worry, that he would teach her the easiest way to draw a star. First she had to draw an inverted V, then an upward line to the left, another horizontal line to the right, and finally a downward one to meet the initial point of the V. “It draws itself, see?” said Mauricio. “And you don’t even have to lift the pen.” That was another reason Josefa wanted to be an adult. If she learned how to draw stars and do all the other things adults knew how to do, no one would laugh at her again.

“Sputnik Two. A Soviet ship,” said Fede, delighted with his own words. “Laika was a mutt, a street dog. Her real name was Kudryavka, and she beat the other two dogs the Russians were training. She was the first living being to travel in space, and after seven hours, the first to die in orbit.”

Josefa didn’t like hearing that Laika was dead. Really, it was pretty stupid on her part to think the dog could still be alive, flying around out in space, but that’s how she’d imagined her, just like in the song, looking out through the rocket’s window at the colored ball that was Earth.

“She’s carved beside Lenin on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space. There’s a poem on the monument. One verse says, ‘We have forged great flaming wings.’ In Russian, of course. I like the Russians more than the Yankees, how about you?”

Huddled in Fede’s arms, Josefa said she preferred the Russians too, but she didn’t really know what that meant, and she said it in a voice so quiet it was as if she’d said nothing at all.