Cover

Dedication

TO MY MA AND PA, WHO HAVE GIVEN ME EVERYTHING

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PART ONE

1

MA IS ALWAYS TELLING ME HOW I feel too much.

“It isn’t a bad thing, mijo,” she reminds me every time this comes up. “It just means you carry around a little more than you should. When things are bad, it weighs you down more than it would most people. But when everything’s good, you also get to feel a little more of the good stuff.”

On days like today, I think she might be right. Maybe I do feel too much. I’ve been carrying all this weight inside my stomach for hours, and it just won’t go away. It’s heavier than these boxes I have to carry around, and I’m getting tired of the way it’s bringing me down.

I look at the pile of boxes, trying to figure out which one weighs the most. Maybe if I grab the heaviest one, this feeling inside me will feel lighter in comparison, so I push a box of paper towels aside and pick up the one full of packaged tortillas.

It’s lighter than I expected, but maybe that’s just because my arms have gotten stronger. I’ve been helping Ma and Pa at the bodega for a couple of years now, but I only took over the task of restocking the shelves last summer. In the months since then, I’ve learned that no box is too heavy to carry.

I head toward the back of the store and set the box down in front of the half-empty tortilla shelf. This little corner of the bodega used to be nothing more than a few shelves with Mexican products, but ever since Pa decided to add items from other countries, we started referring to it as the Ethnic Foods section. As I begin to pile up the packages of tortillas on the shelf, that word starts burning my tongue. Ethnic.

“Too ethnic,” I whisper to myself. “Too ethnic.”

“Excuse me?”

I turn around to find a woman standing behind me. Her hand is frozen mid-movement as she reaches for a bottle of salsa.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. “I was just talking to the tortillas.”

She walks away quickly, throwing me a weird look as she disappears around the corner of the aisle.