Mrs. Solís joins Ma and me on the couch, and Pa walks out of the apartment to go check on her TV, because that’s just what he does. It doesn’t matter that he spent all morning at the bodega and all afternoon running around the city, meeting with suppliers, paying the bills. It doesn’t matter that he’s exhausted and needs to wake up at five thirty tomorrow morning. He goes to check on Mrs. Solís’s TV because she needs him, and he’s not going to let her down.

As I sit watching Hamilton with Adam beside me the following night, I can’t help but feel all the same things I felt the time we went to see Wicked, my very first Broadway show—the chills, the tingling in my hands. My chest swells with the music, and deep down, I feel a desperate need to be up on a stage. I also love hearing the small gasps Adam lets out every now and then, and feeling the way he tenses in his seat whenever a singer hits a high note.

“So?” Kimmie asks the second we walk out of the theater. She’s standing right beside the doors with a big smile on her face. “How was it?”

“It was unbelievable,” Adam says.

I nod. A part of me wants to tell her every last detail about the show, but I also don’t want to rub in the fact that we got to see it when she didn’t. Instead, I ask, “How was dinner with your family?”

“It was all right,” she answers with a small shrug.

We stand on the sidewalk while people continue to file out of the theater through the doors behind us. The air feels a little warm for March. If there is one thing I like about winter, it’s that the cold air somehow neutralizes the smells of the city, but when I take a long breath, I’m pretty sure I catch the stench of trash somewhere nearby.

“So,” Adam says.

“So?” I ask.

“McDonald’s?”

“Let’s do it.”

Every time we go see a show, we go to the McDonald’s in Times Square afterward for Chicken McNuggets and ice cream cones.

We walk half a block toward Broadway and find ourselves in the middle of all the lights and billboards. I only like Times Square when it’s late at night. It’s when the crowds aren’t as bad and the lights look their brightest.

Kimmie leads the way into McDonald’s, and Adam and I follow. After waiting for an excruciating ten minutes, the three of us walk out, each of us holding a brown bag in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other.