She and I have known each other since we were both in diapers. She’s tiny, probably well under five feet, but she has a loud voice, which she’s always been unafraid to use—especially when I can’t use my own. When we were in elementary school and a kid on the playground pulled my hair, she made sure one of the teachers found out. When a guy made a mean comment about my shoes in freshman year, she snapped back at him before I could even open my mouth. And when I’ve told her about all the things I can’t quite understand, like the fear that people are watching me, or the loneliness that follows me everywhere I go, she’s always been there to listen to me, to reassure me, to make me feel a bit more like Sol even when I’m feeling most like Soledad.

“Hey!” she says when she sees me approaching the table. In a quick movement, she takes her bag off the chair she saved for me and places it on the floor beside her.

“Hi,” I say. No one else looks at me as I put my tray down. The conversation keeps going, which isn’t all that unexpected. Even though we’ve been sitting at this table for almost two years, I still have a hard time thinking of any of these people as my friends. To me, they’ve always been Ari’s new friends, even though they’re not at all new anymore.

“Congratulations again,” Ari says to me, her smile widening. “Did you do anything last night to celebrate the job offer?”

“Uh… not really,” I say. “My dad and my abuela were a little shocked that it’s all happening so quickly, so…”

Ari presses her lips together, smiling in a way that tells me she doesn’t need any more explanation than that—she gets it.

She’s the one who helped me find a job. For weeks, I sat in front of our family computer, applying to every single opening I could find, but the furthest I ever got was with a movie theater chain in Imperial Beach, which sent me a generic email where they spelled my name as “Sole” and blandly explained I was not right for the position at that time.

When I told Ari that I needed to find an after-school job to help my family, though, she jumped into action. She spoke to one of the managers at the department store she works at, got me an interview, and then helped me prepare for it, cheering for me every step of the way—up until yesterday, when I got a call saying that I’d gotten the job.

“No way,” Tony says suddenly from the other end of the table, his eyes widening. “No way.”