All of a sudden, I’m glad to be busy with school. Not wanting to sit around thinking about what’s gonna happen at the hearing, I push myself even harder to focus. I start making lists, the way I used to. I spend every free second of my time studying, trying to memorize all the things I didn’t bother to learn in the past several weeks.

Even though Kimmie won’t stop insisting that I should join her and Darryl for lunch, I almost never do. I keep telling her that I need to go to the study room, that I have work to catch up on, and even though it’s true, I’m not sure she believes me.

“There you are,” Kimmie says when I run into them in the hallway on a Tuesday. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“It’s only been a few days,” I say, sneaking a quick glance at Darryl. He’s smiling at me, but I can’t help thinking about what he said last time we talked—how Kimmie’s been upset because I’m acting weird.

“You could take a break every now and then, you know?” she says, but I don’t really listen.

Every night after dinner, I stay up for hours, forcing myself to do more work. Studying at Jorge and Amy’s isn’t easy, though. It’s not like in our old apartment, where I had a desk and a bedroom door that I could close. Here, I have no choice but to study at the kitchen table. And when everyone’s gone to sleep and I’m still up, going through endless textbooks and notes, all I can think about is that the door of Amy and Jorge’s room won’t close because the crib takes up too much space. I wonder if they’re lying in bed, wide awake and upset because the light from the kitchen is filtering into their bedroom.

The same worries I’ve had since day one have not left my mind. I still worry that Sophie and I are bothering them, disrupting their routine. I worry that Jorge and Amy are going to get tired of having us here, and that if my parents’ hearings don’t go well, Sophie and I will have nowhere else to go.

I come back from my shift at the bodega on Thursday to find a weird scene inside the apartment. Sophie and Amy are sitting at the dinner table, while Jorge leans against a wall with his arms crossed. There’s an untouched plate of cookies and a full glass of milk in front of my sister, and it looks like she’s been crying.

The second I walk in, they all turn to look at me, but no one says anything.

“What’s going on here?” I ask, closing the front door softly.