Turning to me with game face on, she says what she has said to me a thousand times in the future, in every emotional crisis I’ve made her bear witness to. “I think we need a hot chocolate.” Regardless of season or time of day, she says hot chocolate solves everything, and though I can’t prove this applies to quantum physics, I’m not saying no.

Gale Warning

Gale Warning

The plan is to pass me off as her nephew. “Sometimes, you have to put a blind spot to work for you.” We are standing outside Frohmeyer’s door, and Ms. Silverthorn says this so quietly that I am not sure whether she is reassuring herself or me. We worked it out over breakfast, which I wolfed down out of nerves, forgetting the intermittent fasting I do at home—which I now think of as a time, not a place.

“You think he’ll buy it?” I try to keep my voice low. We look nothing alike: no overlap in skin tone, hair texture, or features. Mom’s family, Cuban immigrants from the revolution, prize their comparative paleness; they marry only other light-skinned Cubans (or, in a pinch, white people, so that they can at least keep a fiction of their purity). But she went and married my dark-skinned dad, which pissed off her family and produced me, a midpoint on the color wheel.

“I think Mr. Frohmeyer doesn’t know enough Black people—or Hispanics for that matter—to doubt it. And since he only employs one, I don’t think he’ll dare question me.” (Hispanics? Whoa. This really is the ’80s.)

His door swings inward, and he waves us in. Frohmeyer looks like Alfred Hitchcock with a mullet. The trail of snowy curls hanging to his collar is jarring in contrast to the shiny dome. His round cheeks seem permanently stuffed with something, which makes his small mouth look even smaller. “Tell me again what this clown’s doing at a new school a month before graduation?”

Clown? I can’t imagine Mrs. Somboon-Fox talking about a student that way and getting away with it, but I try to keep my face neutral. (Oh god, imagine if I hadn’t wiped off the glitter.)

Ms. Silverthorn bites her lip. “Well, Ninevah …” She swallows and blinks to forestall tears. “You remember my sister, yes?”

Frohmeyer clearly does not and just as clearly has no plan to admit this. “Of course.” He fills in the blanks. “What—is she sick or something?”

Ms. Silverthorn steers her wet eyes away from him and toward the framed portrait of the dead Mrs. Frohmeyer. She takes a breath and then can’t continue. I am loving this. I don’t think people said you go, girl in 1985, but I am screaming it on the inside. Ms. Silverthorn’s performance is masterful. “I’m all she has …”