Sofia looks at the apartment where she’s lived all her life with new eyes: high school eyes, eyes that have spent the past week in a world inaccessible to her family. Sofia is realizing how very alone she has been for most of her life. Aside from Antonia, Sofia has not been immersed in schoolyard dynamics; she has never been the center of a buzzing crowd of children. Sofia feels like she has come up for air, emerged into sunlight, washed a layer of dirt away. She has unearthed, at the center of her person, a little sprouting seed of something that feels like anger, like jealousy. It is looking at her father, at his job, at the structure within which Sofia has been raised, with new suspicion. What will I do?

Who, Sofia Colicchio wonders, alone in her apartment, will I be?

Sofia cannot picture herself as an adult. She knows she will get married and have children. She cannot remember learning that information, but she knows it is true. Marriage is like clothing one must pull on before leaving the house; to be without it is to walk naked through the streets.

Down the block there is a woman who lives alone. She came from Sicily many years ago to escape a horror, some vague thing no one will say, but everyone’s parents understand, yes, us too, and it always has something to do with hunger, with being forgotten. She came with one ragged leather suitcase full of herbs, cards that tell the future, and a wooden box, locked shut. It is rumored that women having babies can call her and she will help them burn the cord and dim the lights and make poultices of herbs and flowers and show the mothers how to angle their nipples to feed. It is rumored that if she makes eye contact with you no one will ever fall in love with you. It is known that she can curse you with a word or two, and just like that, your future will be altered, shadowed, darkened. Sofia knows she is a witch, and she and Antonia walk the long way around the unassuming building where the shades are always drawn across the face of the attic apartment. They do this out of habit—because it is what they have done since they were six, walking home from school—but even teenage Sofia is filled with a cold fear, a heart-fluttering kind of panic, when she imagines the witch woman, who is only ever spotted on her way to the grocers, wild hair escaping her hat, gnarled fingers curled around her shopping bags like pea tendrils, reaching until they find something to squeeze. No one looks at her, and the idea of this terrifies Sofia. How empty, to walk through the world under no one’s gaze. How impossible, to never be seen. How could anything grow like that.