Sofia also knows that if she needed help, the witch would help her. But she would take something in return. Sofia scans her person and finds nothing she would be willing to part with. But she feels invincible and cannot think of anything that could go wrong. She is on the raging pinnacle of fourteen; she knows nothing about sacrifice.

Sky, earth, someday you will be a mother: these are the constants. Sofia is interested in boys as purveyors of attention. She is interested in them as adventures. There is a tickling, an urgency in her rib cage and tongue when she thinks of kissing one. She can picture exhaling into an open mouth, creating some new breath that lives only between bodies. But she cannot imagine dragging two children across the street, groceries falling off of one shoulder. She cannot imagine being her own mother, whose hair always seems to stay in place, who has mastered the behind-the-scenes coordination necessary for keeping two children and a husband fed and clothed and clean, but who sometimes grips the sink and hunches her shoulders and takes a staggering breath in and out, exhaustion seething in the kitchen air. Her papa looks at her mamma, but is he the only one? Sofia wants to belong to the world.

It is easier for Sofia to imagine being Joey. Her papa strides through the world chest-first. If her mamma is behind the scenes, her papa is the star of the show. He is watched, listened to, talked about. But I wouldn’t do what he does, Sofia tells herself. She knows what he does. There is something about Joey that makes Sofia angry, prone to gnashing her teeth. He is the reason other families cross the street when they see the Colicchios walking. He is the reason no one was allowed to be friends with her at school. It’s best not to ask questions, Rosa has told her. Sofia has a feeling she will have to get smaller as she gets older. Fit herself into tighter spaces.

Sofia is just starting to realize that the freedom of this Sunday morning will shrivel into boredom when she sees Antonia, clad in a red dress with smart black buttons and capped sleeves, walk down the street. Sofia presses both of her palms and her nose to the glass and holds her breath so it will not fog and watches Antonia cross at the corner.

Antonia would have told her if she was going to the hair salon, or the grocery store, or the post office—somewhere routine. And Antonia would have invited her to the cinema, and would have asked for advice if she was going somewhere forbidden and scandalous (midday on a Sunday?) like Central Park, where they are absolutely not allowed to be alone, or Coney Island, where the air is brackish and foreign, and they can watch men shuffling sheepishly in and out of the freak show.