In the afternoons she washes Lina’s dishes, the old teacups with the amber stains and the plates with desiccated toast crusts dangling off the edges. She boils pasta or reheats leftovers or brings home containers of soup from the deli and tries to get Lina to sit at the table, to eat something, to ask Antonia how her day was. She leaves each dinner table for her books, and imagines being Antigone, buried with her principles and her god and her unimaginable loss. Or she feels like she is living on the earth, and scooping shovelfuls of black soil down on top of Lina in her tomb. Antonia is Penelope, abandoned by more courageous adventurers. She is Circe, with only the ghosts of things she has missed out on for company. In this way, Antonia manages to inhabit every bitter and angry and passionate thing she has denied herself in her real life, where she is too busy trying to survive to think about how it feels.

At night, when she is close to sleep, Antonia shuts her books, closes her eyes, and misses Carlo. She does this carefully, for a few minutes at a time. Good night, Papa, she whispers.

Sofia finds a group of red-lipped, coiffed-haired older girls who slip notes to one another when the teacher turns around and linger leaning against their lockers between classes. If they know who her family is, they say nothing. It is possible that they do not care. From her new friends, Sofia learns the power of a jutted hip, a manicured nail. She begins to take a different sort of care when she dresses. She dares show up at the dinner table with her proud straight spine and her lips lined and glossy. She begins to notice the eyes of other students at school following her as she walks down the hall, and most of these encounters make her feel taller, more full of red blood and moxie.