“I didn’t even want to breathe the air near him, much less kiss him!” gasps Sofia. “Much less . . . ugh! And I’m sure he’s told all his friends we did that and more, and God I almost don’t care as long as I don’t have to talk to him anymore!” Sofia almost tells Antonia there was a moment where she looked at him and thought, what if I just did it? What if I undid my buttons and just did it, just like that, what would happen then? and that she was stopped not by a sense that it was wrong, or that she had to protect herself, but by a powerful surge of sadness, the idea that Lucas Fellini would be the one to divide her life into before and after, the idea that if she was changed he would be a part of it. Instead, she had turned to him and told him to walk her home, and she had gone to bed still shaking with the thinness of the boundary between saying yes and saying no. But she would feel naked if she told Antonia, who she is sure never has to wrestle with breaking rules the way Sofia does.

Antonia’s stomach hurts from laughing—with relief, with love, with horror at the things Sofia is tempted to do. Sofia rests her head on her stretched-out arm so she can look sideways at Antonia.

“I’m sorry, you know?” says Sofia.

Antonia is tempted to ask about what but she knows it would be one of those choices that makes her smaller, that Sofia would roll her eyes and say you know, and Antonia does know. So she says, “Me too,” and they lie together and listen to the adults in the living room. Occasional coughing; a man’s laughter.

“Do you ever think about this?” asks Sofia. She gesticulates toward the closed bedroom door.

“How do you mean?” asks Antonia.

“I mean, do you ever think about what they’re doing in there? Do you think about what our—what my father does?”

“I try not to,” says Antonia. But of course she thinks about it: every doffed cap an homage to her papa. Every slick suit a reminder of what was taken from her. She almost tells Sofia that she has been building a house with a wraparound porch, in her mind. She has been entertaining fantasies of college, of independence and escape. Sofia would understand this, she thinks. But Sofia would feel abandoned, too. And Sofia would know Antonia was faking something.

Sofia is silent, and then she says, “I do.”

“You do what?”