In the fall of 1928, Sofia and Antonia start school together, and the world gets exponentially bigger with each passing day. They race there each morning, tripping over each other’s feet and legs. They are fierce and small, and arrive breathless and early. They learn numbers, and letters, and geography.

They learn on the first day that half the kids in their class are Italian, and half are Irish. They learn that Ireland is a small island far away from Italy, but not as far away as America, where we all are, says Mr. Monaghan. Sofia and Antonia make friends with Maria Panzini and Clara O’Malley. They are all wearing blue ribbons in their hair. They decide they will also do this tomorrow. They eat lunch together and they hold hands on the way out to their waiting mammas. Mamma, mamma, the four of them are ready to call out, but the mammas have dark shades drawn over their faces. The next day Maria Panzini eats lunch with another table of girls, and Clara eats all the way across the courtyard. The Irish kids eat over there, Antonia realizes. Just stick with Antonia, Sofia’s mamma says later. Our families are a little different, Rosa and Lina tell their daughters, and Sofia and Antonia don’t know whether that means they are better or worse, but soon they spend lunch alone.

They still love school, because of Mr. Monaghan, who fought in the Great War and has a limp, and who lives by himself in the basement apartment of a run-down brownstone a stone’s throw from the ship forge. Mr. Monaghan has a twinkle in his eye. He is long and lanky and lively. He looks at them when they speak.

Every morning they spin a globe and pick a part of the world to learn about. This is how they have come to know about the pyramids, and the Taj Mahal, and Antarctica. No matter where Mr. Monaghan’s finger lands, he knows stories about the place, and he has pictures, and he tells them great, animated, nearly too-tall tales that hold twenty children rapt, still as stones in their seats. And today Marco DeLuca has stolen Sofia’s turn to spin the globe.

He did it without knowing, which means when Sofia looks at him with a furrow in her brow and a boiling fury in her chest, he returns her gaze with his own soft, impassive stare, and does not know why she is glaring, and that makes it worse. Inside Sofia’s body a heat builds, flushing her face and shaking her fingertips and turning the breath in her body to bile. Later in her life, friends and family will come to recognize the telltale tightening at the mouth and narrowing of the eyes as Sofia sinks into anger. She, too, will come to appreciate the hot, swollen, all-consuming fire of an imminent fight.