Dark spirals of hair popped free from her ponytail as she bent closer to her textbook. Concentration was elusive. She closed the window next to her with a shriek of metal on metal, shutting out the gray February breeze and the number 4 train running on the elevated tracks down Jerome Avenue. She tilted her head, listened.

What is that?

Breathing. It was gaspy, heavy breathing, coming from the depths of the worn corduroy couch behind her.

Angel twisted in her chair. “Jose,” she said, too loudly, knocking pages of lecture notes off her makeshift desk on the radiator.

“Mama, I’m fine,” the seven-year-old boy muttered. He turned up the live radio stream coming from the decrepit laptop and avoided her eyes.

“Go get your inhaler. Now.”

“Just a minute. The Duke is about to pitch.”

Faintly, she could hear Suzyn Waldman, longtime announcer for the Bronx Bolts, adding color to a local charity game. “He’s winding up and … another beauty, right over the plate … Ohh no, the batter’s hit a hard foul right into the dugout.” The announcer clucked, but then, “What’s this? The Duke seems to want off the mound.”

“No!” Jose yelled at the computer, as if it could hear his complaint.

“His ankle may still be giving him problems.”

“Jose! What’d I tell you?”

Jose’s face shone with perspiration as he stomped past her, wheezing down the hall to his room. That beautiful pouty face, she thought. His bronze complexion, a shade darker than hers, was the perfect blend of her and his father. Jose’s dad was long gone, however—the high school quarterback had disappeared when he found out his fifteen-year-old girlfriend was pregnant, but not before slapping her around, yelling, “That ain’t my kid.” Angel had shoved him into the hallway, slammed the door in his face. She didn’t want him. She didn’t need him.

Two years after Jose was born, her mother died. Angel was seventeen. She almost buckled from the pressure of the responsibility to care for another, tiny human. She had no safety net. His dark eyes, staring up at her with such adoration … She’d shoved steel into her spine, stood up straight, and vowed her boy would be safe, happy, and healthy on her watch.

And she was doing it.

In a few more weeks, she’d be done with nursing school and would take her final boards. She survived by putting her head down and pushing through, focused on getting them out of this decrepit apartment building filled with dust and screeching train brakes. She kept the rest of the world’s bullshit at arm’s length.

“Usted va a la escuela, muestran al mundo que las niñas puertorriqueñas no deben ser,” Mama said. You go to college, show the world Puerto Rican girls are not to be messed with.