My meds were wearing off, pain rumbling in the marrow. Soon there would be lightning jags lancing along my nerves. I pretended the tension in my body was all anger.

“No, I don’t. I’ve been trying not to focus on the nightmare ahead of me. I’ve been trying to stay fucking positive.”

Ellis raised an eyebrow, and I heard how ridiculous I sounded and almost laughed. She always brought me back to earth.

“I’m staying,” I told my mother, still in English. “My life is here now. My school, my friends.” I swallowed. “And Elle is here. I won’t leave her.”

“I made a reservation for her, too.”

Now we both gaped.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bergen, but I can’t—”

“Unbelievable,” I interrupted. “Still controlling my life. Thinking you know better. My choices are never good enough for you, Mamá. I’m never good enough.”

“I won’t hold this against you,” she said icily. “You’re in pain, and upset. Let’s go home.”

“I am home.”

I half shouted it. Because I couldn’t explain, not in words. Only with lines on paper, tides of color. This place, this new life we’d started, away from my mother’s meddling and Elle’s awful parents, where we could finally be our real selves—this was home. This was ours.

In the last painting I started before the crash, two silhouettes ran into the night ocean. The water was so thick with stars it looked like liquid glitter. Spray kicked up from their heels, shimmering trails of galaxies. Rising on the horizon, instead of the moon, was Earth: a deep-blue pearl wrapped in tatters of white mist. One silhouette’s hair was long and the other’s short, but nothing else indicated what they were—young or old, girls or boys. One pulled the other onward by the hand, but a trick of perspective made it different each time you looked: Sometimes the long-haired one was leading, sometimes the other. Sometimes, as you looked, it switched right before your eyes. The only certainty was that they were going in together.

(—Bergen, Vada. Follow Me into Forever. Unfinished; oil on canvas.)

My mother’s gaze flicked between me and Elle.

“What is really going on here?” she said in a hushed voice. “Is there something I should know?”

“No. I told you. I’m still in school. I have a life here.”

“I should go,” Ellis said. “I’ll give you two some priv—”

I gripped her shoulder, firmly. “Stay.”

My mother watched us, her eyes glinting with sharp thoughts.

“Chiquita, tell her to come home.”

Ellis bit her lip.

“Don’t drag her into it,” I said. “Just let me live my life, Mamá.”

“What kind of life?”

“My own.”

“Your own. I see.” She breathed deeply through her nose. “A life you have to hide from your mother. From everybody. What kind of life is that?”

“Don’t you dare judge me.” Ellis put a hand on my spine, stroked softly, soothingly, and my fury fell but my voice remained bitter. “You know why I keep things from you? Because everything I do is wrong in your eyes. I’m not perfect like Ariana. I’m the black sheep. The fuckup. The disappointment.”

My mother stood to her full height. Her voice struck like a slap. “I’ve never been disappointed in you. If I have high expectations, it’s because I would expect no less from myself. The world looks down on you, expects nothing from you because of the color of your skin and your mother’s family name. They don’t want you to fail. They want you to not even try. If you try, you will never disappoint me.”

At that moment I wanted nothing more than to grab Elle’s hand. “There are things about me that would disappoint you. Things I can’t change.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not having this discussion now.”

Mamá snorted. “You’ve made mistakes? Who hasn’t? I never liked the boys you chose, but I never stopped you from seeing them. I still run into Raoul. He asks about—”

“I’m not talking about fucking Raoul.”

Her gaze refocused, cold sun burning suddenly through fog. “You think I don’t know what you’re talking about? Do you really think I’m that blind?”

Elle’s hand left the small of my back, but I sensed her heart smashing hard, inches behind mine.

“Why do you hide this from me? Both of you, why? Chiquita, I have known you as long as mija has. I love you like my own blood.”

“Leave her out of it,” I snapped.

“You think I don’t understand? You spend all your time together, alone. It is one thing to be best friends, but the lines are becoming blurred. Come home. Be around other people. You’ll grow out of it. It’s not healthy, what you’re doing. Either of you.”

“Stop, Mamá. Just stop.” I moved away from Ellis. If I was taking arrows to the chest, I didn’t want one piercing me and hitting her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Whose fault is that? This is the first time you’ve spoken to me in months.”

“And why do you think that is?”

“You are ashamed.”

“Because of you. You taught me shame. You always said making art was pointless. You spent all that money on my stupid Confirmation dress instead of buying me some cheap paint like I begged for. You’re pushing me to get married before I finish school. That’s not me. I don’t want to relive your fucking life for you and fix your mistakes. I want to live my own.”

Mamá’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. I’d gone too far.

“Vada,” Ellis said. “I’ll just go, okay? You should talk. Without me here.”

“I have nothing else to say to her.”

My mother’s eyes ricocheted between us. I expected wrath, but instead she said, quietly, “There is a seat waiting for each of you, mijas queridas.”

My beloved daughters.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bergen,” Elle said.

“Take care of her, chiquita.”

Then she kissed our cheeks and was gone.

I reeled backward into a chair, as if some great weight had just vanished and I’d lost my balance.

“Vada.” Ellis tugged my arm, startlingly rough. “Go after her.”

“Why?”

“Tell her you love her.”

My jaw clenched. “She knows.”

“What if you never see her again? What if those were the last words she hears?”

I have nothing else to say to her.

I caught my mother at the elevator doors. She heard my footsteps, or sensed me. When she whirled around I crashed into her chest and she seized me in strong arms. My injured one was crushed between us, but I didn’t care.

“Te quiero,” I mumbled into her shoulder. “Te quiero, Mamá. Y yo también la amo.”

She held me for a long, long time. The elevator dinged and shuttled past over and over. She didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure how to take that. But when she finally left, I knew my last words had come straight from my heart.

I love you, I’d said. I love you, Mom. And I love her, too.

Querer. Amar.

Two different words. Two different loves.

Her hands.

I obsessed over them. Drew them in all their moods. Deft and nervous, fluttering quick as the flick of birds’ wings, her fingers a blur of white feathers—or slow and tantalizing as they lifted my shirt, unhooked my bra, brushed the skin over my hammering heart. With one nail she’d trace the knot of fire in my chest to the place it came undone just below my navel. I sketched her hands a thousand times in my notebooks, and in my dreams her hands sketched my skin a thousand more.

New Year’s morning I woke in a wash of watery blue light. Ellis sprawled awkwardly in an armchair, one coltish leg flung across the floor. My shoulder shifted in small, abortive orbits, drawing her in my head. Miming the movements hurt but I didn’t stop. Here’s the truth: every line you agonize over is etched into your memory. Onlookers see the finished result, polished and prettified, but all the artist remembers is the labor. The grueling, gloriously bloody becoming.