I gazed at a history report that I was supposed to turn in last May but had gotten lost under the cushions of the sofa, apparently. I didn’t understand what she meant, not really. I didn’t see what was so awful about living here, or how a life with Ricky could seem better.

But I did understand how she felt good about herself when she was with Ricky. That’s how Will made me feel.

And I understood her view that a different life was within her grasp, a better life, like a magic door opening. I felt that way every time Will wanted us to get more serious. The thing was, Violet thought this was a magic portal. I thought it was a painting of a magic portal, like on the cover of one of Sophia’s fantasy novels. If you tried to step into it, you would realize it was only 2-D.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Violet murmured, wiping off a photo of Dad and Izzy and setting it on a shelf.

“Sure you do,” I said with all the fake cheerfulness that went with pathological cleaning. “You’ll get a job.” I snapped my fingers. “Actually, I have a good fit for you. You always loved helping Dad restore the woodwork and the fountain in the white house, right?”

“Aw, the white house!” She sounded as sad as I was about the loss of our mansion. We’d never talked about it, because moving out of that house had been tangled up with Mom leaving.

“I might be able to hire you at the antiques shop if you wanted,” I said.

“I love that place,” she said. “How’s Bob?”

“Better,” I said. Man, hiring Violet for the shop was the best idea I’d had in years. She would get a steady job that paid okay. With her working there too, I could wean Bob and Roger off relying on me to the point of making me feel trapped. I would have been impressed with myself if I hadn’t been panicking about Will underneath.

“You get a job there,” I told Violet, “live here, and go to school. Look for one of those programs where you study for your GED and take college classes at the same time.”

“School!” she said. “I couldn’t do that. I was never smart like you.”

“Like me!” I snorted.

“Of course like you. Are you crazy? We’re all proud of you for getting in that special class for smart kids, and for doing so well on the drums.”

I almost laughed when she put the gifted class and band together in the same sentence, as if they were related. But I probably sounded just as nonsensical to Izzy when I talked about hair color.

“Dad always said you’d be the first person in the family to go to college,” Violet went on.

“Well, of course he would say that now. You and Sophia and Izzy haven’t been to college.”

“He said that when you were a baby. You picked up on everything so quickly. Mom said Izzy didn’t talk until she was three, but she didn’t have another baby to compare her with. She said if she’d had you first, she would have put Izzy in an institution.”

I laughed. That was the funny yet slightly wrong sort of comment I remembered my mom making. “News to me,” I said. “I thought you only kept me around for comic relief. That’s all anybody ever seemed to think I was good for.”

“Well, sure,” Violet said, “back when you were in third grade. But now you’re grown up.”

That, too, was news to me. My heart started pounding again. It knew what I had done to Will. My brain didn’t want to deal with it yet. But as Violet pointed out how old I was, my fear of having a boyfriend seemed immature. It might have worked for me in ninth grade.

Not now.

“This didn’t take as long as I thought,” Violet said, rescuing the last pair of panties from the sofa and twirling them around on one finger. “If we could get the kitchen counters and the stove cleared off, I could run to the store for groceries.”

I inhaled as if the house already smelled like Puerto Rican food instead of dust. “We could make carne guisada,” I said.

Her dark eyes flew wide open. “And pasteles? And—”

“Amarillos!” we both said at the same time with all the reverence of two hungry girls who hadn’t eaten fried plantains in months. If we made them, maybe Dad still wouldn’t eat them. I didn’t care anymore. I would eat them.

“Divide and conquer,” she said. “Kitchen or store?”

“Kitchen.” If cleaning would make me feel better about breaking up with Will, I still had a whole town to polish.

After the kitchen was in reasonable order, I went outside. As we’d cleaned, we’d thrown mounds of trash into the yard, which probably frightened the neighbors. I bagged it up and stacked it neatly by the curb. Then I raked the magnolia leaves. I was pleasantly surprised to see that grass was living underneath. With some rain in September, the yard might start to look like a yard again.

I crossed the street with my rake and looked at our house from a distance, really looked at it like a potential buyer would have viewed it if Dad had followed his original plan of flipping it. A previous owner had painted it an unfortunate dark brown, but it had good bones for someone who didn’t mind a funky 1950s bungalow with retro lines.

My heart thumped painfully again as I realized I was viewing this house as if I was Will, parked in his Mustang on the street, capturing the proportions with a pencil and a ruler.

“Uh-oh, what’s the matter?” Harper said beside me.

I jumped. I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard her roll up on the sidewalk. She and Kaye straddled their bikes, watching me with worried eyes.

“We came to ask what was up with you and Will last night,” Kaye explained. “But your yard looks beautiful. Obviously something has gone horribly wrong.”

That’s when I broke down.

***

“I have a theory,” Harper said.

My crying jag was over, but she kept her arm around my shoulders, even though this must have practically dislocated her arm because I was seven inches taller than her. We sat on a handmade bench my dad had brought home and set under the magnolia tree, then lost under the leaves. Cleared of plant rubbish, it was a nice place to sit—or would have been, if the heat hadn’t been so oppressive.

Kaye stopped sweeping the sidewalk to circle her finger in the air, telling Harper to cut to the chase. In spite of my despair, I almost laughed at this interaction I’d seen play out between them countless times since third grade.

“Your sisters missed your mother,” Harper told me, “and they felt like your family wasn’t whole. Starting their own families was their way of getting back what they’d lost. The problem was, they were so young that it didn’t work. I mean, I get carried away buying art supplies and run out of lunch money. You”—she poked me—“can’t get up in the morning. Could you imagine one of us being the primary caretaker for somebody else?”

“No,” I said. Izzy seemed stable now, but I had seriously worried about her children at first. I still worried about Sophia’s baby.

“And the boys your sisters hooked up with are even worse,” Harper said. “They bailed on their girlfriends and their babies. Seems to me Izzy is doing a pretty good job putting her life back together, though.”

“Now she is,” I acknowledged. Two years ago was a different story.

“You’ve watched your sisters make mistakes. You’re younger, so you may have seen your mother leaving very differently from the way they saw it. You miss your mom, but instead of trying to fix your life by filling her shoes, you avoid further complications by sidestepping responsibility when you can. You have an allergic reaction when you do get put in charge. You stay out of any relationship at all.”

“But that’s a good thing,” I defended myself. “I’m a lot better off than my sisters.”

“But what if you don’t change?” Kaye asked. “At some point when you’re older, you’re going to look around and see that everybody is in a relationship while you’re alone. And pretty much everybody in your high school classes will have gone off to college.”

“I’m going to college,” I declared. “I’ll be a National Merit Scholar.”

Kaye raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Not if you don’t get your grades up and convince some teacher to vouch for you. I worry that you’re going to stay right here because you couldn’t be bothered to take the next step.”

“At least the house will be clean,” I said.

“True,” Harper said. “And maybe there will be other boys you can mess around with. But most people want a relationship sooner or later. Even those boys will move on while you stay put. And as for your relationship with Will . . .”

I held my breath, waiting, hoping, praying for Harper to give me some insight into how to fix this.

“I wouldn’t have paired you two up in a million years,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen you together, I get why you’re so compatible. You’re different from each other, but you each understand what makes the other tick. It would be a shame for you to let your knee-jerk reaction rule your life, and let him go.”

I shrugged. “Our time together was all a misunderstanding to begin with,” I said. “He misread me as girlfriend material. I misread him as a player. By the time we found out we were wrong about each other, it was too late.”

Kaye nodded sadly. “You’d already fallen in love with each other.”

“Well, I don’t know about him. That’s what he said, yeah. But I . . .” The full meaning of her words hit me. “Yeah, I’d already fallen . . . Oh, God.” I put my hands over my face, horrified that I was crying in front of them yet again.

Harper drew me closer on the bench. Kaye called, “Group hug!” and wrapped her arms around both of us. This was a little much in the heat, but I relaxed into their embrace and tried to stop panicking about Will.

Kaye knocked her booty against mine so I’d scoot over to make room on the bench. After I’d crushed Harper sufficiently, Kaye sat down, then stroked a lock of hair out of my eyes with her middle finger. “Teen hygiene tip. If you try to get Will back today, bathe first. Guys love that.”

“Yeah, okay,” I grumbled.

“I agree with Harper,” she said. “After seeing you and Will together, I think you may be meant for each other. It’s obvious that he loves you. It would be a shame for your fear to be the only reason you let him go.”

We all turned as the front door opened. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten—time for my dad to wake up. He called across the yard, “Lucita! What happened to the top four layers of the stuff in the house?”

***

Kaye and Harper left when Violet arrived in Dad’s truck with enough groceries for a feast. An hour later, she and Dad and I sat down to our first family dinner since we’d moved in, because we had cleared off the table.

“Lucita,” he mumbled between bites. “So good.”

“Thanks.” I wondered why he was into this meal now when he’d never wanted what I’d cooked before. Maybe the table made the difference. Or Violet. Or the fact that the meal was not offered with an air of desperate sacrifice.

“Violet,” he said. “Delicious. And—” He put his hand over hers on the table. In Spanish he told her that he was very glad she’d come home. He said he’d always thought she would return eventually. He’d wanted her to figure that out for herself. Love was a complicated thing, but that boy she had picked out would not be his choice for her. Then there was a series of epithets that involved Ricky’s private parts.

“I know, Dad.” Violet took a bite. “This house doesn’t seem like home, though, with Sophia and Izzy missing. I haven’t seen Izzy and the kids in months. Maybe I could cook again one day this week, and we could have them over, now that the house isn’t a death trap for the children and we’ve found all the chairs. I could drive up to get Sophia and the baby one weekend.” She gazed around the den/dining room/kitchen. “It would be kind of small in here for all of us, though.”

“The white house is for sale again,” I said casually.

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. Suddenly he looked more awake than I’d seen him in years. “Really?” The eager look settled into wistfulness. “I loved that house. I think about it a lot.”

“Me too,” Violet said.

“Me too,” I said.

“I looked forward to tackling that fountain,” he said. “Remember, in the atrium, with the mermaids?”

“I’ll bet it would be cheaper than it was before,” I said. “It’s been on the market a few times. Why don’t we buy it back?”

He laughed. “I wish. I work too much, lucita.”

“Yeah, you do,” I said. “Why? Izzy is stable now. Sophia is stable-ish.”

“Ish,” Violet echoed with a laugh.

“Violet will get there,” I said.

Violet snorted.

“And you don’t have to worry about me,” I told him. “I’ll get college paid for.”

“College!” he exclaimed. “I always said you would be the first one to go to college, but you’ve been hemming and hawing.”

“I decided I’m going,” I said.

“When did you decide this?”

“Today. I’m getting online and registering to take the SAT in a minute.” I had no doubt I could score high enough on the SAT to get a full ride to college, provided I could get really stressed out with responsibilities before test time. The way things with band and work and Will had been going, that shouldn’t be too hard.