Shadows of reason

1. Amalia

For the love of Turing, why won’t these invoices delete? Come on, Amalia. You did not spend years drowning in textbooks and problem sets just to be defeated by a DELETE command. Use that big beautiful brain of yours.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, and I think it’d actually be pretty funny if someone snapped a photo of me right now, because I can feel the grin spreading all the way across my face.

A few more invoices to wipe and I’m done.

If only they knew that the person sitting here with a stupid smile could make every single one of their orders vanish from the system without a trace.

That’s the adrenaline. That’s the thrill.

And honestly? It makes me feel pretty damn proud.

Bien hecho, Amalia.

Okay, the hundred dollars I’m about to pocket are a nice bonus too, but it’s the power — the kind that comes from two keystrokes, from the ability to make a company lose money, clients, or inventory.

Thirty seconds of code and I can take down their entire site.

That thought fills me with a satisfaction I’m pretty sure would raise some serious eyebrows among the people who know me.

Because sweet, kind Amalia? She would never. Except she absolutely would.

Now, that’s a good start to the day. Nineteen years old and the first day of college.

The School of Engineering at Ciudad Universitaria wouldn’t have been my first choice, but Lupe wanted to study law here, and we both wanted to stay close to tío Felipe.

The first rays of sunlight push through the window, and I glance over at my twin, who’s softly snoring into her pillow. I decide to give her ten more minutes while I get her coffee going.

In the kitchen, at the counter, I find tío Felipe flipping through the same financial newspaper as always, a radio murmuring the morning news somewhere in the background.

“Buenos días, tío,” I say and kiss him on the cheek.

“Buenos días. ?Feliz cumplea?os, corazón!”

“?Gracias, tío! Can we order pizza tonight?”

“Whatever you girls want. I’ll ask se?ora Suzana to make that tres leches cake you two love so it’ll be ready by tonight.”

“Gracias, tío chulo.” I watch him turn back to his papers.

He doesn’t take his eyes off that newspaper, like it’s about to hand him the winning lottery numbers. And I already know the odds of that are 0.00000007 percent. Yeah — being good at math does come in handy.

While I get Lupe’s coffee going, I make myself a hot chocolate and light the small candle I always keep on the east-facing windowsill.

Diosito, watch over Julia. Wherever she is.

My uncle glances at what I’m doing and closes his eyes for a moment. It’s been thirteen years since we lost contact with her, because I refuse to believe she’s dead.

No. She’s alive.

She just hasn’t found her way back to us yet.

I add a pinch of cinnamon and a little whipped cream to my drink and take a sip.

Perfect.

“Ready for your first day?” My uncle’s voice makes me wrinkle my nose just slightly, not because there’s anything wrong with the question. Honestly… I’m scared.

Lupe is more of a people person than I am.

I’ve always been the class nerd, the one everyone wants as a friend specifically so they can copy her work when they need to.

And I was fine with that for a long time, handing out homework answers and test results, until I realized that when I stopped helping, my value to them dropped to zero.

A former friend once told me I was too arrogant, just because I corrected her on a project she’d done.

But what no one understands is that this is how my brain works.

Who gets the formula for the sum of the first n consecutive natural numbers wrong and still tries to apply for a scholarship spot at the School of Mathematics?

It’s not my fault my mind never really shuts off, and my mouth doesn’t always get the message that it should.

“Amalia, sweetheart, are you okay?” The concern in his voice makes me look up as I adjust my glasses.

“What if I don’t fit in here either?” I whisper, because he knows better than anyone how many times I came home in tears because someone had gone after me.

Most of the time I didn’t even tell Lupe what had happened.

The truth was, our relationship had always been complicated by an invisible weight between us.

She’d always felt like she was living in my shadow, suffocated by comparisons she never asked for.

I was the straight A student, the one teachers praised in class, the one called a genius.

Lupe was always a step behind, at least in everyone else’s eyes, and I could see how it wore on her.

I’d become a burden to her without meaning to.

My achievements cast a spotlight that only made her feel more invisible.

Every award I brought home felt like another reminder of the gap between us that I desperately wished didn’t exist. So I kept my struggles hidden.

I didn’t want her to know how hard I was fighting just to hold onto some kind of social life, how I was barely keeping my head above water in areas where she seemed to move so effortlessly.

Maybe part of me thought that if she saw me struggling too, it would feel like pity.

Or worse, like I was trying to prove we weren’t so different after all, which would only diminish what she was going through.

So I carried my loneliness in silence, protecting both of us from one more complicated conversation we didn’t know how to have.

During our senior year of high school, the boy I liked — Sergio — asked me to prom. Lupe had already left with her date, and I stayed back to wait for Sergio, who never showed up to get me.

Instead, he texted me after I’d already been standing there for forty minutes. Just a simple: “Next time don’t make me wait when I ask you for a formula during a test.”

I don’t even remember which test he meant, but I remember exactly how my heart clenched in that moment, because it was painfully obvious that one of the most popular guys in school was never going to look twice at the ultimate nerd. That storyline doesn’t even play out in my telenovelas anymore.

Tío Felipe drove me to prom, and even though he didn’t come inside with me, he held me and told me over and over that nothing bothers people like that more than seeing their words don’t touch you.

Oh, they touched me. I just made sure nobody knew it.

Not even my twin, who still doesn’t know to this day why I didn’t show up to prom on Sergio’s arm.

We used to be inseparable, but now we each have our own secrets, and even though it stung at first, I’ve come to understand that’s just part of growing up.

It’s okay not to know everything about each other, as long as I know we’ve got each other’s backs when something goes wrong.

“Amalia, a mind like yours will always have a hard time fitting into mediocrity, but it’s precisely your intelligence that makes you stand out, mi ni?a.”

Maybe I don’t want to stand out. Maybe I just want to fit in. Just for once.

But I don’t tell him that. Instead I nod and kiss him on the cheek as I pass by on my way to get ready.

“Lupe, coffee’s ready.” I watch her eyes slowly blink open.

“Feliz cumplea?os, hermanita,” she says in a drowsy voice, finishing with a yawn.

“?Feliz cumplea?os a ti también!” I whisper back.

I head to the closet and pull out a yellow dress with green stripes and ruffled sleeves. I slip on a pair of comfortable pink boots, and when I look in the mirror, I hold my own gaze.

Te extra?o, papi. No tears today, Amalia.

He’d be heartbroken to know I’m crying for them on a day like this.

My parents died the same day my older sister went missing.

Apparently, Dad had borrowed money from the wrong people.

When he couldn’t pay them back, they took matters into their own hands by shooting my parents and blowing our home to pieces.

We would be dead if Julia hadn’t gotten us out in time.

She brought us to a neighbor’s house and went back to help our parents.

We never saw her again. That’s how Lupe and I ended up in tío Felipe’s care.

No thinking about that today, Amalia!

Lupe’s classes start later than mine, so I rush out the door to avoid being late.

My first class is math — a required course even though I’m here for Computer Science. Se?or Gustav, my old high school computer science teacher, is the one who taught me everything I know about computers, and the one who helped me earn a little extra money with my particular set of skills.

Between what I’d managed to save and what my uncle had set aside, we scraped together enough to cover my share of the tuition for one year in this program.

My academic record only got me halfway there. The other half? That had to come out of our own pockets. We’re talking thousands of dollars here. Money that neither my uncle nor I could have magically conjured up if I hadn’t been working the way I had for Se?or Gustav.

My uncle, naturally, thinks I received a more generous scholarship than I actually did. If he ever found out I’d gotten the rest through small...let’s call them mildly illegal side projects...he’d yell loudly enough to separate my head from my shoulders.

Because I’m Amalia. The good twin. The obedient one. The twin who’s never caused a single problem in her entire perfect little life.

Plot twist: Amalia has a dark side that wakes up the second she crosses a line. Imagine the disappointment if anyone found out. Because no one wants that Amalia. They all want the sweet, sanitized version.

But sometimes I wonder which one I want.