3. Amalia
Ihave one lecture left today, and I can’t wait to get home. It’s been a nonstop rush and I’ve barely had time to meet anyone. The good news is that the last class is exactly what I’m most excited about: object-oriented programming. Advanced level.
When I walk into the classroom, there are only twenty of us. I frown, double-checking my schedule. Right room, right time…so why are there so few people?
I don’t get a chance to figure it out, because a woman, somewhere around forty, walks in behind me, and wow — we have a female professor for this course?
Over the last few years, more and more women have been breaking into this field, but seeing a woman teach one of the hardest courses in the university gives me a quiet kind of hope that I’ll find my place here too.
“Let’s ease into it. I can see there are more of you than last year. I hope to see at least half of you at the final exam. If you don’t know what an abstract class is or how dependency injection works, do yourself a favor and don’t come back next session.”
Okay then.
I know what those terms mean and they don’t scare me, but when I glance to my left, the girl next to me already has wide eyes and a faint tremor in her hands.
It’s no secret that a lot of firms recruit straight from the first years of college, so everyone is trying to absorb the material as thoroughly as possible and ace their exams to get noticed by the right people.
The next hour is a walkthrough of the projects we’ll be completing throughout the first semester and how we’re supposed to choose a topic for our end-of-year assignment.
I already have something in mind: a weather prediction model built on artificial intelligence, but I’ll need some guidance to pull it off.
There’s a big difference between logging into a server to route a company’s donation to an orphanage and sourcing millions of input data points to train an algorithm.
With every year that passes, I hold on tighter to these moments: the three of us sitting around the same table. Because I know that at some point, both Lupe and I will build lives of our own, and daily dinners with tío Felipe won’t be something we can take for granted anymore.
And if anyone has sacrificed for us, it’s him. He never married, and I’ve always suspected that was because of us, because when we landed in his life, we became his number one responsibility, and everything else came second.
When I walk through the door, I hear my twin singing along to Thalia — Mom’s favorite. Piel Morena fills the entire kitchen, and my uncle is sitting there smiling, watching Lupe spin around while absolutely demolishing the high notes of the chorus.
I drop my backpack on a chair and pull my sister into a hug, and we spin together through the verses that have always made Mom feel a little closer. She never cooked without Amor a la Mexicana, Piel Morena, or Tú y Yo playing in the background.
Lupe spins me into a turn, but of course I have two left feet and nearly face-plant. She catches me just in time, and we keep dancing pressed together, laughing.
“La extra?o,” she whispers when her back is to tío Felipe.
A knot rises in my throat, because miss isn’t a strong enough word for it. We didn’t just lose her that day. We lost our whole family, and the only grace was that we had each other.
We’re so different, and yet I know I could tell just from one look if something was hurting her.
“You two are going to make me cry.” Uncle Felipe’s voice carries from his chair, and he gets up to pull us both in.
My heart feels twice its size in my chest, and I wouldn’t change a single thing about this moment.
“They would be so proud of the extraordinary women you’ve become, mis ni?as.”
“Gracias, tío chulo,” I tell him, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
His eyes are full of tears. I study his face, the lines deepening with every year, that thick mustache that makes him look just like Super Mario, his dark blue shirt buttoned all the way to the top and tucked into his pants.
We spend the whole evening on the couch watching Encanto, eating pizza, and going through photos. We don’t have many saved from that night, but the ones we do have, we only look at on this day. The rest of the time we keep them put away so they don’t hurt quite so much every single day.