She learned that no one was ever going to want her, for reasons she couldn’t control, and that praying to chipped statues of la Virgen María and el niñito Jesús didn’t come with anything but silence. She learned to survive and survived by learning. By the time she was thirteen, she was a full-blown beauty, with lustrous black curls, skin like the darkest honey, but still peculiar and still followed around by cats, though roosters had begun to join her daily parades to the river shore.
