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Mornings would come and I would wake to the sound of my parents’ voices, chatting on the other side of my wall. They were scrolling through lives each was living, sharing events after the fact. He had his subjects. She had hers.

“Papi,” I said to him, during one of his longer visits, “I’m writing a report on the Andes, for my seventh-grade social studies class.”

“On the Andes? Why?” He looked up from the living room sofa and lowered The New York Times.

“Because.” I stopped there, stymied. His face was awaiting my answer, open in genuine surprise. “Because I’m Peruana, Papi,” I said.

“You?” he said. “A Peruvian?” And then he laughed, shaking his head, long and hard. “No, Marisi. You’re a gringa, like your mother. You’re not a Peruvian anymore.”

I went off and thought about that, my heart a little smaller for his words. Had Peru fallen out of me? Like a leaf in a winter wind?

What of my language, my patrimony, the power of my qosqo? Was that gone, too? I looked down at the copper money winking out from my loafers. I loved my mother’s country, pledged it allegiance every day, dreamed its golden dreams, bought its daily lotteries of the soul. But I was sure that somewhere inside me I was also Peruvian.

It was Lucilla who reminded me of that.

Lucilla was black as Antonio’s stone, a cocky, junior-high-school girl who chose her friends by the color of their skin. She was sassy, funny, filled with dislike for much about Summit, and part of that much was me.

“Hurry up, girl!” she’d yell as we scooted from one class to another, and then she’d give me a kick in the can.

“Git! Git! Can’t be late!” And then—foomp!—her pointy shoe would connect with my tail.

It had started in gym class, where the lineup put her behind me. She was ahead of me in one significant way: superior in every sinew of her body. If I could pound out a hundred sit-ups, she could pound out a hundred fifty-five. One day—who knew why?—she decided to stick her foot into my life. She tripped me on the playing fields, kicked me down corridors, slapped a boot up against the door of my bathroom stall and kept me there until the bell rang, until I begged her for mercy. Then Lucilla and her girls would holler and slap their knees as I flitted, panicked, down the hall.

Once, when she was standing alone on the hockey field, away from her gang of girls, I decided to risk the question. “Lucilla,” I said, “why do you want to get me in trouble?”

“You’re already there, girl,” she said, and bugged her eyes.

“What?”

“You a wiggle-butt wetback,” she added. “You nothing but trouble. You oughta go back where you belong.”

There it was. Lucilla’s proof. The Truth, whether or not my father could factor it. His children had not gone from any first thing to a second. We were the “neither-here-nor-there people”: one thing when here, the other when there. Or forever from some other place. We were neither; we were both.

Funny that it was a black who reminded me of that. I’ve often thought of Lucilla as I sit in my corner of Washington now, seeing how this country has changed since I was a girl. There were days I felt George, Vicki, and I were the only Latinos in the United States; I certainly did not see any others around. I knew we were the only ones in the Summit school system. But I’ve returned to Summit often over the years and watched its subtle transformations. Today, you cannot walk down a main street in New Jersey and not hear Spanish, or pass a Latin grocery, or see a Latino face. The last time I checked, there was a child with my surname—no relation—in the corridors of Summit High School. There are thousands of families with Spanish surnames in the American capital. There are nearly forty million of us in your country now, Lucilla. We belong here. Just like you.

BY THE TIME I settled into junior high school, my parents had bought into North American soil for good. We never imagined they wouldn’t stay together. They cared for each other deeply, that much was written on their faces every time Papi walked through