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“What flavor?” I asked.

“Strawberry.”

Candy. I hadn’t anticipated bribes. My power was beginning to seem infinite. I could hear the giggles and guffaws outside.

“Fine,” I said, and put out my hand. He dropped the warm cube in. “You tell anyone about this and you’re gone,” I said. “Ciao.”

“And the kiss?” he said. El beso?

I put out one foot. “On my shoe.”

He obliged.

“Okay. You’re in.”

He scrambled to his feet and burst outside with a whoop.

Three more filed in, one at a time. I extracted a variety of treasures from them: a green marble, a Coca-Cola top from the loco boy’s garden, a fifty-centavo piece. The kisses were minor obligations: my elbow, my wrist, a hand, and with each, the promise to never tell.

The last was Carlos. He came in, peering up through his lashes.

“You want to be in this club?” I said, narrowing my eyes as he sat.

“Sí.”

“Bueno. You have to do two things. First, the kiss. And then you give me something.”

“Give you what?”

“What do you have in your pockets?”

“Oh.” He checked. There was nothing there.

I looked him up and down, taking my time to think. Outside, the boys were crawling up, trying to eavesdrop. I could hear George wrestle them back.

What could I get the boy to give me? And then I thought of Antonio.

“I know,” I said. “Tell me something. A story. But it has to be true, it has to be secret, and it better be quick.”

He frowned, smoothing his cowlick. “Okay,” he said.

“Un beso primero,” I said, and pushed my lips out for a kiss.

He didn’t hesitate. He sucked air, leaned in, pecked me on the mouth, and sat back down.

“And now, el secreto,” he said calmly, folding his manicured hands together in his lap while I caught my breath and wiped his kiss onto my forearm. “It’s something I heard my mother say to my father. And it has something to do with you. She said your mother is weird. Rara. She talks funny, doesn’t fit. She should get on a boat and go back to wherever she came from. She doesn’t belong in Peru.”

I could feel heat rise through my chest, fly up my neck, and lodge in the back of my throat. A boy staggered through the flap, fell, and rolled in at us, red-faced and cackling, but I hardly registered him at all. Carlos stood, brushed himself off, and walked out of the tent. “She said yes,” he announced to the others, assuming consent when I’d sat there with my mouth hanging open like a reptile.

Doesn’t belong in Peru? What did that mean exactly? Did she fit any less than anyone else in that makeshift hacienda? There was a carnival of misfits here: Tommy the loco, the long-legged solteros, and—por el amor de Dios—how about Wong?

Step inside a corner bodega anywhere in Peru and you were likely to see a Chinese face behind the counter. Step inside Paramonga’s shabby little bodega china and there would be Wong, his colossal head trailing a goatee to his abacus the way a genie trails a wisp to its lamp.

“Qué quiele? Tulón?” You want a turrón? And a long, bony finger would point to the tall glass jar with its colored chunks of nougat. “One sol buys five!”

“How about flan?” we’d call out, just to tease him. Just to ask him for something we knew he didn’t have.

“Mo lo!” he’d bark back in Cantonese. “All gone.”

Wong, we had been told, was from the village of Huarmey. His parents had been coolies from Shanghai. Slavery had been outlawed for almost a century in South America, but a new “Chinese law” was in place when his family was lured to Peru. The sugar and guano moguls paid one pound sterling for Wong’s father, half that for his mother. The two made the nine-thousand-mile voyage to Callao in the hold of a ship with four hundred others like them. By the time they stepped into the cane fields five months later, they knew they should never have come. Wong’s father had to be shackled to keep him from trying to make a run for the sea. His mother took an overdose of opium and lay down by the sugar shoots to die.

Old Wong grew up, married, had sons. But he stayed