Some mornings I dreamed of the clean citadel of West Point and woke up first disoriented, then unhappy. I chased that feeling away with strong coffee or a joint, or sometimes a hard workout.

I attained something of a reputation in CJ’s crowd as that mostly quiet girl with the birthmark and the occasional hair-trigger temper. From time to time CJ had to drag me away from a vending machine I was trying to bust up for taking my money or a bouncer twice my size I felt provoked by. Sometimes CJ had to wrap his arms around me from behind and negotiate over my shoulder, telling people that I was on mood-altering meds or just getting over a bad breakup.

Later, when I apologized to him, he always said, pleasantly, not to worry about it. Some of that was CJ being CJ, so mellow that one friend of his joked that his adrenal glands secreted some kind of cannabinoid substance instead of adrenaline. But I think CJ chalked most of it up to my washing out of West Point. It’s amazing the shit people will let you get away with if they think it’s coming from a place of anger and low self-respect.

Nonetheless, I always told him I was sorry-often too abjectly, because I was usually still drunk or high or stoned and therefore able to access my feelings in a way I couldn’t when sober. “I love you,” I’d tell him. “I’d kill anyone who’d try to hurt you.”

“Those are lovely sentiments; go sleep them off,” he’d say.

But underneath the fevered language, I meant it. The way I thought of it was, I had been born an only child, but in time, the gods took pity and gave me a brother and a sister.

three

The sister was Serena Delgadillo.

Technically, Serena and I went back to the seventh grade together. We’d both been chosen for an academic-achievement program called ReachUP, which singled out promising students in rural or disadvantaged schools in hopes of helping them compete with middle-class students at college admissions time. We’d also both played on the girls’ soccer team that year, alongside each other as forwards. No question, she was better than me. The daughter of migrant workers, she had learned soccer on the hard brown fields of California’s inland valleys from her four older brothers and other immigrant kids, all futbol fanatics.