46 8.4.19 Photograph by Melissa Golden/Redux, for The New York Times
of her own name and birth date, so Fanny kept paying the bills out of
her mother’s savings. Alejandro moved back into their apartment and
learned to shop for them both — a task that came to include buying
Fanny’s sanitary pads, which she was too embarrassed to get herself —
but he was still working the same long hours, so Fanny moved in with
Laura’s family, who were from Mexico, too. She called them ‘‘family
friends,’’ but in truth, she hadn’t spent much time with them before
going to live with them.
When Alejandro told her she could start calling Laura’s mother
‘‘Mom,’’ Fanny made a face that said, That’s not right. It was weird in
October, just a few weeks after Rosario was deported, when Fanny
turned 13 and the family took her out to the local diner for dinner and
cake, even though she didn’t really know them. It was still weird over
Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, which was especially hard. She and
Rosario had always dressed up nicely and posed for photos in front of
their tree; these people pulled on ugly sweaters. Rosario decorated only
the tree; this family, her new family, did the whole house, decking the
living room and kitchen with tinsel and paper snowfl akes while Christ-
mas music blasted from Fanny’s dinged-up speakers — the mother;
the father; the sisters, Laura and Ana; the brother, Nando; and Laura’s
young daughter, Leila. To a girl who had grown up mostly without others
around, it was amazing how quickly the small ranch-style house could
fi ll with sound and people.
At fi rst, she didn’t tell most people what had happened to
her mother — not her teachers, not even most of her friends
— and some people she never told. It had never been hard
for Fanny to convince grown-ups that she had everything under control,
and by the time Rosario had been gone three months, Fanny’s air of
competence, combined with her careful imitation of YouTube makeup
tutorials, often seemed to make adults forget that she was in seventh
grade. Friends’ moms would keep chatting with her long after their
own kids became bored and disappeared into their phones. Managers
off ered her minimum-wage jobs. A man asked for her number.
There were days when a prickling sensation would spread out from
her right foot and left hand, like a limb falling asleep, except it was her
entire body vibrating in an anxiety attack, and she passed out in the
school cafeteria and woke up in the nurse’s offi ce. Days when what
Fanny called ‘‘the feelings’’ overwhelmed the antidepressants she was
on, and she took an extra pill to see if it would help. Whenever she got
sick or had a panic attack, and her brother couldn’t pick her up from her
middle school, she had to wait in the offi ce until the bus was leaving. The
staff there wouldn’t let her call Ubers. Alejandro, resigned but nervous,
always told her not to fall asleep in the Ubers she did take — ‘‘just listen
to music and look outside or something’’ — but she didn’t sleep much at
night, so she often remembered his warning only when she was waking
up at the end of the ride.
Alejandro gave her an allowance, fi lled in at her parent-teacher con-
ferences and tracked her whereabouts when he remembered to look at
his phone. But it was clear to Fanny that the only person fully
responsible for her was herself. So she kept making her own
appointments with the therapist she’d been seeing regularly
since her suicide attempt the year before. She kept handlingAbove: Fanny at
the nail salon.