And of course, they have each other. So when they are twelve, and Angelo Barone corners Antonia in a dark corner of the schoolyard and tells her he knows how her father died, and Carlo deserved it, Sofia overhears, draws back her fist, and punches him in the jaw. Puttana, he spits, at one or both of them. In the bathroom before class, Antonia runs cold water over Sofia’s reddened fist. They make eye contact in the mirror. Angelo will not tell on Sofia; he will not admit a girl punched him. Sofia and Antonia draw identical masks of cold steel over their faces and get to class before the final bell rings.
When they are thirteen, and Sofia wants to sneak out to a dance in a nearby church basement, Antonia gamely lies to Lina and goes with her. They spend the evening in alternate cold terror and openmouthed awe, in the sweaty thick of the women’s powder room and on the bright liquid dance floor. They are the youngest people there, a fact Antonia cringes away from as Sofia puffs herself up, hoping to pass for fifteen, for sixteen, for just another sure-of-herself young woman with nothing to hide. Their pinkies hook together and their arms swing back and forth as they walk home through darkness they should not be out in. Their shadow looks like one creature lumbering along the Brooklyn streets.
On the exact same morning, Antonia and Sofia wake with blood smeared along their thighs. They do not think they’re dying: Antonia too practical, with a diagram for padding her underwear already ripped from a library book and squirreled away in her nightstand for just this moment; Sofia not practical but curious. She revels in the metal and musk, bundles her sheets into the laundry, tells Rosa, who purses her lips and whispers instructions through the bathroom door and says, you have to protect yourself now. Sofia takes this to mean she is fragile, but she doesn’t feel fragile.
Sofia and Antonia meet outside. They do not have to tell one another what happened. They are both ablaze with change in the icy morning sunlight.
* * *
—
It isn’t long until Sofia and Antonia begin to dream of escape.
BOOK TWO
1937–1941
Antonia has spent ten minutes sharpening three pencils to the same length. She slips them into their own pocket in her knapsack, presses flat the pages in her new notebook, makes sure the straps of her knapsack are tightened to match one another. Antonia lives fully in these rituals—in the brushing of each tooth so her whole mouth feels smooth, in the knotting of bootlace loops into equal ovals, in the methodical rolling of symmetrical meatballs. These things make her mind feel clear and her body uncomplicated. And so it is not a surprise that on the still-warm August evening before she begins high school, Antonia has organized all of her dresses by color; stacked her books by size; cut two loaves of bread into perfectly even slices.
Antonia is looking forward to the new school, where she hopes the bigger campus will afford her some anonymity. She imagines feeling free of the stories people tell about her—did you hear her mamma hasn’t left the house since he died; did you know he killed five men in Sicily and that’s why he had to come here; I heard she wears one of his shirts under her school clothes; I’ve seen other women calling on her mamma, and they don’t look like they’re bringing scones to share.
Antonia examines her line of bangs in the mirror and uses a sewing scissor to trim the ends of a couple errant hairs, carefully, breath held in as she cuts and only let out when the hair in question is determined to be the proper length. She leans away from the mirror to examine the bangs, which Sofia convinced her to cut in the middle of an interminably hot and boring July day. They don’t fit her face: they make her features look cramped; they tangle with the prominent line of her brow. They are constantly caught and blown by the wind. Sofia says she likes them, but Antonia will grow them back out, she decides. She finds a bobby pin and sweeps them back from her forehead.
At seven o’ clock, she reheats a casserole that Sofia’s mamma brought over on Thursday. The smell of tomato and cheese and the warmth of the oven lures her own mamma out from where she has been hiding in the deep folds of her favorite armchair. “It smells wonderful in here,” she says.
Antonia is piling bread slices in a bowl but she stops to turn around and kiss her mother on the cheek. “Sofia’s mamma brought it,” she says.
“She’s too good to us,” says Lina.
“She makes extra,” says Antonia. Here, honey, Rosa says, at least twice a week. Take this one to your mamma. Careful, it’s heavy. Her mother will not call Rosa to thank her. Antonia remembers when Rosa and Lina were close, closer than her and Sofia. The rainfall of their voices together in a different room. How warm the world used to feel. “It’ll be ready in two minutes.”