THE NEXT AFTERNOON, the three partners in Amigas Inc. met at Carmen’s house to discuss their mystery quince. Carmen lived on the Canals in Miami, on one of a series of small streets that lined the water. No cars were allowed, and the houses, while packed closely together, were beautiful, and looked as though they had been transplanted from Venice. When the girls were younger, their favorite thing in the world had been to take boat rides in the family’s little turquoise boat. Now they sat on the patio, watching as Carmen’s younger stepsisters rowed around, laughing hysterically, with their friends.

The contracts for the mystery quince were all signed, and the first payment was in the Amigas account. The girls sat with their Lucite clipboards, which Alicia’s mom had customized with the hot pink Amigas Inc. logo. Breaking out the clipboards was always exciting, but as they sat thumbing through their ten-page events checklists, they were both excited and slightly daunted. Their contact, Julia Centavo, would neither confirm nor deny that their client was, indeed, Carmela Ortega, but the girls were confident nevertheless that they’d cracked their client’s secret identity.

“I’m megaexcited about planning Carmela’s quinceañera,” Alicia said. “But I’ve got to tell you chicas, I’m pretty stressed about juggling all that work with everything else on my plate—SAT prep, getting letters of recommendation, requesting transcripts, writing college essays. It’s a lot!”

“Who are you telling?” Jamie demanded.

“Ugh, I love Ms. Ingber, but she’s making me nuts, the way she has me running and gunning,” Carmen said. “What kind of loca takes AP Spanish literature when she’s applying to art programs?”

All of the Amigas Inc. crew spoke some degree of Spanish, but the truth was that none of them were actually fluent except for Gaz, who’d grown up in Puerto Rico and come to Miami in the fifth grade. Of the three girls, Carmen spoke Spanish the most fluently—partly because of her dad. She had spent so much time on his telenovela sets that even when her vocabulary failed her, she could throw in an “¡Ay, no digas!” or an energetic “Sinvergüenza” that was so convincing that anyone would have taken her for a native speaker.

But that was only part of the story. While Alicia and Jamie had decided to place out of their language requirement in junior year, Carmen had continued, studying literature in the work of writers as diverse as Isabel Allende and Federico García Lorca. It gave her a little thrill to read in Spanish, even if it meant she pored over each page with a pen in one hand and a dictionary in the other. And she loved to see the way the over-the-top romances depicted in her father’s films had real cultural roots. To be Latina, she felt every time she opened her current favorite, Eva Luna, was to be in love with love.

“So, we’re all swamped,” Jamie agreed. “What are we going to do? Binky’s was the biggest-budget quince we ever did. But to do a quince that will be attended by luminaries from our nation’s government, that’s historical. We can’t mess this up.”

Alicia flinched. Even the thought of a misstep with a quince gave her the chills. It was because she cared so much about each and every girl’s Sweet Fifteen that she sometimes got a little controlling. She hated to admit it, but even though she’d never had a quince herself, she’d gone all quince-zilla on more than one occasion.

She thought about it for a few moments. “We need help,” she said. “But we have a bigger problem. It’s the first of October. We’re graduating in less than a year, and by the sound of it, none of us are going to school in Miami. Who’s going to run Amigas Inc. when we go off to college?”

The girls looked at one another, and the reality that they were going to split up—not right away, but really soon—hit them like a ton of textbooks.

“Maybe I won’t get into any schools,” Carmen offered wistfully.

“Maybe my financial aid won’t come through and I’ll have to go to community college,” Jamie said.

“And maybe I’ll get a two hundred on my SATs,” Alicia put in. “But since they give you two hundred points for just signing your name, that doesn’t seem likely. No doom and gloom, chicas. We don’t need to derail our futures so Amigas Inc. can live. What we need is a plan.”

Carmen looked appreciatively at her friend. “What we need is successors.”

Jamie jumped to her feet. “Let’s have a contest! It should be like The Apprentice. I’m so ready to get all Donald Trump on a bunch of younger chicas. Please, let me be the one who says, ‘You’re fired!’”

Alicia looked out at Carmen’s little sisters playing around in the rowboat. “That’s not a bad idea.”

Never one to be shy, Jamie said, “Are you kidding? It’s a genius idea.”

Alicia gave her friend a playful shove. “Okay, it’s a genius idea. So what do we call this brainstorm?”

“Amiga Apprentice?” Carmen said.

Alicia shook her head. “Nah, too derivative.”

“Countdown to the Quince All-Stars?” Jamie suggested.

Alicia considered it. “That’s pretty good.”

Carmen smiled. “No, no, I’ve got it.” She drew a few graffiti-style words on a piece of paper and held the sign up so her friends could see:

Alicia smiled. “I love it.”

Jamie did, too. And with the name agreed upon, the search for the next leaders of Amigas Inc. began.

The next day, the girls put Are You That Chica? signs up all over the school.