It took a while, but finally I wore Milly down and she started talking to me.

“Tell me about your mother’s new role on American TV,” she asked, and I didn’t even mind that she asked about my mother. I’d had a nice vacation from the fame bubble.

“She plays a maid,” I said. “But she’s actually an entrepreneur, nueva Latina mogul in the making.”

Milly touched her nose, then pointed to me. On the nose. “Well, my mother is a maid in real life, so if your mother protrays a stereotypical maid on TV, then you can expect me to write a letter to the studio,” she said.

I nodded. Fair enough.

“So what you doing after school?”

Milly shrugged. “Homework. Lab notes for chemistry class since this crazy girl from the DF ran her mouth the whole period and I got nothing done.”

I smiled. “Want to come over to my house?”

“Okay? Going to kill the lying with those two girls?”

I assured her, “The wheels are in motion.”

But the truth was, that was a delaying tactic.

When we got home, my father was in the kitchen listening to the Hamilton sound track, which had become his obsession since we’d all gone to see the play the week before.

He was singing and rapping at the top of his lungs when I came in with Milly.

“Papá, please!” I called out. “We have company.”

“It’s okay,” Milly said, and then quoted a line from the musical: “Immigrants get the job done!”

Then she shook my father’s hand. “Mucho gusto, Señor del Valle.”

I could tell that my father was taken with her.

“The pleasure is all mine, young lady.” They went back and forth in Spanish for a few minutes, and then my father switched back to English. “Your Spanish is so beautiful. Were you born here?”

“East LA, but Chicana through and through. You know what they say: hardly home, but always repping.”

“I hear that,” my father said, giving her a high five.

He even complimented her on her tattoos, even though I was fairly certain he’d never let me get inked.

I gave Milly a quick tour of the house, and she said, “Basic BH Fab. I like it. Some of the houses are just over-the-top ostentatious.”

I knew what she meant. When we were first house hunting, our Realtor, Digna, took us on an informal tour of the tackiest houses in LA. There was the house with not one but twenty-four replicas of Michelangelo’s David sculpture on the front lawn. There was the house with a landing strip on either side of the mansion, because you know door-to-door service is what airline travel is all about. And then there was the famous party house that’s used for all the OTT music videos. “That house has thirty bedrooms and fifty bathrooms,” Digna said. “And I guarantee you that no matter how many times it’s been cleaned, you don’t want to run a black light over any of the surfaces there.” Our house was nice but not cray-cray.

When we were done with our homework, I invited Milly to go for a swim in the pool, but she had to leave. “Next time,” she said. “My dad works security, and he’ll be getting ready for work just as my mom is getting home. I should go help make supper and take care of the little ones.”

I found out that Milly had three little brothers, all under the age of ten. “I’m the oldest,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a pain in the butt, but those little monsters look up to me. And that’s kinda cool. You know what I mean?”

I nodded, thinking of Sergio.

It had been one thing to live in Mexico without my big brother. It had been hard moving to another country without him. My bro—hardly home, but always repping.

This is the thing that any spy worth her salt can tell you—it’s easy to tell a convincing lie for a couple of hours, or even a few days. But once you get into the realm of weeks and months, then you’re always on the verge of getting busted.

One day I took an Uber to the Grove, and I thought I was in the clear because the driver left me in the parking lot of the natural grocery store, which was blocks away from the fancy stores where Willow and Tiggy liked to shop.

I hung back and followed along as they purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes. Back in Mexico City, I used to shop like that. I didn’t even have to carry cash or credit cards. The stores would let me charge whatever I wanted to my mother’s account. The thing is, I never really wore most of the stuff. I’d found that it was actually more fun not to buy clothes and to “shop” in my mother’s walk-in closet instead. Sure, I was tempted sometimes to buy something. Willow bought the sweetest cropped leather jacket by Alexander Wang, and it felt like my credit card was burning a hole in my pocket. I wanted so badly to whip out my card and buy my own, screaming “Twinsies!” the way I used to when Patrizia and I bought the same thing. But I knew I didn’t need the jacket. It was like waking up in the middle of the night craving a cheeseburger. The feeling would pass.

We were getting smoothies at the Jamba Juice when Tiggy looked over at me and said, “Did your dad get a new job?”

“Nope,” I said, slurping down my Gotta Guava smoothie.

“Really? Because I could’ve sworn I saw you get out of a Cadillac Escalade.”

The guava drink nearly came out my nose. I had given up so many luxuries to support my little charade, but Uber Black was my weakness.

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

Tiggy sized me up suspiciously. “Really? Because it looked like you. My mom drove me over to Erewhon because she was out of pomegranate arils, and you know she’s addicted to them.”

I whipped out my monthly bus pass, which I had begun purchasing just the month before. “Must be nice,” I said.

Willow looked at the bus pass. “Wow. This is expensive. Don’t they have a student discount?”

I wanted to sink into the ground. Of course they probably did have a student discount bus pass. I just hadn’t thought to purchase it.

“Think quickly, think quickly,” I thought, tapping my foot furiously.

“If I get the student bus pass, then me and my dad can’t share,” I said. “This way, we save money.”

Willow looked at me with her big brown eyes, and she looked as if she wanted to cry. Then she hugged me. “You make me realize how much I take for granted,” she said.

Then she handed me her shopping bag. “I want you to have this,” she said.

It was her Alexander Wang leather jacket.

“I couldn’t,” I said, and this time I meant it.

“Yes, you can,” she said. “I’ll ask my dad to buy me another one, and then we can be twins. Really, please, take it.”

Don’t hate me for what I did next. Because there are two things you should know. Number one: it was honestly the cutest leather jacket I’d ever seen. Number two: it is rude not to accept a gift.

The next day when Sergio called to check in on me, I took a page out of my mother’s telenovela play book and doused my eyes with drops so that my face would look tearstained. Then I bit my bottom lip hard before I answered Sergio’s FaceTime call.

“Hey,” I said listlessly.

“You don’t look good,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

That would’ve been the perfect moment to just stop it, the lying and the pretending. But I couldn’t stop. I liked the weird dichotomy of having Willow and Tiggy feel sorry for me and at the same time, the sweet superior feeling that I was getting one over on them. I wanted to keep it going, just a little longer. But I needed Sergio to think that I was a good person, not the pendeja he had once accused me of being. Hence the tears and the subterfuge.

“I told them,” I said, lying. “And things got pretty ugly.”

Sergio looked exasperated. “Well, what did you expect, loca? For them to throw you a parade?”

“I know, I know.”

“At least you still have Milly, the friend you never lied to.”

“That’s true,” I said. “She invited me over to her house for dinner tomorrow night.”

“In East LA? You should have Albita drive you,” Sergio said.

“Now who’s being shallow and superficial?” I asked.

“Seriously, Cammi,” he said. “LA is safer than Mexico City, but that doesn’t mean you can be reckless.”

I promised him I’d ask for a ride.

Of course, I had no intention of asking Albita to drive me anywhere. That Saturday, I breezed into the garden and told my parents that I was going to meet Milly at the library downtown.

My father jumped up and dangled his car keys. “No problem. I’ll drive you.”

Shoot. I held up my phone like it was a lightsaber. No te preocupes, Papá. “I can call an Uber easy peasy lemon squeezy.”

My mother peered at me over her giant sunglasses, interested. “Easy greasy what?”

“Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” I said slowly. “It’s an expression that means ‘No big deal.’ ”

My mother took out the little notebook where she had begun writing expressions and words that were new to her. “Say it again?”

I took the notebook from her. “I’ll write it for you.” I wrote it out and handed the notebook back to her.

It was cute the way she walked around with that little notebook, repeating phrases to herself like “in there like swimwear” and “it’s the freakin’ weekend.”

My father would not be deterred. “I’m driving you, Cammi.”

I gave my mother a hug and said “Your eyebrows are so on fleek” just to watch her scribble it into her notebook.

In the car, I fessed up. “Full confession, I’m not going to the library.”

“I know,” he said.

“I’m going over to Milly’s house. She invited me for dinner.”

“Sergio told me.”

Only my jet-setting brother could tattle across eight time zones like that.

“So give me the address and call Milly to let her know there’ll be one more for dinner.”

It took nearly an hour to get to Milly’s house. It wasn’t that far. Just seventeen miles, but that’s LA traffic for you. The minute we turned onto Whittier Boulevard, I felt like I’d been transported back to downtown Mexico City. The streets were packed with people and street vendors, colorfully decorated food trucks, and cool-looking low riders.

My father looked around, smiled, and said, “Hombre! It pays to go exploring. Look at that, Salazar Park.”

He began to hum a song I’d never heard him sing before. Then Papá explained that Rubén Salazar was a Los Angeles Times reporter who died during a Vietnam War protest in 1970. Salazar had been exploring the growing resistance to the Vietnam War in the Chicano community. A songwriter composed a famous corrido about his death. My father whistled. “Look at this park. Swimming pool. Baseball diamond. Tennis courts. He would be proud.”

If Milly and her parents hadn’t been waiting for us, I think my father would’ve ditched me at the corner of South Alma and Whittier and gone off on an adventure.

I don’t know what I expected Milly’s house to be like, but I wasn’t expecting Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul. Milly’s house wasn’t like any other on the block. It was dark blue with bright yellow shutters and had a crazy Aztec-style sculpture. The front garden was full of cactuses and other succulents. The driveway was painted like a mural with a beautiful mosaic pattern. My father whistled and said, “It’s so beautiful, I don’t want to drive on it.”

“Hello, hello!” Milly called out as she walked onto the front porch. She showed us where to park, and then we all hugged hello.

I told her, “Oye, chica, you didn’t mention that you lived in Willy Wonka’s house.”

She laughed and said, “Come and meet the Oompa Loompas.”

In the backyard, three little boys jumped on and off a Slip’n Slide. Milly’s mother, a pretty, petite woman who was a good three inches shorter than both of us, stood up to greet us.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said. Then, peering over my shoulder, she added, “And of course, I know all about your mother’s work.”

“She’s not here, Señora Flores,” I told her. “But this is my dad.”

My father did a dramatic bow and kissed the back of her hand. “Es un placer.”

“Hey, hey!” I heard a booming voice call out. “You’ve got to watch out for the slick caballeros from the Distrito Federal.”

It was Milly’s dad. He was dressed in paint-splattered overalls and a cowboy hat. He looked cool, and I could tell as they shook hands that he and my dad would totally be friends.

“We’ve got pernil, rice and peas, and aguacate,” Milly’s mother said shyly.

“Yum,” I said.

Milly’s father clapped my dad on the shoulder and said, “Before we eat, let’s talk about art. Let me show you my studio.”

He took my dad into his studio, a two-car garage that he’d tricked out with a giant skylight and a fancy glass garage door. It was the kind of rolling glass door that I’d seen in my mother’s design magazines. I guess, just like Willow and Tiggy did, I thought everyone who lived in East LA lived in poverty and squalor. I was embarrassed by my ignorance.

“I thought you said your dad worked security,” I whispered to Milly.

“He does, but he does his night job so that he can spend his days doing what he loves—painting.”

“That’s cool,” I said admiringly.

As I followed her to the kitchen, she said, “Let’s see about those mad salad skills that you’ve recently acquired.”

“Don’t hate the player, chica,” I reminded her. “Hate the game.”