A fifteen-year-old Cuban American girl cannot imagine leaving her hometown of Hialeah. Life is good, and she has a nineteen-year-old boyfriend who indicates he will marry her when she turns eighteen. However he constantly pressures her to have sex with him, and, while she is interested, she refuses him every time out of respect for her Catholic upbringing. In between break-ups with him, she applies to an out-of-state school in the northeast and is accepted. After careful negotiations with her parents, they agree to let her go if she returns after four years and lives in proximity to them. Once she arrives at college, she feels like an outsider, but she excels academically. When she returns to Hialeah for winter break, she meets up with a high school friend, Myra. She tells Myra that the latter’s job as a truck dispatcher is a low-class profession and that she ought to find something better, and Myra storms out. The girl maintains that she is in the right, and assumes that Myra is simply jealous. When the girl returns to school, she becomes an RA and dates a Spaniard and then a member of a Latino fraternity. Her mother is disheartened that she has not committed to marriage yet. When she realizes she is panicked about having to go back to Hialeah after graduation, she breaks her promise to her parents and instead chooses to attend grad school in the Midwest, where she is labeled a trouble-maker for her progressive ideas about being a minority. She develops a complex relationship with her Latina heritage, and feels at once very close to it as she is ostracized by her white peers and the white faculty and also distanced, because of her distance from her community. She dates a white grad student, and breaks up with him when she realizes that his research is on Cuban American communities. She takes a job at a community college in Wisconsin and does not call home as much. As she is going through her mother’s messages one evening, a tearful one makes her call home. Her mother tells her that her cousin, Barbarita, is sick with cancer. While she makes plans in her head about how she is going to bust Barbarita out of the hospital, her mother tells her that Barbarita died that morning. The girl promises to make it back for the funeral, and, in the meantime, tries to make a list of her memories of Barbarita, ultimately coming up short. She returns to Hialeah in time, but finds that she mourns not only her cousin but also her life before.