Rosario tried to be patient when Fanny started telling her how much of her paycheck to save, how much to spend and what to spend it on, but sometimes she lost it and threatened to take away Fanny’s phone for a few weeks, or to cancel her quinceañera. Rosario dreaded Fanny’s obvious desire for financial control. If Fanny wanted things Rosario couldn’t afford, she would want to work, even though she was barred by law from employment until she turned 14. If she got a job, she might want to take on more hours. If she worked more, she might want to drop out of school.

“Live your childhood now, because the minute you’re an adult, you’ll miss it,” Rosario sometimes told Fanny.

“You’re just exaggerating,” Fanny would say, addressing her mother in Spanish with usted, the formal “you” that Spanish speakers usually reserve for authority figures and strangers. Underlying this habit was the private assessment Fanny had formed of Rosario: “My mom is not the type of person you can actually talk to.”

Fanny sometimes felt as if they fought about everything now: about money, about going out and, more and more, about makeup. Fanny had taken to leaving the house with a full face of makeup, complete with novelty contacts that magnified her brown irises into green, pink, gray or purple discs. “I don’t even have that much makeup on,” Rosario said. Maybe it was the makeup or maybe it was the way Fanny sat up straight and had a quick answer for every question he posed, but Rosario and Fanny were pretty sure that the elderly manager at the diner across the road from their apartment hadn’t known how old she was when he offered her a summer job waitressing a few days a week. Rosario didn’t stand in her way.

Some days that summer, Fanny woke up in their 8-by-10 room, and Rosario was still asleep, because she’d worked late the night before. Some nights she went to bed after her shift at the diner, and Rosario wasn’t there, because she was still at work. And sometimes she woke up because her mother had cranked up her favorite Latin music on Fanny’s old speakers and was dancing in her pajamas. “Wake up, Fanny!” Rosario would say, shimmying at the foot of the bed. “Come dance.” Fanny would laugh and join her.

Mostly, though, they saw little of each other, except in passing. It felt weird to Fanny. “Mom, I’m going out,” she would say. Or: “Mom, I’m going to work, I’ll be out late.” Or: “Mom, I’m going to Walmart — do you need anything?”

By the fall, Fanny had dropped the diner shifts because of school, but she would soon find new ways to avoid being home. She got a fake ID and started sneaking out of the house to go clubbing. When Rosario first caught her, she said that if she couldn’t stop Fanny from going out with her friends, she at least didn’t want her to drink. The second time, she was suspicious that Fanny had been drinking anyway. Their fights turned louder and more vicious. Rosario couldn’t stop herself from saying to Fanny: I gave you everything, and this is how you behave? One night after Fanny had been out late, not wanting to face her mother at home, she was sexually assaulted. She didn’t tell her mother. Fanny’s mental health, already fragile, took a sharp turn for the worse, and she was in and out of school all year. She spent time in a mental health facility, and only just managed to pass eighth grade.

By the summer after middle school, Fanny had moved out of the room she’d shared with Rosario and in with her brother, who lived in a neighboring county with a couple of friends and their girlfriends and kids. Come this fall, Fanny had decided, she would enroll in high school in another town; maybe she would pick up shifts with a housecleaning crew after school. After graduation, maybe she’d get a business degree and start doing other people’s makeup for a living, or maybe she’d become an auto mechanic. She didn’t talk much to Rosario about what she was thinking. She and Alejandro were moving in with a friend of his who lived in the new school district. It would be her fifth home in two years.