My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

outside, lined up on the bench: nannies for young women, really. Only the rich girls or the very intelligent ones went to college. What would happen to a girl who thought herself neither?
    She didn’t know then how to make friends. If she had any at all, they were just the neighbors, people who recognized the same raggedy girl passing by every day. There was a lonely old lady who lived down the street in Barrio Bosque. Her granddaughter had become a prostitute and didn’t visit anymore. So Celina went to sit with the grandmother in the afternoons.
    Aurora was very strict, very religious, and fearful of anything fun, but she did have a few friends who came to visit. Celina would listen to the stories they told over coffee: about who was promenading in the plaza, the ladies on the left and the men on the right; about tea dances at the Hotel Parador Oasis. Walking home from school, she would peek into the entrance and catch a glimpse of shadowy pink archways, but she would never set foot inside. When she woke in the middle of the night to singing and guitars in the street, she could guess who was being serenaded: the same girl who sat there on the balcony in the afternoon, dressed like a princess with her fingernails painted.
    One morning, a group of young soldiers were leaving for Fort Buchanan, and some of Celina’s classmates decided to go wave good-bye to them at the train station. Ever since Pearl Harbor, Puerto Rico was in shock, and the boys were joining up as soon as they were old enough, if not sooner. She didn’t even know the ones who were leaving from San Germán that day, but she liked the idea of a
despedida
to send them off. Maybe she still missed Pedro. The girls stood on the platform at the train station and waved till the caboose disappeared into the forest. When they got to school, they were all punished for being late.
    Maybe a seed was planted that day. Later she saw an ad in the newspaper: Join the Women’s Army Corps! She knew the instant she saw it: this was her chance. She mailed in her name and address and said she was nineteen. Celina was only seventeen. They wrote back and told her to present herself in San Juan. Celina showed the letter to Aurora.
    “You’re crazy,” Aurora said.
    “No, it’s an order from the army. I have to present myself! I can’t disobey. I
have
to go.”
    It took six or seven hours by train to get to San Juan, and that trip was the best adventure of her short life. The conductor punching the tickets looked like a general in his smart uniform. Passengers came fromwho knows where, all over the island, with their bags and bundles and boxes, their
fiambreras
stacked up with what they’d brought to eat. The world zipped past the windows. A car raced alongside the tracks, the driver honking and waving. The train pulled in at little flag stops, not even stations, where kids ran on the platform to sell fruits through the windows. At one crossing, a chain beside the tracks cordoned off a road leading elsewhere, a crimson tunnel carpeted with petals dropped by a
flamboyán
tree in full bloom.
    Aurora’s husband had a sister in San Juan, and they had called her on the telephone. She met Celina at the train station and took her to the camp the next day. High on adrenaline, Celina took a whole battery of tests and passed every one of them, mental and physical. Then they asked for her birth certificate. Panic. They said, you leave for Miami in four days. Go home and get your birth certificate. Come back in time to ship out.
    She took the train back to San Germán, another whole day traveling and plenty of time to fret. At home she told Aurora what had happened: “You have to find a birth certificate, and it has to say I’m nineteen. Or else they’ll put you in jail!”
    “
¡Estás loca!
You’re the one who’s going to jail, not me.” Well,
somebody
would be going to jail if the U.S. Army went to all that trouble to recruit a WAC and then found out she had lied. Aurora went