Andrea wants somebody to hug her hard, to squeeze her until every bone in her skeleton cracks. She slides the letterhead back into its envelope and smiles at the nurse, as if the tests were just for her cholesterol.
It’s drizzling outside, and she has to dig for the key to the old red convertible that she demanded her father give her four months ago, as soon as she turned sixteen. She settles into her seat, elbows the lock down, and goes back to studying the lab results. Only one word matters. She tries to stare it into changing, but it keeps telling her that she’s the world’s leading idiot and is going to have to live with the consequences of her idiocy, which are that she’s got something inside her, though it’s still too small to feel. Her blood says it’s there. The lab says her blood says.
It’s 7:40. She can still get to school if she speeds. She was planning on going, but she wasn’t expecting this result, even if all the signs pointed to it. She lights a cigarette and inhales several times in a row. The rain continues, cleansing the city of its grime.
For days, she’s been asking herself when it could have happened. After Nicole’s basketball game, maybe.
Or in the car the night they had that argument at the stadium. If she loved Humbertito, if she were serious about him, this would be different. She’d feel less cold now if she loved him. She wouldn’t feel such a pressing need for someone to break all her bones.
A trio of knocks on her window startle her back to herself. It’s a boy, six or seven years old, in grubby secondhand American clothes, the kind they sell in the southern part of the city. With the hand he’s not using to knock, he jiggles a box of individually wrapped pieces of gum that catch Andrea’s eye. They’re Bazooka, from her childhood. She shakes her head no, a small, severe movement of her mother’s that she hates, but lately has found herself reproducing all the time.
The boy rattles the box. He does it over and over. She could buy some gum, or just give him a coin, but his stubbornness bothers her. Does he not care that her eyes are red, that she’s clearly about to cry? His shirt says I really need a day between Saturday & Sunday. She’d bet its original owner doesn’t even know where Bolivia is.
‘Please,’ the boy insists. ‘So I can buy bread.’
She shakes her head like her mother again, takes one last drag of her cigarette, and crushes it in the ashtray before clumsily turning the key and hightailing it out of there, as if she were running from a catastrophe.
*
She spends the next hours driving in circles, Avenida América to Pando to Circunvalación and back. She passes other cars heedlessly, flooring the accelerator. Her parents have been out of town for days, so there’s no risk that one will see her. Although they said they were going to Miami, she knows that’s just where they’re meeting their lovers before continuing on to separate destinations.
Her mother and father have decided to open their marriage. She learned this six or so months ago when her mom was talking on the phone (a conversation Andrea initially overheard without wanting to, but then, as she listened, her shock and hurt were joined by an expanding relief ), and though she didn’t gather all the details of her parents’ new accord, she learned the basics of their truce. Now it’s just good that they’re gone, good that they can’t learn what she knows. It’s good to hit the car’s limit, to scare herself out of the feeling that nothing is real, to crank Los Cadillacs up as loud as the speakers will go.
‘Vos que andás diciendo que hay mejores y peores, vos que andás diciendo qué se debe hacer,’ they sing. ‘Qué me hablás de una raza soberana. Superiores, inferiores, una minga de poder.’ Andrea can’t interpret the lyrics, but it doesn’t matter. Words don’t matter. Rage does, and the song is full of rage. She joins them in the chorus— ‘¡Mal bicho! ¡Todos te dicen que sos . . . mal bicho! ¡Así es como te ves . . . mal bicho! ¡mal bicho! ¡mal bicho!’ —and by the end, she’s pounding the wheel and shrieking, ‘A la guerra, a la violencia, a la injusticia, y a tu codicia, ¡digo no!, ¡digo no!, ¡digo no!, ¡digo no!’
During her second year of high school, this song was everywhere. She and her classmates danced to it hundreds of times—or, really, jumped to it, since that’s what the band did in their videos. Surrounded by music, goaded by it, she feels a stab of hopelessness about her lack of clarity. Driving and smoking and staring straight ahead is all she can do to get it. Another song comes on, a softer, more melodious one, ‘Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out. It doesn’t matter much to me.’
She pulls into the Stop and Go on Avenida América and, without getting out of the car, orders a pack of Marlboros and a small Coke. She gets gas at a station on Santa Cruz. No one asks her anything. Maybe her coolness intimidates them, or her green eyes. By 11:00, she’s ready to move on. Outside school, time feels different, and so does Andrea. More like her future self, truer, harder to deny. She’s not into the song that’s playing. She rewinds the tape, and soon she’s gone back to shout-singing, ‘¡Mal bicho! ¡Todos te dicen que sos . . . mal bicho! ¡Así es como te ves . . . mal bicho! ¡mal bicho! ¡mal bicho!’
She wishes she could spend the rest of her life in her car. She’d never get out. She’d grow old driving rings around the city. Die driving, without pain.
*
Dr. Angulo’s secretary says he’s not in yet.
‘What time will he get here?’ asks Andrea.
‘He’s got a patient at two, so any minute. But he’s completely booked today.’ She consults the schedule, furrowing her eyebrows as if she can’t read her own handwriting or has found some strange note between the appointments. ‘If you want, he could see you on Tuesday. At four. Or Wednesday at, let’s see, seven.’
‘I’ll come back,’ Andrea says, and hurries away. She’s not sure whether she should have come. Maybe it was a bad idea, and she’s lucky that he’s out. Maybe his absence is a sign that she shouldn’t see him, that she should get in her car and drive in another eight or ten hours’ worth of circles.
His clinic is in an old mansion remodeled for its new life. She sits on the curb across the street. By now it’s 1:20. Her classmates will get out of school soon. She’s known nearly all of them since age five and can still take herself back to the moment she saw some of them for the first time. Nobody’s changed much. All the traits that distinguish them, that make them who they are, were already there in childhood.
Although the rain is over, the sky is still gray, and she starts to notice the smell of wet earth. She considers what’s inside her, the nothing and the thing it could become. Will she have to marry Humbertito? Right now, this school year, until death do them part? She lights another cigarette and exhales thin threads of smoke that get lost in the air while she remembers the anti-abortion handout from last year’s civics class, illustrated with photos of babies who the writers made beg, in comicbook speech bubbles, to please not be murdered. According to the handout, Beethoven and many other geniuses were the children of poor, raped single mothers who could have had abortions, but instead did humanity a great service through their integrity and strength. It also said that in Bolivia, hundreds of women a year die gruesomely after running sharp wires up their vaginas.
Beethoven turned into a class joke. When somebody got a problem wrong on the board or tanked a test, everyone else would say, ‘You and Beethoven.’ Andrea smiles at the thought. She’s going to give the doctor another five minutes, then decide what to do if it seems like he’s not going to show up.
But when the time is up, she can’t stand. She can’t do anything but light another cigarette and doodle in the air with the smoke. She likes the gray weather, and having missed school. Mondays—math and physics—are rough this year. Once she goes to college, she’ll have more freedom to choose her schedule and everything else. She’s not sure what to study yet, if she even goes. Her mom wants to send her to the U.S., but her dad would rather keep her in Cocha. Neither of them has the slightest idea of her situation, of what the lab said her blood says. She has a tough time imagining herself surrounded by strangers in courses she might or might not take. Maybe it would be nice to have a baby, to dedicate herself to motherhood, to not have to study anymore? If she told Humbertito, how would he react? Smoke streams from her mouth. Nothing makes her happier than smoke streaming from her mouth. She checks the time again.
*
Bald, thin, and mild in his trademark tortoiseshell glasses, Dr. Angulo rounds the corner at 1:50. He carries a black leather briefcase in one hand and holds a folded newspaper up to his face with the other.
When Andrea’s mother first brought her to see him, she couldn’t hide her astonishment when Andrea said she wasn’t a virgin. At home after the appointment, she grilled Andrea for an hour. Andrea refused to talk. It was her choice, her body, her life, and neither her mother nor anyone else had the right to hear about it. Eventually her mother gave up. ‘I don’t know how I got such a slut for a daughter,’ she said, and slammed Andrea’s bedroom door behind her.
Andrea gets up and hurries across the street, catching the doctor at the clinic entrance. Only once she’s next to him does she register that she hasn’t eaten yet today, and she’s more worn out than she thought.
‘Andreíta!’ he says. ‘What a surprise.’
She gives him the same kiss on the cheek that she would at one of her parents’ parties. After all, this isn’t just a doctor adjusting his tortoiseshell glasses beside her. He’s an old family friend.
‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’
‘I need to talk to you.’
She calls him “tú,” not the more formal “usted.” She’s not sure if she’s ever done that before, but she isn’t going to revert now.
‘Come in, come in. I have an appointment at two, but we have time.’
She trails him into the clinic. Walking, he asks how her parents are, and she gives her standard answer, which is that they’re good and Nicole misses them more than she does. Not a word of it sounds true.
‘What a pair of travelers,’ he says.
Once they’re in his consulting room, he unhooks his white coat from the door, puts it on, and washes and dries his hands. It seems as if he’s going in slow motion, questioning each step before taking it. Maybe he’s just confused by the situation and trying to buy time.
He sits at his desk.
‘So. What brings you here?’
For a moment, there’s a silence loud with bones cracking, the dirty boy selling gum in the rain, her parents kissing while packing, Humbertito laughing hard.
‘I’m—pregnant,’ she says effortfully.
‘What was that, Andreíta?’
Her upper lip wobbles.
Repeating herself isn’t easy, but she manages.
A new silence begins. He breaks it this time, saying quietly, ‘Urine tests can be wrong.’ He’s not hiding his surprise or unease.
‘I got a blood test,’ she says. She goes to get the envelope, but doesn’t see it in her backpack. Briefly, she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. But she discovers it at the bottom, hiding between two notebooks, and hands it over.
He studies the document, taking his time.
‘We’ll have to do a sonogram to know precisely where we stand,’ he says eventually. ‘How many weeks late are you?’
‘I’m not sure when to start counting.’
‘When were you supposed to get your period?’
‘Six or seven weeks ago, I think.’
‘And you’ve told—’
‘No one,’ she interrupts, so brusquely that he stops asking questions. Instead he removes his tortoise-shell glasses, breathes on them until the lenses fog, and cleans them with his coat, then calls his receptionist and tells her to get the ultrasound room ready. She says, presumably, that his two o’clock is waiting, because he asks her to let the patient know that there’s a small delay.
‘I don’t want it,’ Andrea tells him when he hangs up the phone. She’s surprised to hear herself say the words.
‘We’ll do a sonogram,’ the doctor says, his tone more serious now. ‘Next door there’s a room with a robe. My tech will meet you in there.’
‘I’m not having it. I don’t want it,’ Andrea says. Her conviction is sudden, solid. ‘I need your help. That’s why I’m here.’
__________________________________
From The Invisible Years by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from the Spanish by Lily Meyer. Used with permission of the publisher, Deep Vellum. Copyright 2026.
