The apartment was still dark when his mother's hand shook his shoulder. Che's eyes opened to her silhouette against the kitchen light—already dressed in her nurse's uniform, her scrubs the pale blue of the hospital laundry. She was leaving for her shift in twenty minutes.
"Los pequeños," she said quietly. "They need to be ready before I go."
Che nodded, still half-asleep, but she was already moving through the apartment, checking on his grandmother, grabbing her bag. The morning routine didn't need explaining. It had been the same for two years now, since Diego was born and Sofia turned four.
He got out of bed carefully, stepping over Sofia's small form on the floor—she'd rolled out of her blanket sometime in the night—and went to the kitchen. His mother had left water heating on the stove. Che filled the basin they used for washing and carried it to the corner where Sofia slept, setting it down carefully so it wouldn't spill.
"Vamo', Sofia," he said, his voice still rough with sleep. "Hora de levantarse."
She whined, turning away from him, burrowing deeper into her blanket. Che didn't negotiate. He pulled the blanket back—not roughly, but with the matter-of-factness of someone who'd done this many times—and waited. Sofia made a few more protests, then swung her legs over the edge and stumbled toward the basin, her eyes barely open. Che helped her out of her nightgown and began washing her, working methodically: her arms, her back, behind her ears where she always tried to skip. His hands were efficient, gentle where they needed to be, firm where she tried to avoid the water. By the time he finished, she was at least half-awake, complaining about the coldness of the water in that high-pitched whine that meant she was actually fine.
Diego was harder. He was five now, old enough to understand instructions but young enough to believe that stalling was a viable strategy. When Che called him to the basin, Diego pretended to be a cat. When Che insisted, Diego became a dog. Che waited him out, standing there with the washcloth, until Diego apparently decided being a dog was exhausting and shuffled over on his own.
"Why are you always like this?" Che asked, running the cloth across Diego's shoulders.
"Because," Diego said, which apparently was a complete answer.
Their mother was in the kitchen now, pulling on her work shoes, glancing at the clock. She had to catch the bus that came at 7:15. The hospital was across the city. If she missed this bus, she'd be late for her shift, and she couldn't afford to be late—her supervisor had already warned her twice about punctuality.
Che dried both Sofia and Diego with the towel their mother had set out, then dressed them in their school uniforms: white shirts, dark pants for Diego, a dark skirt for Sofia, both with patches of fabric sewn into the seams where their mother had let out the hems as they grew. Their shoes were equally worn, the leather cracked, but they were as clean as their mother could make them.
"Desayuno," his mother called from the kitchen, already moving toward the door.
Che got the cereal—a brand that was cheaper but still tasted like cardboard—and poured it into two bowls. Sofia complained immediately about the amount, which meant she wanted more, so Che added extra. Diego just ate, focused and methodical like his breakfast was a mission to complete. Their mother watched from the doorway, pulling her hair into a tighter bun, checking that her hospital identification card was clipped to her uniform.
"Make sure they're at the gates by 7:45," she said to Che. The preschool was four blocks away. It was 7:10. "Don't let them dawdle."
"I know," Che said.
"And when you come home after school, straight to pick them up. Don't go anywhere else. I don't want to get a call that you're late."
"I won't be."
She kissed both Sofia and Diego on the tops of their heads—quick, efficient gestures—and then she was gone, the apartment door closing behind her with the soft click of the lock. The sound of her footsteps faded down the hallway, and then it was just Che and his two cousins in the small space, the city beginning to wake up outside the window: car horns, voices, the distant sound of a colmadón rolling up its metal gate.
"Finish," Che said. He went to the corner and pulled on his own uniform—the white shirt his mother had washed yesterday, the dark pants with the cuff she'd hemmed. His school shoes were on the floor where he'd left them. He grabbed them and sat down to put them on, working the laces through the holes without really thinking about it. His feet had stopped growing two years ago. The shoes had lasted longer than expected.
Sofia was still eating slowly, moving cereal around her bowl more than actually consuming it. Diego had finished and was attempting to climb onto the counter. Che didn't even look up—he just pointed, and Diego climbed back down.
By 7:35, both cousins were standing at the door in their uniforms, Sofia's shirt already untucked on one side, Diego holding Che's hand without being asked. They walked through the morning streets of Barrio Pérez, which were already crowded with people heading to work, children heading to school, vendors opening their shops. The light was hard and already warm.
Sofia wanted to stop and look at a cat sitting on a fence. Che tugged her forward. Diego wanted to jump in a puddle that had collected near the sidewalk. Che steered him around it.
"Che, wait," Sofia said, turning around.
"No," Che said. "We're going to be late."
They moved faster, Che half-pulling them both along, Sofia complaining that he was hurrying and Diego giggling at the speed, like they were playing a game instead of racing against the clock. Other kids were walking in the same direction—clusters of younger children with older siblings or parents, the morning migration to the preschool and the primary school beyond it. Mateo passed them on his bicycle, his sister on the handlebars, and called out something teasing. Che's jaw tightened, but he didn't respond.
By 7:43, they were at the preschool gates. Sofia and Diego peeled away from him without hesitation, joining the other small children flooding through the entrance. One of the teachers waved at Che—she knew him, knew he brought them every morning—and he gave a small wave back before turning to head to his own school.
The walk took another fifteen minutes, through increasingly crowded streets as he got closer to the school zone. Other students were streaming in the same direction, uniforms like his, shoes like his, the sound of their voices filling the narrow streets. Che kept his head down, moving through the crowd without really looking at anyone.
He only noticed the shoes when he was already in the school corridor, when the laughter started.
At first, it was just a girl giggling at something her friend had said. Then another voice. Then someone saying his name, the sound of it drawing attention. Che stopped and looked down.
Both laces were undone, hanging loose from the eyelets. The right shoe was actually gaping open, the sole starting to separate from the upper at the heel. He'd somehow missed it entirely that morning, his hands moving through the motions of getting dressed without his mind actually present.
"Che, your shoes," someone said, one of the girls from his class.
"Where'd you get those?" another boy asked, louder, making sure more people heard. "From the garbage?"
The laughter spread like a contagion. Che felt heat move up his neck and into his face. He quickly bent down and tied the laces as tightly as he could, trying to cinch the shoe closed, but it didn't really help—the sole was still separating, the structure of the shoe itself was compromised. He straightened up, and the laughter was still there, people still pointing, still making comments.
His uniform was clean. His shirt was pressed. His mother had taken time to make sure of that, had hand-washed it even on nights she came home exhausted. But his shoes had been falling apart for months now, and he'd kept forgetting to tell her—or more honestly, he'd kept avoiding telling her, because he knew what would happen. She'd worry about money. She'd find a way to get him new ones anyway, which meant she'd sacrifice something else, and he couldn't bear that.
The teacher called for everyone to go to their seats. The laughter diminished but didn't disappear entirely. Che made his way to his desk, keeping his eyes forward, very aware of every step, every shuffle of his feet.
The morning passed in the blur of lessons that usually occupied half his attention. Mathematics, which came easily enough that he could answer the questions without really thinking. Language arts, where they were reading a story that the teacher seemed to find profound but which Che found predictable. He sat at his desk and went through the motions, but his mind was elsewhere.
At lunch, there was the hour when the school opened the back field. Not a real pitch—just a concrete area with painted lines and goals made from metal frames—but it was where they played. Che joined a group of other boys for a casual match, and immediately the morning was forgotten. There was a ball at his feet, space around him, the simple clarity of knowing where he needed to be.
He wasn't the best player out there. That was Juan, a tall boy in the year above him, who could dribble past three defenders without breaking pace. But Che had something—a sense of movement, a way of being in the right position even when he wasn't the one pushing forward. He received a pass on the right side, about thirty meters from goal, and could immediately see Nico three meters ahead of him, unmarked in the channel. The pass was simple, just a short push forward, but it was weighted perfectly. Nico controlled it and kept moving, and a moment later he buried it in the corner of the goal.
"Good ball," Nico called back, breathless.
For that hour, Che's shoes didn't matter. His size didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the position of the ball and where it needed to go next.
But when the bell rang and they trooped back inside, reality returned. He caught his reflection in a corridor window as they headed back to their classrooms: small, thin-shouldered, wearing a uniform that hung slightly loose and shoes that were literally falling apart.
The rest of the school day was a numb procession of lessons. His teacher, Señora Márquez, called on him during a history question, and he answered it correctly without even remembering the specific lesson—the information just was there in his mind. She nodded, satisfied, the way she always did when he answered correctly, like she was confirming something she already knew.
"You should join the academic competition," she said after class, as students were packing their books. "The regional one. You'd have a real chance of moving up, getting into one of the better schools in Montevideo."
Che didn't respond immediately. He just kept placing his books carefully into his bag.
"Your mother would be proud," Señora Márquez added. "I'm sure she has plans for you."
Che thought about his mother at the hospital, working ten-hour shifts, coming home exhausted, checking his homework, talking about university. He thought about the way she looked when they talked about money, like she was calculating something in her head that didn't add up.
"I'll think about it," he said, which was what he always said, and which meant nothing.
By the time school ended at 3:45, the afternoon heat was at its worst. The streets outside the school gates were already crowded with children heading home, older students heading to work, vendors moving through the crowd selling agua de coco and empanadas. Che turned toward the preschool, his mind already shifting ahead to the walk there, the collection of Sofia and Diego, the walk back home.
But as he walked, his thoughts drifted. He was imagining a play—one of those moments from the lunch match, where he'd received the pass on the left side and instead of playing it simple, he'd pushed forward, dribbling three meters into space before finding the striker with a low pass. The pass had been defended, but just barely. It was the kind of move that felt alive in his mind, that played over and over, variations of where he could have gone differently, where he could have done better.
He was so deep in the visualization that he didn't notice when his feet carried him off the curb. Didn't notice when he stepped into the street. His head was down, his mind somewhere else entirely—on the pitch, in the space between defenders, following the trajectory of a pass that existed only in his imagination.
The horn came first, loud and sudden, a sound that belonged to the street but not to his thoughts. The brakes came next—a screech of rubber on asphalt that was violent and wrong, a sound that cut through everything.
The hood of the car filled his vision. He had just enough time to register the color, the shape, the impossible speed of it, and then—
Everything went white.
Time stopped.
Or maybe it continued, but Che wasn't part of it anymore. There was only whiteness, and the sound of a horn that had already stopped, and the smell of burning rubber, and nothing else at all.