We first meet Lupe at a freshly minted age 14, the summer before she starts high school. Lupe is the youngest of three girls and the only member of her family born in Connecticut. Her parents were high school sweethearts in a small Texas town. When Monica was three and Danielle was an infant, the family moved to Unity. This was before the influx of immigrants (mostly from the Dominican Republic), so a Hispanic family in a majority white town drew some nasty comments. Lupe's parents responded by christening their third daughter with the most "Spanish-sounding" name they could muster and enrolling themselves and their daughters in Spanish classes.
Now Lupe lives in two worlds. She's the only one in her immediate family fully fluent in Spanish and English, placing her in the awkward position of translating for her mother and her maternal grandmother when they want to have a serious conversation over the phone. Her two best friends are complete opposites, so Lupe often acts as the go-between. She's almost in high school, straddling the line between kid and adult. Her ethnicity makes her an outsider in her conservative hometown, but it's still the only home she's ever known. And Lupe has a knack for finding the pockets of weirdness in Unity, especially these strange, supernatural occurrences that no adult ever seems to acknowledge...
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