The Irony is That This Cell Phone Has Gone Through Dante's Inferno and Back and Still Looks Better Than You

Natalia Santos grew up feeling separate from her family.

It wasn’t a terrible feeling; she supposed it was mostly natural. She was a second generation Hispanic, born in the United States to parents who were the first to have been born there. It was a source of pride for them, to be the first to go to college and buy a house and provide for their children in ways that were impossible when they were kids.

Of course, things were lost. Pieces of the culture that made up her family but did not make up her. The reason why her mother sung her Spanish lullabies or strung a bracelet of colored plastic beads with painted eyes on them when her sister was born had no rhyme or reason or any conceivable meaning that she knew of. They just were.

While the cousins who crowded her house every weekend spoke rapid-fire Spanish, the affinity for the language skipped over her and she embraced the rough English of her classmates, developed an ear that picked up fragments of a life she didn’t live, and a mouth that, at best, could stumble along in poor Spanglish until she managed to escape them.

She was a girl misplaced, the extra piece to a puzzle that was already finished. She didn’t particularly mind it. At least, she didn’t always.

It wasn’t very long before she met them.