Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

to be at the top of the class. But today . . . today is awful. Things that feel a lot more important than a math lesson have gone wrong and my brain whirs to try to find a way to fix them.

I like fixing things: I’m always trying to find a way to do things just a little bit better. But I have no control over Victor leaving and you can’t change death, so today my brain spins and spins but doesn’t get anywhere.

Victor stays quiet for the rest of the day too. When we sit together again for our lunch of watery soup at noon, I try to bring him into the conversation, but he just shakes his head and stays quiet. School lets out for the day right after that, so once we finish eating, it’s time to gather up my satchel and notebook and head home. I’m thinking hard about what I’m going to say to Victor, but when I meet Daniel at the big blue metal door, I don’t see him anywhere.

“Hey, where’s Victor?” I ask.

Daniel pokes his head out. “There he is.” He points. “He must have got a head start.”

I push past him, out the door. “Victor!”

Victor turns. He’s already twenty meters up the road that leads toward El Rosario. He and his papi live in a little house perched right on the edge of the gully overlooking the entry lot. I wonder what it’s like to wake up every morning and see your future below you.

We live in the other direction, farther down the mountain, but I jog to catch up to Victor.

“Victor, I . . .” I trail off when I get to him. What am I going to say? That I’m sorry he has to leave school? That this isn’t fair? He already knows those things.

“What, Ana?” Victor’s eyes look tired already. I notice he didn’t bring his notebook home with him. He must have left it at school so some other kid could use the empty pages.

“I’m going to miss you,” I finally manage. “Take care, okay?”

“Okay, ” he says, but even I can tell he doesn’t believe it.

I watch until Victor turns the bend, then I retrace my steps to where Daniel is waiting for me and join him for the long walk home.

The younger kids stay behind because Don Marcelino will give them a ride down the mountain in his truck. They look funny, twenty of them packed into the flat bed of the truck, but it’s a nice thing to do for their little legs. The bigger kids, like Daniel and me, walk.

For a couple hundred meters, there are other kids our age on the road with us, and Daniel chats and jokes with them. Daniel is cheerful, like he always is when he gets to go to school. Being sick and stuck at home with nothing to do bores him. I bring him work so he doesn’t fall too far behind, but that only fills an hour or so of the day. It’s not the same as being at school all morning, every day, surrounded by friends. It lights him up from the inside.

It also exhausts him.

In twos and threes the other kids branch off the road to find their own paths home. We wave at them. Eventually, it’s just us hiking our way up and around the Cerro.

Walking home is even slower than our trip to school in the morning, when Daniel was fresh. On the steeper slopes we have to stop every ten steps or so for him to lean heavily against my shoulder and take deep, shuddering breaths. In my mind, I try to figure out how much farther we have yet to go and how long it will take us. We don’t have time to dawdle: Mami needs us home to work. Still, I’m afraid to push Daniel. I study his face. He’s pale and his cheeks are shiny with sweat even though we’re going so slowly.

I walk to a boulder slightly off to the side of the road.

“Take a rest,” I tell him. “We’ll keep going in a minute.”

It’s proof of how tired he is that he doesn’t fight me on this. Instead, he collapses against the boulder and closes his eyes, focusing on evening out his breathing.

The air is thin up here. The Cerro Rico is 4,800 meters above sea level. Whenever tourists visit, or even people from lower down in Bolivia, they gasp like fish and get horrible headaches and nausea. We call it sorroche—altitude sickness. The extreme altitude is why water boils at a temperature so low you can cook a potato for days and it will still be hard in your soup. Even cars and trucks struggle to work up here. I heard Papi grumble once that a car will last three to five times as long at lower altitudes just because there’s more oxygen in the air which lets it burn fuel efficiently without straining the crankshaft. Not that we have a car, but still, he was offended by the thought. Those of us who live here don’t notice it so much, but when I hear Daniel wheeze, it’s all I can think about: whether, if he had air with more oxygen in it and we could get him away from breathing in dust full of arsenic, lead, and other things that weaken your body—if we were somewhere else, anywhere else—he’d be okay, even with his asthma and his constant lung infections.

I scowl and aim a sharp kick at a rock near where we’re standing.

Unfortunately, the rock is not loose scree, like I thought it was. Instead, it’s a small spike of the mountain, still very firmly attached.

I swear loudly, grabbing the toe of my sneaker in both hands.

Daniel’s eyes pop open at my cussing, and seeing me hopping around on one foot, he starts to laugh.

“Shut up!” I snap. “It’s not funny.”

“Sure, sure,” he says, still chuckling, “you’re not funny.”

It’s only when he winks at me that I realize he’s