The following text is adapted from Sylvia Acevedo’s 2018 memoir Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist. The narrator is traveling by car with her family to Mexico City. Mario and Laura are her brother and sister.

Mario and I played games to see how many different license plates we could spot, and Laura liked to look for children in the back seats of the cars we passed. We were used to the forty-five-minute drive to El Paso and familiar with the six-hour ride to Chihuahua, but I wondered what the long journey to Mexico City would be like.

©2018 by Sylvia Acevedo