Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the John Gardner Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Miami Herald, The New Times, and the Latinidad List. Her stories have appeared in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Anthology 2011, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Epoch, and elsewhere. She joined the creative writing faculty at Florida State University in 2011 and has recently completed work on a new novel, from which this is an excerpt.