Alicia is a girl with a lot of dreams and hopes, she expects to one day become a renown heart doctor. Because she wants to help all the people, that like her mother, died of a heart arrest before her fifties. She lives in a house with her father and her two sisters, they are all older. As a matter of a fact Alicia has four brothers and sisters, but her two brothers are now on their own, one is in jail and the other disappeared some time ago.

She has a bad relationship with her sisters, they always tell her she won't ever achieve anything in life, and that she is not smart enough to be someone. Alicia does not know they say so because of their own fear, because in the next ten years both her sisters will become prostitutes, and one is going to end up with a drunk husband, while the other won't live to the end of those ten years.So she cries every time her sisters tell her so.

Alicia and her family are now living in Florida, but it wasn't always like that, she remembers living with her whole family, aunts and grandparents, which wasn't better because they fought all the time. They moved from Puerto Rico Sushi is their business, they have a dirty place outside their house, no sanity department in the world would approve it, but people still go. And while it can't pay for Alicia to have more than one dress every year, it can very well cover her father's love for liquor.

In the place they live people are kidnapped or murdered daily, and every two nights she hears gun shots near her window. So to avoid this reality, Alicia not only dreams of being a heart surgeon. She dreams as well of being away, not away in Puerto Rico, not away in school, simply a place where she could rest from all the gunshots, outside, and inside her house. She is constantly daydreaming, thinking of how would life be if she only could run away one of this days, and go to a good school, study to be a doctor ,and heal all the poor people in the world. But instead she has to cut putrefied fish.

She goes to school every day she can, which is not daily because her father forces her to work in their sushi place day and night. While she is in school she enjoys being away and actually learning something, she can't see what about school made her sisters dislike it so much. Even tough she tries hard, she doesn't have the time, so she is failing almost every class. She tries hard so she can accomplish her goal.

Today, Alicia is making her homework next to the bucket of fish she has to prepare, she is also day dreaming about going away and knowing the world, being successful. And she still dreams and makes an effort because she doesn't know yet, that in five years her father will die because of some missed shot to a gangster, she will have to work full time in the sushi until it closes and then she will be a waitress until the age of twenty, which is when all her hopes and dreams are only memories.


By I'm the penguin