If Yulisa Cabrera ignores the bemoaning of her best friends, she quite likes winters. Especially Chicago winters— despite their notoriously dreadful reputation. She loves the wind that whistles between the houses, and she loves when the windows of the L fog up, and she loves when the noses of passers-by are tinged pink, like they have been kissed to discoloration by their lipstick-wearing lovers. But, and Yulisa will never admit this aloud, she loves the snow best. She likes that when she lays in the snow for too long, she starts to feel numb all over because that's when she feels like her body matches her mind the most. Numb all over.
It is sort of trite, she knows, her apathy toward everything and everyone. It's been done before. Yulisa isn't trying to claim she is the first person to feel any which way. In fact, she feels a great deal of comfort in knowing that everything she feels has inevitably been felt by someone else first.
Still, sometimes she looks around at the people she's known her entire life and wonders what they're thinking. If they've ever felt a cold sensation sweep over them until they've frozen like ice— incapable of any real human emotion. Because, knowing someone else has felt like this before is one thing, but knowing the people you love feel like this too is another. Sometimes when this happens, she thinks about God. She tries not to think about Him all that much if she's being honest. She doesn't really even know who He is, and a lot of the interpretations she has been told don't sit right with her. But, if God made her perfectly, that means He chose to do this to her. He chose to make her like this.
He chose to make her stomach flip when it wasn't supposed to, and He chose to make her turn cold, icy to the touch like snow, only for her to feel an immensely heavy thud of guilt thrown at her brain once she came back to herself.
She tries not to think about God all that much, but the wooden crucifix hanging on the wall in the family room of their house makes it pretty difficult. So, Yulisa spends all her time with her friends instead. She rides the L for hours with Holly until she fears the wrath of her mother, and she gets drunk in Lip and MJ's kitchen with the objectively bad wine she steals from the sacristy, and she watches the Bulls games with Jace and his (basically) brother-in-law Kev, and she holes up in her padrino's auto shop on the border of Back of the Yards and Brighton Park to work on the absolute beauty (not street legal, metal death trap) of a 1970's Oldsmobile that Lalo found in a junkyard off of the highway.
Yulisa is on the run from the one thing she's been taught has omniscience and omnipotence, and, God, she hopes He won't catch up.
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THE SEVEN GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT:
1. Wisdom 2. Understanding 3. Counsel 4. Fortitude 5. Knowledge 6. Piety 7. Fear of God
