Make mistakes.

Work harder than everyone.

And never, not once, let your last name be a reason to think yourself above another living soul.” “I promise,” Santiago said.

He turned at the barrier and raised his hand, and where once there had been no one at all to see him off, now there were so many hands raised back at him that he had to stop and simply look at them for a moment before he could make himself go.

He thought, standing there with his hand in the air, of the boy who had knelt in the cemetery mud two years before and told his dead father that his aunt said people like him didn’t go to places like that.