Do you remember what it felt like to call someone's house on a landline and pray with all your might that their dad wouldn't answer? Or the mothball smell of an old scarf, the erasers that smelled like grape but tasted like soap, and the endless recesses behind the middle school workshops?

This story was born at twenty to midnight on a freezing sidewalk, while two strangers waited in line to buy the same magic book.

Clara is wearing double socks, newspaper sheets inside her sneakers by her mom's orders, and has an unforgivable habit: she always reads the last line of every novel before starting it to make sure nobody dies a horrible death. Leo is wearing a hand-me-down jacket with a torn lining, fifteen pesos in his pocket, a hunger capable of trading half a squished sandwich for a mint gum, and an absolute inability to stay quiet for five minutes straight.

What starts as a truce against the November cold soon turns into a bet for some street cart potato chips with hot sauce on the side, whispered phone calls at eight in the evening, chocolate milks rescued from the bottom of the school store freezer, and afternoons of broken silence on the second floor of the public library.

In No leas el final, I decided to get the narrator out of the way. Here, there is no one explaining what the characters feel or describing the landscape from above: it's just you, eavesdropping on every word, every clumsy joke, and every nervous silence between Clara and Leo. It's a direct trip to those years when the world fit into a blue backpack, first-degree equations were solved by imagining fences, and your heart would pound out of your chest three minutes before the bell rang to go back to class.

Come in, grab a seat on the back step of the shop class. Just one thing: you are strictly forbidden from opening the last page ahead of time.