"You are not a criminal," Ms. Dobrin said. "Being here without status is a civil matter, not a criminal one, and you came at twenty-two months, which is not an age at which anybody in their right mind thinks you decided anything. But you don't have status, and that means you're removable. Deportable. That's the word. It's an ugly word and I'm going to use it, because you should hear it in this room first and not somewhere else."
I wrote down: deportable. My hand was steady. I was proud of that.
"Can I get the program? The one for kids who came young?"
"Right now, today, that program is not accepting first-time applications. It has been in court for most of your life. It might open again. It might close for good. I've been doing this for twenty-two years and I've stopped predicting. If it opens, you will be the first person I call, and you will qualify, and we will file the same afternoon. That's a promise." She held up one finger. "But here is the part I want you to really hear, Maya. You are seventeen. Your birthday is November fourteenth."
"Yes."
"Under the law, the time you spend here without status before your eighteenth birthday doesn't count against you. Not for the bars, the penalties, the waiting periods. Right now, you are, in one specific and important sense, clean. Starting on November fourteenth, a clock starts. And if that clock runs for more than six months, and then for more than a year, the penalties get much heavier, and they follow you, even if a door opens later." She tapped Tía Jacinta's receipt notice. "This petition is real. It's old, which is good, because old is the only good thing in this line. Your aunt filed it for your mother in 2011, and you are a derivative, which means you ride along. For the country of Ecuador, in that category, the government is currently processing petitions from some years before yours. Your number is getting closer. Slowly. Every month it moves a little."
"How long?" I said. "Honestly."
"Honestly? I don't know. A few years. Maybe more. And when it comes, your parents will have their own problems, separate from yours. Waivers. Interviews. Things I'm not going to pile on you today, because your parents and I are going to talk about those in another meeting." She looked at my mother, briefly, and my mother looked down. "But for you, there are some things we can do now, before November, and there are some things we can try that might not work. There's a way the law looks at the age of a child in a family petition. There are ways to make sure that when your number comes up, you're still counted as a child, even if you're older. I need time to run it all down. I need every piece of paper your family has ever touched.