My Name is Maria Isabel

María Isabel looked at the cup of coffee with milk and the buttered toast in front of her. But she couldn’t bring herself to eat.
Her mother said, “Maribel, cariño, hurry up.”
Her father added, “You don’t want to be late on your first day, do you?”
But instead of finishing her breakfast, María Isabel just kept staring at the butter as it slowly melted into the toast, and at the cloud of steam that floated over her cup.
“You’ll see, you’ll like your new school,” her mother said. But her mother’s soft, reassuring voice didn’t seem to convince María Isabel. María Isabel knew it wasn’t going to be
easy starting at a new school, especially when the school year had already begun. She was probably the only new student. She kept thinking what bad luck it was that they had had to move two months after school had started. And she had had so many plans to spend her winter vacation playing with Clara and Virginia.
“You’ll make new friends soon,” said María Isabel’s father, as if he could read her thoughts.
María Isabel kept staring at the cup. But when her brother, Antonio, chimed in, “Come on, Belita, hurry up. You’re going to make me late,” she gulped down her coffee, even though it burned her tongue. María Isabel shook her head, trying to shake the nervous thoughts from her head.
She got up and grabbed her blue backpack. María Isabel had always wanted a backpack, and at the store last Saturday, this seemed to be just the right one. She had been so happy when her mother decided to buy it, even though it was more expensive than the red one. Later that day, when María Isabel was alone in the apartment, she had walked back and forth with the pack on her shoulders and had even climbed up onto the toilet seat to see how she looked in the bathroom mirror. But now it just seemed heavy, and María Isabel couldn’t understand why she had liked it so much.