Carmen was waiting at the restaurant when Jared and I got there. She was wearing jeans, a denim jacket, a pink T-shirt, and pink Chucks and looked like a teenager rather than the twenty-three-year-old that she was. My cousin takes after our mothers’ side of the family height-wise. She’s short, about 5’3” and tiny, with caramel-colored skin, dark brown eyes, and thick, curly brown hair that seemed to be bursting from the ponytail she’d tried to pull it into. The first thing Jared did when he saw her was pull her to him for a hug, lifting her off the ground and nearly knocking her glasses off in the process. After wearing contacts throughout high school and college, Carmen decided she was tired of them and went back to wearing glasses. She was sporting a pair of geeky-looking black frames th
