“I pulled my sugar sack—Miranda Martinez-Cordova— from my backpack. ‘Dinnertime,’ I whispered, admiring the face I had given her with a Sharpie. Her eyes were big and wide with short lines for lashes. Her mouth was a blissfully flat smirk.” 

This quote subtly illustrates both Sierra’s facade and the tender child that lies beneath it: “Sugar Babies” chronicles her difficult relationship with her mother, who gave birth to her when she was a child herself, became very unhappy, and later abandoned her. Sierra, about to enter adolescence, has constructed a tough, sarcastic persona to show both the world and her mother. She has done so as a defense mechanism, as a response to her abandonment and the pain it caused. Her admiration of her handiwork shows her simply being a child, enjoying her own creativity, while the “blissfully flat smirk” that she has drawn on the baby symbolizes her own purportedly invulnerable persona. 

“Lying there with my mother in the afternoon light of my bedroom, I imagined her far into the future, driving day and night, her little white truck sliding from mountain peak to valley, through snow and heat waves, windstorms and lightning. Her headlights beam bright and warm, shining into town, the place where I’ll live when I’m finally a grown-up and my mother’s black hair is silver and her face is well lined. In the distance, I see her arriving, joyously waving to me, her last stop.” 

This quote reveals that, beneath Sierra’s facade of toughness, glib invulnerability, and sarcasm, her dearest wish is for her mother to love and want her. Although she spends most of the story exercising cold antagonism or an attitude of indifference toward her mother, and rejects a figurative motherhood for herself during the sugar baby assignment, this passage illustrates the true vulnerability that animates the construction of her persona.