Make Your Home Among Strangers (10 page)

*   *   *

In the airport on Saturday with two hours to go until my Thanksgiving return flight really left, I sat near my gate across from a bank of pay phones and thought about calling Omar. I wondered if I could get him to come out to the airport. It was a longer trek from Hialeah, but the way he drove, he could make it in twenty minutes if he caught all green lights. I wondered if he'd waste time being mad over the phone and use that as an excuse not to spend the gas, or if he'd just rush over, wanting to see me so bad that he didn't care I'd been home and not told him. I wondered if I'd have to beg him—if I
would
beg him—to come see me. We'd have a couple hours to talk before my plane would start boarding. I'd maybe get to hear someone say they were going to miss me.

I decided to make it a test. He picked up on the third ring.

—What do you mean, you're
here
? he said. You're like, outside?

—No, I'm at the airport.

—No fucking way, he said. So,
shit
! You need me to come get you?

—Not exactly.

It turned out not to matter: he was stuck at work, asked everyone around to cover for him and not one person said they'd do it. I didn't know if this meant he'd failed the test or not. I could turn it whichever way I needed.

Eventually, after a pointless conversation about his pizza-for-dinner Thanksgiving and the Ariel news and the custom rims he'd saved for and just bought and which friends were doing what that night, he asked me why I hadn't told him anything about the trip.

A voice over the airport's PA system answered in my place, announcing a gate change for a flight that wasn't mine.

—I would've paid for you to stay an extra night, he said after the voice finished.

—I couldn't let you do that.

—Why not?

—Because we weren't talking, I said. Because of that last fight about my hearing.

He was silent for a second, then said, I didn't know we were fighting like
that
.

I almost said, You don't know
anything
, but could already hear him shooting back,
See what I mean about dramatic
? And he'd be right.

—Plus, you're probably broke after those rims, I said.

—
God
El, he said. You are so fucking stupid.

I was ready, then, for the conversation to be over. I said, I know.

He told someone on his end to give him five more fucking minutes, then said into the phone, Are you gonna pull some shit like this at Christmas?

I mumbled no, but then reminded him that he already knew my travel plans for that day. It was the return flight for my original ticket.

—We'll see if I remember, he said, but he laughed.

—We'll see if I care, I said.

—How you gonna be like that when you're the one who comes home and doesn't even tell me?

There was still so much time left until we'd start to board, but I said, Omar, they're calling now, I gotta go. I'll see you in a few weeks, okay?

He sighed into the phone, then said, Fine, Lizet. I gotta go too. But will you at least call me tonight? So I know you got there alive?

—I thought you were going out with Chino and them, I said.

I wanted to hear that he'd stay home tonight and talk to me, that he'd carve out a chunk of time from his boys and give it to me so we could figure things out, and if he did that, he'd pass some other little test, and I'd stay his girlfriend.

—I'll have my phone with me, he said. I'll pick up.

I said okay even though I wasn't sure if I meant it. We both knew that I wouldn't call him—I'd let
him
call me that night, give him one more hurdle, and if he never did, that would settle the other tests he'd only half passed.

I was about to just hang up on him when he asked, So you hear yet?

—Omar, I told you I've
been
here but I'm leaving.

—No, I mean the thing at school. The investigation thing. What happened?

—Oh
that.

I considered lying to him, saying everything was fine, that I'd already heard and I was clear to stay. But he'd know that wasn't true, would sense it in the way I'd force those words out, as false as the thug image of Omar I'd given people up at Rawlings. The difference between him and the Rawlings audience was that he knew me better, or more precisely, he knew the version of me that couldn't lie to him, not yet.

—There's another stupid meeting, where they'll tell me the decision. I'll probably find out when that is like the minute I get back, I said.

The weight of that truth made me clutch the phone to my face and slide down in the plastic seat.

—Well good luck with that, he said.

He cleared his throat, the sound crackling in my ear, then said, Seriously, good luck. I actually mean it.

And then he hung up on
me
.

 

9

FROM THE ROWS OF SHUT DOORS
and the absence of wet boots outside of them, I figured I was the only person back on my floor. I was in our room just long enough to leave my bags in the middle of the carpet separating Jillian's side from mine—she'd be back Sunday, and I planned to spend my night alone spreading myself over the whole room just because I could—before turning around and heading immediately back into the cold, to a building everyone called the Commons, where our mailboxes lived.

It had snowed all day, but some miraculous group of people apparently still worked that weekend, plowing the sidewalks and paths for those of us unlucky enough to be on campus. Everything felt louder for the unnatural silence—no cars searching for spots in the parking lot, no one smoking or talking on their dorm's front steps. My sneakers against the clean pavement made soft, dry taps; the only real sound around me was my jacket's plasticky swish.

The Commons could feel deserted in the mornings whenever I made it to breakfast, but that Saturday night, the place felt post-apocalyptic empty. Inside, the snack shop that served fried things—normally open until two
A.M
.—was closed, a metal grate I'd never seen before pulled down over the entrance. In the TV lounge across from it, a screen glowed a beam through the dark over the body of just one person, a guy with his head thrown back against the recliner holding him, a baseball cap over his face.

At the bank of mailboxes, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of plastic and metal, more key chains than keys. I fumbled for the tiniest one while eyeing the crush of papers waiting inside, visible through the slit of a window lodged in my mailbox's face. Through that slit I spotted the bright red envelope the school used to mail out the bursar bills. I had these sent to myself at my campus address because at first, when they went to my mom's apartment, her and Leidy lost their minds over numbers so big, not realizing that most of the figures in one column were canceled out by the figures in another. I'd switched the delivery address and dealt with it myself after a second month's round of panicked calls from home. In the box, too, were flyers for concerts I wouldn't go to, ads for events in the Commons about which I didn't give a shit—pool tournaments, marathon game nights, free popcorn and screenings of French films—paperwork for a housing lottery I might or might not be around to experience, and in the smash of all of it, in that little bin, there was, as I'd predicted for Omar, a sealed letter from the Office of the Dean of Students.

I dumped the flyers in the recycling bin and shoved the bill and the lottery info and the letter into the mesh pocket inside my jacket. As empty as the Commons was, I wanted to open the letter in my room to guarantee I'd be alone, in case the reality of the set date made me cry.

I didn't even stop to take off my shoes. I stood on Jillian's rug—I'd clean up any mud later—and unzipped my jacket, then the mesh pocket, let the other envelopes drop to the floor, and opened the Dean of Students letter. The paper was thin and beautiful, the school's seal glowing through the middle of the page like a sun. It felt too elegant to be a piece of mail I'd been dreading. At the end of my hearing, an older white woman waiting outside of the conference room had touched the back of my arm as I'd left—I'd almost darted right past her—and walked me through another set of doors and around her desk in the lobby, telling me that she'd send a notice via campus mail with information about the next meeting once a decision was reached. I'd nodded but said nothing, staring only at the bright lipstick clinging to her mouth; she wore no other makeup, and the effect was both cartoonish and sad. As she opened one half of the wooden double doors I had come in through over an hour earlier, her mouth added that we'd likely meet in the same place. I saw now that she was right: I was to report to the same office in the same building on Monday at three thirty
P.M
. There was a phone number listed to call if that time was a problem, but also a sentence (one of only four on the whole sheet) stating that my supervisor at the library had already been notified of the conflict and had agreed to excuse me from the first half of my Monday shift.

I read those four sentences over and over again, bringing the letter closer to my face as I slid off my shoes, then as I sat on Jillian's bed. I took the meeting being scheduled in the afternoon—after a full day of classes—as a bad sign, thinking it meant that the committee wanted to give me one last day to enjoy being a Rawlings student: one last morning bathroom rush among dozens of the country's brightest students; one last hundred-year-old lecture room with heavy, carved desks; one last glasses-clad professor in a real tweed jacket at the chalkboard; one last walk across the snow-covered quad.
Let her have at least that
, I imagined the lone woman on the committee telling the four men. Let's at least give her that. It didn't feel like enough, and I thought about calling the number and saying that I wouldn't be there, that I was still in Miami and involved in a local protest about a boy who'd come from Cuba, that as eager as I was to hear their decision, it would have to wait—or maybe not even matter, because maybe I'd have to stay in Miami and be
proactive
, have to
advocate
for something; I could use the committee's own vocabulary against them. Sorry I can't make it (I imagined myself saying after some beep), but don't feel bad about kicking me out because really, there's a lot going on down here, and really, I need to be home right now anyway.

I placed the letter on my desk and picked up the phone, but there was no dial tone. I gawked at the receiver—even the
phones
were gone for break?—then almost dropped it when I heard a voice: Omar telling someone to shut the hell up.

—Whoa, it didn't even
ring
, he said after my confused
Hello?
You just sitting there waiting for me, huh?

—No, I said.

Behind him, I heard Chino's voice and another guy—a voice I didn't recognize—both laughing. I shoved the letter into my desk's top drawer, heard it tear as it crinkled against Jillian's gifted mittens. I pushed the drawer shut.

—I was about to call somebody, I said.

—Who?

—Don't worry about it.

I grabbed my sneaker off the rug and launched it hard at the closet door.

—Oh it's like
that
? he said. I thought you were gonna call me when you got there.

—I just walked in the door, Omar. Seriously? Can I get a fucking minute?

—Are you serious right now?
I
fucking call
you
and you talk to me like this?

I heard Chino say, Oh
shit
, and then a car door slam, then the voice that wasn't Chino's yelling, Bro, just hang up on that bitch already, we gotta go.

—Who the fuck is
that
? I said.

—Don't worry about it.

I took the phone in both my hands and crashed it into the cradle, then lifted it and slammed it again. I picked up my other sneaker and hurled it in the general direction of the first one's landing spot, then hauled my suitcase onto Jillian's bed so I could pace in my socks around her rug while waiting for Omar to call back.

The longer the phone went without ringing, the more the things in my bag made it into my drawers, smashed back into place, until after a while, I reached in and found nothing. So I filled the suitcase with the dirty clothes I'd left in a pile under my bed and zipped it shut, then shoved it where the pile had been. On Jillian's desk, which sat at the foot of her bed, lived the white egg of her Mac desktop, angled so that she could see the monitor from bed like a TV. I pulled back her butter-colored quilt, slipped one of her DVDs into her sleeping computer's drive—a movie I'd never seen called
Life of Brian
by Monty Python, a comedy group I'd mistakenly called “The Monty Python” when Jillian first asked me if I liked them and I tried to play it off like I knew who they were—and got in her bed, tugging the quilt up around me. I'd never so much as sat on her bed before that night, but now I reached over from it to the dresser and grabbed the box of cereal I'd left perched there. I tucked the box under the quilt with me.

The movie played—the screen's glow the only light in the room—and I had a hard time understanding the actors because of the British accents and the cereal's crunch filling my ears between the jokes I didn't know to laugh at. So I watched the movie two more times, looking for clues to the jokes, for the setups—the warnings I'd missed. I even turned on the subtitles the third time through. I laughed when it seemed like I should, until the act of laughing itself triggered the real thing.

*   *   *

During orientation week, I'd missed a different sort of warning the day I met the handful of other incoming Latino students (we comprised three percent of that year's class) as well as the black students (another four percent) at an assembly. We each showed up to the lecture hall with the same letter dangling from our hands, an invitation from the college's Office of Diversity Affairs promising fun at yet another ice cream social. I'd already had so much ice cream that week that I wondered if Rawlings made some deal with a local dairy farm—I'd seen enough cows during the ride in from the airport to think this possible. The letter stated, in bold type, that this meeting was mandatory (which sort of detracted from the
fun
aspect), and it also stated that this would be our chance to familiarize ourselves with the various campus resources available to students of color. It was the very first time I saw that phrase—
students of color
—but I was still brown enough from life in Miami to understand it meant me.