Make Your Home Among Strangers (39 page)

I set down my books and took off my coat, and as I draped it over the back of the chair I always sat in, I heard the crash of the building's front door—Ethan came bursting through it, caught me staring at him from the lounge. He yelled my name and ran toward me, through the open glass door of the study lounge, his bag on his back and a torn envelope in his hand. He charged at me full speed, then leapt and slid across the table on his stomach, his hand and the envelope reaching out to my face.

—Read it, he said.

But he started talking before I'd gotten the letter all the way out.

—I got into Berkeley. For grad school. My top fucking choice, fully funded.

He whipped off his bag and tossed it off the table, then rolled onto his back. He thrashed his arms and legs in the air like a dying bug and screamed, then he tilted his head so he was seeing me upside down, the acceptance letter stretched between my fists.

—You're the first person to know. Isn't that perfect? I am losing my fucking mind!

—Grad school? For what?

He flipped over to his belly and got up to his knees, legs spread wide on the tabletop.

—Dude, for history. For my doctorate.

He plucked the letter away.

—I didn't even know you were applying to places.

—I didn't want anyone to know. And most of the apps had to be in by January anyway. I only applied to four schools. That's all I could afford.

He marveled at the letter again, then said, Jesus H. Christ, I think I'm going to puke.

Without taking his eyes off the page, he scurried off the table and slammed himself into a chair.

—I haven't felt this kind of relief since getting in
here
, he laughed.

—Why didn't you tell me? I said.

He reared away, sliding the letter back into the envelope as if to shield it from me.

—Hey, I think what you meant to say was, Congratulations, Ethan, you are a pinnacle of human achievement, I hope to be half the man you are someday. Something along those lines.

—Sorry, I said. Congratulations, Ethan – assuming you would've told me had I not been just standing here waiting for you.

—Of course I would've told you! I couldn't wait to tell you.

—You didn't bother to tell me you were waiting to hear from places.

—Come on, don't be like that. I feel like celebrating. Don't make this into a thing.

He smacked the envelope against his palm. What
are
you doing here so early?

His face was as bright as a shark's belly. Something was gone from him: the stress of all those weeks of waiting, something I hadn't registered until it was missing. He'd kept his worries a secret, hadn't burdened me with them—a pattern we'd both kept so far and that I couldn't break now even though I wanted to, not in the glow of his good news, and not with his example of someone who'd kept it together shining in my face. I slid my books away from me, lined them up with the side of the table.

—No reason, I said. What do you mean, a
thing
?

—No, Lizet, come on, don't do that.

My eyes filled—I wondered if this was how my parents felt when I told them about Rawlings. Do what? I said.

—What you're doing. Finding a reason to get upset. I'm so fucking happy right now, please,
please
don't wreck it.

I still wanted to tell him about my mom, ask him what he'd do if he were me when it came to the internship, but now I knew he'd just tell me to go. Forget your family, your life is about you: that's what he'd say. That's what his keeping quiet until he found out for sure meant for him. That's why Ethan was going to Berkeley and I was going nowhere.

—I'm not. I'm happy for you. I just don't know why you didn't tell me sooner you were waiting to hear from grad schools. I don't why you'd keep that from me.

—Stop stop stop stop! He lunged at me and grabbed my wrists, squeezed them for a second before letting them go when the envelope crinkled.

—God, Lizet, I wasn't
keeping
anything from you, I – no,
no
, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this!

—Doing what?

—I'm not playing into this.

He stood up, leaned over the table, his color rising.

—This isn't complicated. If you can't just be one hundred percent happy for me right now, that's
your
problem.

—I never said I wasn't happy for you.

—I see it in your face!

I put my hands on my cheeks to cover whatever was betraying me. He slapped his hands against his thighs.

—You're doing that infuriating girl thing where you make this about you, he said. My mom pulls this kind of thing and I hate it. I didn't think you were like that – you've
never
been like that. Don't start now.

—I'm not your mom.

I grabbed my jacket and pulled my arms through it.

—I know you're not my mom. But do you see how now
I'm
trying to make
you
feel better when all I want to do is get drunk and celebrate? When I want
you
to celebrate, too?

—You know what, whatever, Ethan. I said congratulations. What do you want?

—There's no reason for you to resent me for this! I didn't think you'd be this way.

I did resent him—that was exactly it—I resented him for having a future where he could put his mom in her place, and that that place wasn't ahead of what he wanted for himself. I grabbed my books and started shoving them in my bag.

—Well sorry to disappoint you. Sorry I didn't get on my knees to suck your dick the second I saw that letter. Is that what you wanted?

His hands went up into his hair, the envelope still in one of them and so resting against his face. I waited for him to say
Fuck you
or
Maybe it is
and grab his crotch—the way Omar would to keep the fight rising. But Ethan folded over and hid his face. He heaved tired laughs into his hands, but when he stood back up, the skin around his eyes glowed red.

—
Christ
, I cannot believe you just said that.

—Ethan, I don't know what you want me to say!

—Not that! Jesus! Why are you acting like this?

I zipped up my jacket even though the room was too hot.

—Don't worry about it.

He held the envelope up in front of my face and said, I'm not going to.
I
couldn't be happier. I thought you'd get that better than anyone, but clearly I'm wrong.

He picked up his bag, slung it back over his shoulders.

—Ethan, I'm sorry. I'm just upset, okay?

He faced me again, his lips drawn into his mouth. It doesn't matter, he said.

He looked at the ground, and his hair flopped over his forehead.

—I was so happy when I saw it was you in here, he said. I'm an idiot.

With the long edge of the envelope, he tapped the table twice, then looked through the glass walls down the hallway. He said, Forget this, I'm getting another RA to fill in here, then calling my mom to get that over with. Then I'm celebrating.

I tried to undo what I'd done by saying as he walked away, Your mom's gonna freak, she's gonna be so proud of you.

He shrugged, tapped the glass door with the envelope like he had the table.

—She won't know what it means. But she'll be happy to hear I won't be moving back home for good this summer.

Someone came through the door—a resident who Ethan said hi to. His hello was just a nod, a stiff hand raised: serious and so Not Ethan in its perfunctory delivery that it proved how much I'd hurt him.

—I swear I'm happy for you, Ethan. I didn't mean what I said before to come out like that. I'm the idiot, okay?

—Have a good spring break, Lizet. Maybe I'll see you when you get back.

I wasn't going anywhere, not until Easter, but I couldn't explain why now, so there was no point in correcting him. The study lounge's glass door closed after him. He turned back with a little envelope-accentuated salute—the closest thing to a joke he could muster—before disappearing down the hall.

*   *   *

I was grateful that I had our room to myself over spring break, with no chance of Jillian walking in with only a
Hey
and stuffing a change of clothes in her bag before leaving again. Ethan was away—he'd gone to New York City with friends at the last minute as part of his celebrating—and since Jillian had put a password on her computer, I spent the days at the library, studying and writing then deleting e-mails to Ethan and also racking up work hours by picking up all the shifts abandoned by people who'd headed somewhere warm, money I needed to pay off the plane ticket. By the middle of the week I'd gotten lonely enough to e-mail Jaquelin—she
had
to be around—but she wrote back saying she was spending break on a service trip with some organization in Honduras, and I hated her so much for being this ideal Rawlings minority student that I deleted the e-mail without looking at the pictures she'd attached to it.
Sending sunshine your way
, she'd written; frustrated as I was, I believed she was really trying to do that.

During each library shift, I worried I'd run into Professor Kaufmann. Right before break, she asked if I was leaving town (she'd scheduled the lab work so that we wouldn't kill or damage anything because of a week's worth of inattention), and I lied and said I was headed home to Miami. She said she wanted to check in about the internship when I got back, about some forms I should be receiving in the mail. Any and every tall woman who came through the library's entrance that week was greeted by a half-hidden version of me cowering behind the library's security desk; I only emerged once I saw that it wasn't Professor Kaufmann pushing a coat's hood back from her face or stomping snow from her boots. And once classes started again, she didn't ask me to stay behind to talk, didn't e-mail me a reminder to linger after lab. The forms she'd mentioned never arrived in my campus mailbox, and I figured she must've realized I wasn't applying for the internship and was silently upset. In the days before my Easter flight, I kept waiting for her to make me admit I'd misled her, and the dread of that moment followed me around campus, sat with me during lab or at work, and was only eventually crowded out by fear—of flying, yes, but of so much more—the instant I heard the click of my seatbelt on the airplane.

 

30

THOUGH I NEVER TOLD OMAR
I'd seen my mom on the news and that I knew about the weeks-long vigil, I did tell him a few days out from my arrival that I'd found some mythical last-minute deal on an Easter flight. When he asked me why Easter—his voice rising, sounding more than a little panicked—I said, I just feel like I should be home for the day Jesus resurrected himself. He didn't say anything except, Yeah I guess, and I worried I'd gotten it wrong and given myself away, that Easter celebrated something else: I hadn't been to church since my first communion, and even there I had no solid memories—only that I forgot to take off my lace gloves in the bathroom before I went to wipe. I asked Omar to pick me up from the airport, then gave him a chance to confess everything he'd been keeping from me. I asked him, Is there a reason
why
I shouldn't come home for Easter, Omar? No, he said. I even asked, Is something going on I don't know about? I really do think I gave him enough with that, that this test was almost too easy. Still, he failed it. No no, he said. He coughed for a few seconds then said, We'll go to the beach while you're here. So I knew he'd keep my trip a secret, since he was already keeping so many secrets from me.

Omar paid to park and met me at the gate instead of driving around until spotting me, which is what we'd agreed on over the phone. Under other circumstances I would've found the gesture sweet, but this was another Thursday night with me in Miami for a holiday my family didn't celebrate. This was me trying to—what? What the hell was I doing there? That's what I thought when I saw him waiting near a bank of chairs, because that's what his face said:
El, what are you doing here?

The first thing he actually said after I pulled away from his stiff hug was, Where's your ring?

I told him I left it at school, that I didn't want to lose it on the plane, and I pretended to struggle with my bag to avoid looking at his face. I'd taken it off for good the night I booked the flight, had dropped it in the mug on my desk that held my pens and pencils right after clicking
Purchase
. He said, Really?—his voice so tight and uncomfortable that I knew he didn't believe me as much as he wanted to when he said, Right, that makes sense.

The ride home felt just as awkward, but he bought my
I'm tired
s as I leaned against the car door, the street rumbling too close under me. When I first sat in the Integra, my butt dropped into its bucket seat hard: I'd forgotten how low his car was, and as we zoomed through the concrete layer cake of the parking garage, I imagined my ass scraping against each speed bump that the car tipped its way over.

Once he'd navigated away from the airport to the expressway, he veered in what felt like the wrong direction, the sign for Hialeah three lanes away on the other side of the road, indicating a different on-ramp than the one we were hurtling toward. I said the first of many things neither of us expected over that trip.

—I'm not going to my mom's.

—What are you talking about? You can't stay at
my
place, my mom would –

—I know, I said. Drop me off at my dad's.

He huffed like I'd said something funny, asked if I even knew where my dad lived since selling the house, if I'd even talked to him since August. When I said yes, I did, and yes, I had—that I'd seen my dad over Christmas but hadn't bothered to tell him because it wasn't his business and please, could he just stop talking and take me to the Villas—he knew right then that I'd find a different way back to the airport come Monday.