Make Your Home Among Strangers (11 page)

I sat near the aisle in the last row of the lecture hall and watched the room fill in that direction: from last row to first. A small group—maybe seven people—came in together like they already knew each other, rowdy and talking loud as if headed to a pep rally. I later learned they were from the West Coast and part of a program called TROOP—an acronym for something—which meant they were all bound by that program to enroll at the same college as a unit, the program's premise being that having each other on campus would make things easier, would keep each of them alive. But most of us came in alone, or in pairs if we were lucky enough to have bumped into someone else who'd gotten this rare letter in their orientation welcome packet.

Eventually a girl sat two seats away from me, close enough that we had to talk. I said hey first and told her I liked her earrings—gold dangling things with feather-shaped pieces hanging from quarter-sized hoops—and the twang in her voice when she said
Well hi there
back made me wonder what she was doing at that meeting. She said her name was Dana and that she was from Texas; her father was from Argentina, and she visited relatives there every year, sometimes for a whole month. She'd spent most of the summer there, had just returned from relaxing on the family's ranch before coming to Rawlings.

—Hence this tan, she said with an eye roll.

She held out her arms, turned and inspected them, then lifted her legs and wiggled her Christmas-red toenails, her feet in gold sandals. She said her mother was American, which was why she didn't really speak Spanish. She was rooming in a program house called the Multicultural Learning Unit, a new building I'd thought about applying to live in until I read about the extra fees associated with program houses—I wasn't sure if financial aid would go toward covering those. I nodded at everything she told me, relieved like nothing I'd ever felt that she wasn't asking about my family, my summer, my tan.

—Don't worry, she said. I think this meeting is more for the black students. It's hard to be black on a campus like this.

She looked at her nails, long and polished and completely natural—not the acrylics I thought I'd spied when she first sat next to me. She watched the group who had come in together settle down in the very front row.

—I
love
black guys, she told me. My ex-boyfriend was black.

—That's cool, I said.

—He gave me this, she said.

She tugged a thin chain out of her blouse. A gold medallion hung at the end of it, the letter
D
raised on its surface, little diamonds dotting the letter's backbone. It was the kind of jewelry I imagined rich husbands who worked too many hours giving their wives on some anniversary.

—We're still friends, she said. I still love him a lot. He's at Middlebury.

—Oh, I managed.

I pretended to pick something off my knee to avoid giving away that I didn't know if Middlebury was a school or a city or something else entirely.

—Yeah, I didn't get in there, but whatever, it's time I live my own life, she said. Plus I'm a legacy here, but still, this is probably where I would've picked anyway.

Each word she spoke had the unintentional side effect of convincing me that she was some sort of alien, or maybe a poorly designed alien robot. I'd never encountered anyone like this in my life, and that meant I knew better than to ask how someone could
be
a
legacy here
. She asked me if I spoke Spanish (Yes) and what kind (Cuban, I guess?). She said this would be of little help to her, as the instructor for her Intro to Spanish course was from Bilbao, Spain, and so probably spoke
real
Spanish.

Because Dana had glossy brown hair and exquisitely applied makeup and elegant yet somehow still flashy jewelry, it wasn't long before a guy came and sat between us in the seat closer to her. His name was Ruben and he was, he said, from Miami. I almost pissed myself with happiness until I said, Where in Miami, and he said, A part called Kendall? And I said, That's not Miami, and he said, How do
you
know?

I told him I was from Hialeah, had just graduated from Hialeah Lakes High.

—Really? he said.

And when I nodded, he said
Oh
and pointed to himself, shrugged and added, Private school, then turned his back to me and encouraged Dana to talk about herself as much as possible. They hit it off so easily and had so much in common that I began worrying that
I
was at the wrong meeting, but just then someone sat on my other side and said hello, introduced herself with a last name and everything.

—I'm Jaquelin Medina, this new person on my left said.

—Lizet, I told her. Ramirez.

I held out my hand for her to shake, something that still felt awkward and unnatural; I was used to kissing people on the cheek to greet them. From the way she leaned forward and then corrected herself before putting her palm against mine, I knew she was battling the same tendency.

Within a few seconds, she was crying—just quiet, smooth tears falling down and off her jawline, following each other down the streak the first had made. I didn't know what else to say but, Are you okay?

She didn't turn to look at me.

—I gotta go home, she whispered. This is a mistake.

Ruben and Dana laughed about something, and when I glanced over at them, Ruben had her hand in his, was turning a huge gold ring on her middle finger.

—We've been here like a week, I said to Jaquelin. The meeting hasn't even started yet. Look, where you from?

—California, she said. Los Angeles.

—I'm from Miami, I said.

—I miss my mom, she said. I miss my sisters. My stuff still isn't here yet.

—Neither is mine! I lied with a fake laugh.

She sniffled and wiped the drops from her jaw, dragging the water onto her neck. She turned her face to me and said, So your parents didn't come to help you move in?

I folded the letter still in my hands into a very small square. On move-in day, I'd watched from my bed as Jillian's parents hauled suitcase after suitcase up to our room; the clothes I'd wrapped around the other things I'd packed had filled only three of my four dresser drawers. Later, her parents lugged up maybe a hundred bags from Target, each one containing a plastic contraption intended to house more of Jillian's stuff. No,
Mom
, she'd barked at one point, that's the
sweater
box. Her mother, who was trying to force the empty flat container into the closet, instead hurled it in her daughter's general direction with a resigned
Fine!
and Jillian tossed the box onto her bed, packed it with sweaters, snapped on its plastic top, and slid it under her bed, which they'd already lofted to fit a mini-fridge. They were all so stressed and unhappy that it hardly seemed like a
good
thing to have your family there, except that later, as I sat on my side of the room, I thought about how, when Jillian called her parents, they'd be able to picture where their daughter sat, would know where the phone was. I unfolded the letter in my lap, then refolded it, going against every just-made crease.

—We couldn't afford it, I told Jaquelin. The flights up here, I mean.

Jaquelin nodded. She said, My mom doesn't have papers.

I didn't know why she volunteered this until I registered that it meant her mother couldn't get on an airplane. One of my dad's brothers had a friend who owned a speedboat, and twice a year, the two of them raced out into the Florida Straits and intercepted rafts that they'd arranged to meet and brought them closer to the coast—just close enough that they could relaunch their raft and make it to shore “unassisted” and eventually seek political asylum thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act. My uncle's friend charged these people ten thousand dollars each and gave some of that money to my uncle for helping with the runs; my uncle had quit doing this a couple years earlier, after getting his own girlfriend and daughter over from Cuba. I wondered if Jaquelin's mother knew about this law, this system: she could start the process now, leave but come back via raft as a Cuban, so that in four years she could easily board a plane and fly out to see her daughter graduate from one of the best colleges in America. I wondered if this was really an option, if her mother could take advantage of the holes in the system the way my family and so many others had.

Jaquelin began crying again, sniffling into the heel of her hand to stay quiet.

—I'm sorry, she said. It's just – it's hard, right? Wasn't move-in day the worst?

—It was, I said, praying that someone would get behind the podium soon.

The mandatory meeting was run by several people, most of them minorities, all of them having the term
retention specialist
in their job title. Before anyone passed out any ice cream, I learned that students of color struggle more in college than our white counterparts. I learned that, when combined with being from a low-income family—the case for some of us in that room, one specialist said—your chances of graduating college fall to somewhere around twenty percent. They told us to look around and imagine most of the people in that auditorium disappearing, and I did that, not really realizing that when Dana and Ruben looked at me, they were imagining me gone.

We learned that the high schools some of us went to, because they were in low-income areas, probably did not prepare us for the rigorous coursework we would soon encounter. We were told to use the writing center, the various tutoring centers. We were told we had to do our homework, told we had to go to class. Dana whispered to Ruben, Is this a fucking joke? I don't need to hear this! And I sort of felt the same way, but she was the one to get up and storm out of the auditorium, Ruben ducking out a minute after her. No one stopped either of them. I ended up leaving once the ice cream came out, ashamed that some important people at Rawlings felt we needed this meeting, needed to hear things that, the moment after they were said, seemed painfully obvious. I didn't even stay to sit with Jaquelin, who'd written down every word—
get plenty of sleep, take advantage of your professor's office hours
—and who I left alone with her bowl of ice cream. I hadn't seen her again, not since that day. Not in any of my classes, not even in the dining hall. I hadn't even bothered to look for her at the airport or on the campus shuttle—I knew without her saying so that her work-study money was being sent home, that she had to stick to her budget in a way I didn't.

*   *   *

As a bunch of British dudes pretending to be Romans whistled from crosses on Jillian's computer screen, I was the one silently crying, the one days away from disappearing. I calmed myself down by thinking something horrible: at least my mom could get on a plane. At least
Beloved Family Member Getting Deported
wasn't on my list of worries. Jaquelin was proof that someone at Rawlings had it harder than me, and if only twenty percent of us were going to make it, then at the very least I had a better chance than her, didn't I? My home life
had
to be more stable than Jaquelin's, right? Maybe I belonged just a little more than this one other person, and ugly as it was, that felt like something—like an actual advantage.

The last of the credits scrolled away. I kept Jillian's quilt around my shoulders like a cape, dragged it with me over to the phone. I dialed the apartment after punching in the numbers on my phone card, and after a couple rings, Leidy answered.

—I was just calling to tell Mami I made it back okay. Let me talk to her.

—She's not back yet.

—Back from where?

—The meeting.

It was just after ten at night. I pulled the quilt tighter around me, gathered the material in a fist at my chest.

—The meeting that started at one?
That
meeting?

—No Lizet, the meeting for future Miss Americas.
Of course
that meeting. What other meeting
would it be
?

Her voice sounded tired and so far away. I went over to the heater and dialed it to its highest setting. After we hung up, I put my hands on the warming metal, wondering how long I could hold them there before they burned.

 

10

I TRIPLE-CHECKED JILLIAN'S SHEETS FOR
cereal crumbs the next morning, eventually managing to arrange her quilt back on her bed with the same disheveled elegance she achieved whenever she made it. The DVD was once again in its case and nestled on her shelf between
The Big Lebowski
and
The Sound of Music
—two other movies everyone at Rawlings but me had seen. Jillian didn't even look at her bed before dropping her duffel bag on the rug and launching herself onto it, snuggling her face into her pillows before turning to me at my desk and saying, Liz! It's
so
hot in here!

It took a second to remember she was talking to me—I was Liz again, no more El—but I reached over and turned the heater's dial to low. Going by Liz was easier than correcting people when they said,
Sorry, Lisette?
or
Like short for Elizabeth?
after I told them my name. I liked Liz fine, and it seemed more and more weird to me that no one had ever called me by that nickname before, but just a few days home had made it strange to me again. Even though Omar and other Miami friends had called me El since kindergarten, asking new people to call me El seemed annoying of me, like I was trying too hard, like how it hit my ear when any Rebecca wanted to be called Becca instead of just Becky or a Victoria, Tori instead of just Vicky. So I'd embraced Liz, had even covered up, with a lopsided heart filled in with blue pen, the
E
and
T
on the nametag our RA had taped to our door.

I hadn't noticed the room was too hot, and said so.