Make Your Home Among Strangers (14 page)

Someone's bag beeped as they went through the security scanner, and I jumped high enough at my tall desk that he laughed into his hand at me.

—Sorry about that, he whispered.

He couldn't have looked less like Omar—ear-length red hair parted down the middle in a style well on its way out, a smattering of freckles across his nose, greenish eyes, eyebrows so pale they might as well not exist—but my brain understood he could count as attractive to a certain kind of person and so classified him as a new kind of male specimen, albeit one that would burst into flames if left unprotected on a South Florida beach. I put my letter down; my hands shook as I reached for his bag, which was covered with so many buttons and patches that I couldn't discern its original color.

—I guess you never get used to that sound, huh?

—No, you do, I said. You get used to it if you work at it.

I checked his bag—his portable CD player the sensor's culprit—and cleared it though the scanner, then slid it back to him with a cheesy smile and a thumbs-up.

He thanked me. I'm Ethan, by the way, he said, and I said, Okay.

I went back to my letter.

He drummed his fingers on my desk, then said, Right. OK. See ya around.

He pushed through the glass doors a few feet from my desk. Through the library's huge front window, I watched him walk toward the quad, wishing I'd said,
Yeah for sure, see you around
back to him, making a kind of promise to myself that way: that I'd be around to do such a thing. I told myself I'd wave at him—a big, obvious one that used both arms—if he turned around, but he didn't.

The commotion with Ethan was the night's only distraction at work. For the most part, as I planned out the next three and a half weeks, people passed me in silence. For the most part, it's like I wasn't even there.

 

12

THE THIRD ITEM DOWN ON
the page of “Relevant Campus Resources” I'd printed off the Diversity Affairs Web site—listed after the mental health clinic and the financial aid office—was the Learning Strategies Center, which was divided into various “learning labs” based on whichever subject was slowly killing you. Like the salon where Leidy worked, each of these places gladly welcomed walk-ins, so my first visit to the chemistry learning lab between classes on Tuesday was spontaneous.

It was housed, along with a couple other offices, in a three-story brick building on the corner of the quad. I'd passed it dozens of times but never entered, thinking it was someone's house: it looked more like an old mansion than an office building. But it actually
was
an old mansion, the former home of Rawlings presidents of yesteryear, before the civil rights era convinced college officials that having the president's house right on campus maybe made student protests a little too easy for us. Inside, tucked up against a wall in what was clearly once a living room, sat a modern cubicle, its reddish panels the same color as the carpeting. The stairs—each step extra wide and pleated with the same carpet—ran right alongside this front desk. After easing shut the front door so that it didn't make a sound as it closed and saying hello, I asked the student sitting there, So how does this work?

He said, Oh! Ummm, then chuckled. He pushed a chunk of straight black hair from his eyes and off his forehead, but it flopped back to the same spot the minute he pulled his hand away. He showed me a brochure and explained that upperclassman majors in various subjects were standing by to help me work through any and all assigned problem sets and to further explain concepts that I didn't pick up in class or on my own. He ran a finger down the list of subjects covered, then down the different locations on campus.

—It's other students that do it? That help you?

He said yes but assured me that the process to become a peer tutor was, like everything else at Rawlings, fairly grueling. He was, in fact, a tutor for several physics courses but couldn't go near chemistry.

—For instance, he said, I'm pretty sure the center coordinator for chemistry has banned me from even saying the word
chemistry
more than twice in one day.

—You better watch out then, I said.

He blinked at me, so I said, You said
chemistry
three times just talking right now.

—Oh! he said, then laughed hard through his nose in spurts.

I swung my backpack around to my chest and opened the zipper, looking for my wallet and thinking of the money I'd thrown away on my surprise flight home.

—They charge by the hour or what? I said.

—Oh, no no no, he said, waving his hands. This is totally free. Or rather, to be more accurate, it's part of what our tuition covers.

My hand was already around my wallet. I let my fingers relax and felt its weight slump back in my bag.

—How many do I get? I mean, appointments.

—As many as you need? I don't think there's a limit.

He slid papers around on his cubicle desk, checked a list tacked to the wall. He said, No one's ever asked me that.

Before I left that day, I booked twice-weekly slots for chemistry all the way up to the final exam, and I made initial biology and calculus appointments for the next day. I took the brochure for the writing center, which was apparently housed in the basement of the student union, right next to where I worked, and during that afternoon's library shift, while checking my e-mail during my break and seeing the string of appointment confirmations in my inbox, I created an online account and booked even more appointments in every subject, grabbing multiple time slots on the weekends and each day of study week. It's free, I told myself, imagining them as mall-bestowed perfume samples hoarded in the hopes of never having to buy a whole bottle.

On my way to the writing center—where I'd made standing appointments on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and Saturday afternoons, and where I would eventually bring draft after draft of my final paper and its bibliography, driving my tutor close to insane with my paranoia about plagiarism—I had to pass several large-screen TVs mounted on a wall that also had clocks set to different time zones. Without fail, over those last weeks before winter break, one of those TVs had something about the impending Y2K doom (we got e-mails “preparing us” for this from the Office of Technology, but we didn't seem to have to actually
do
anything to prepare) and another invariably blasted the latest development in “The Battle for the Boy,” which was what some stations were calling the Ariel Hernandez situation. Ariel's father had emerged from wherever he'd been the first few weeks Ariel was in the United States and was now demanding that his son be sent back. On my way to my first Thursday writing center session, I walked by those TVs just in time to see a line of demonstrators stretching from Ariel's house to beyond my mom's apartment building, which glowed orange on the screen. The shot zoomed in and I stopped and stood on my toes to get closer to the screen, scanning the line for Leidy or my mom, but the camera angle was from above, from a helicopter, and the tops of everyone's heads both looked and didn't look familiar. A row of words popped up, white letters in a black bar:
AND AS YOU CAN SEE, SUSAN, THINGS ARE UNDER CONTROL NOW BUT AUTHORITIES ARE STILL STANDING BY IN CASE THE SITUATION ESCALATES AGAIN
. The black bar rolled away and another scrolled up to replace it:
SUSAN
:
BUT DAN, ARE YOU SEEING ANY FLAMES OR SMOKE NOW FROM THE SKY SEVEN NEWSCOPTER? EARLIER YOU SAID
—

Before the next box could roll up, I found the volume button on the underside of the screen, and even though a small placard asked that we not change any of the settings, I reached up and tapped it just a little louder so that the closed-captioning the mute setting triggered disappeared. I didn't care if anyone saw me, but I had a joke ready—
We have enough reading to do, am I right?
—if anyone said something. No one did.

I stood back from the row of TVs and decided the marching looked almost peaceful now that there was no mention of fire scrolling across the screen, especially when compared to the nearby Y2K-related report showing the pandemonium of the Wall Street floor, where the hysteria of men in suits flapping paper around was matched only by the scroll rate of the words flying on and off the screen.

Halfway down the steps, the TVs safely behind me, I turned on the landing and slammed into the overstuffed backpack of Jaquelin Medina, who I hadn't seen since the mandatory Diversity Affairs welcome meeting. Despite this, she gave me a tremendous hug, but I was too stunned to return it in time—my arms stayed pinned to my body as her hands pressed into my back.

—I was just thinking about you, she said.

Something moved across my face that made her say, No! Not like that, I mean I was just worrying because, you know, I heard about how bad things are getting.

I thought she meant my grades and my probation, so in too mean a voice I said, How'd you hear about that?

She pointed slowly behind me, up the steps. The … media? Plus we've been talking about it a lot in my government class.

I shook my head once and said, Sorry, I'm just – it's hard. I know it's everywhere, I'm just busy, I'm just – trying to ignore it.

—Is your family doing okay? They're staying away from all the like –

She finished her sentence by waving both hands in front of her chest and giving an exaggerated frown, like she'd just been asked to dissect a cat and had to say no. I didn't know what to tell her: part of my study plan for finals was to not call home as much as usual, since I didn't think I could handle being much more than a Rawlings student for a little while. For three days in a row, I'd stayed in the library after my shifts until it closed at two
A.M
., and the four or five messages from Omar that Jillian wrote down on her yellow Post-it notes over those days had gone straight from my fist to our garbage can. The one message from Leidy I planned to return when I knew she'd be at work so I could keep it short and talk to the answering machine instead of her.

—I think so, I said.

Someone came down the steps behind me, and I searched his face as he looked at me and Jaquelin in the stairwell, but I couldn't see his eyes behind his sunglasses. Had he stopped to watch the Ariel coverage and now gotten the bonus of catching probably the only two Latinos he'd see on campus all day discussing the exact national issue he expected us to be talking about?

Jaquelin put her hand on my shoulder and pressed her lips together. Do you want to get dinner? I have a swipe on my meal card for a guest.

—I already ate, I lied. And I have my own meal plan, I said, this time meaning to sound rough. Were you just coming out of there?

I pointed to the glass doors of the writing center.

She looked back at the entrance, smiled at the place.

—Yeah, she said. I come every Thursday for a couple hours and work with a tutor on my papers. Have you been? It's so good, it's helped me so much.

—No, I haven't been, but I'm thinking of going now since – because of finals.

—You should! she said. My tutor's an English major and she's so good with structure and helping me even just talk through paper topics sometimes. I can't believe you haven't been yet. I had to start going the second week, after that meeting where – where we met? – and they told us to go, but I was like, whatever, you know? Then right away we had this response paper due in my history class? And I got a B-minus and I was like,
uh-oh
, I better hustle if I want to stay here. That feels like a million years ago, right?

I blinked a couple times, said yeah.

—Okay, so no dinner, but maybe – what are you doing Saturday? My roommate invited me to this party but I don't really want to go alone.

I wanted to say something sharp to keep up the ruse that I was smarter than her—
You aren't alone if you're going with your roommate
—but then I got what she meant: her roommate was white. She didn't feel like going to a party where she might be the only
person of color
.

—We can just meet there, she said. We don't gotta like, get ready together or anything. I just think it would be cool if, since us two are from real cities, right? We can show them what's up. It's a dance party supposedly.

The two or three Rawlings parties I'd gone to in early fall blurred together as one long night where I stood against a wall holding a red plastic cup filled mostly with foam as progressively drunker frat boys walked over to me and asked me what my problem was. Despite whatever Omar thought, I wasn't interested in cheating on him and hooking up with white boys wearing frayed visors with
RAWLINGS SAILING
stitched across the front, and this version of nightlife was so vastly pathetic compared to the places in Miami Omar could get us into that I preferred staying back at the dorm and waiting for Jillian to come home drunk, her careful makeup all smudged, and tell me and half the hall about
some jerk who was totally hot though
. But Jaquelin saying this was a dance party—god, I missed dancing, missed moving around in a crowd of hundreds while music pulverized me from every direction. Before Omar and I got serious, I used to be close with some girls at Hialeah Lakes, and we lived for the weekends, for putting on the worst animal print we could find and using our older sisters' IDs to get into eighteen-and-over clubs, for dancing in a tight circle all night long. We'd claim we were sleeping over at each other's houses, but we'd come home the next morning straight from the clubs, changing in the backseats of whatever car we'd been allowed to borrow for the night. Once we all found ourselves with boyfriends, those nights slowed down, then stopped, replaced by us hanging out in couples, then just each couple on its own until we either got engaged or broke up. I'd never thought of Rawlings as a place where I could maybe find a version of that fun again. Those first few parties—their hosts blasting music sluggish with guitar and devoid of booty-moving bass—had each ended with me walking back to the dorms a few feet behind the first random group of girls to leave, my arms hugging my shoulders against the cold night.