Make Your Home Among Strangers (3 page)

—Yeah, I lied.

—Wait though, she said. Where did you go to high school?

She hopped in her seat and twisted her whole body my way, her hand now on the seatback between us. In seeing her get so excited about such a stupid, irrelevant question, I wanted to take away all the distinction I'd given her by thinking of her as a professor. But I didn't know yet that this question—when you're from Miami and talking to someone else from Miami after you've both left it—was the shortcut to finding out which version of the city had raised me. Out the window, the sun disappeared along with the clean, empty streets of Coral Gables, and that neighborhood started to melt away into the run-down strip malls—with their bakeries and liquor stores and Navarro Pharmacies and neon-signed cash-only restaurants—that looked more familiar.

When I didn't answer right away, she said, I went to Hialeah Gardens.

She said the school's name like a punch line, pointed to her chest with four of her fingers, her thumb back at me, as if saying,
Can you believe that?
But I didn't get the joke: Gardens was our big rival in football, a sport we tended to dominate, but they killed us almost every year in soccer. A handful of kids from both teams at both schools went to college on athletic scholarships each year; that was how most of the few students headed to college at all from either school managed to make it there.

—Oh cool, I said. I went to Hialeah Lakes.

—
Wow
, she said, nodding. Yikes, she said. That's
rough
.

She lowered her head and nodded harder, waiting for me to nod along with her. A rectangle of light came in through the van's window and scrolled over her face, turning her skin greenish, and I thought maybe she was lying about going to Gardens, or that maybe I was wrong and she wasn't some kind of Latina like me.

—Were you crying just now? I said, crossing my arms over my chest. Because it looked like you were crying.

The woman let her hand drop from the seatback, and I added, I'm just saying.

—I'm, she said, I was being weird is all. She laughed a little and said, I just flew in from Michigan. I'm in my last year of a postdoc there.

Then she rolled her eyes, as if the definition of
postdoc
were written in the air above us. I lifted my chin and squinted, but she didn't say more, and I tried not to think about how much I still didn't know, even after almost a whole semester away at a real school. The rectangle of light slinked over the seat and found my arms, passing over them and turning them the same green.

—I'm in college, I said. I'm a freshman. I came home for the break but my flight got screwed up yesterday.

She showed me all her teeth again, but her lips slipped over them in a more natural way. She asked where I went to school, but I flapped my hand in front of my face, like the question smelled foul. I didn't expect her to know the school. My boyfriend Omar had never even heard of it before I'd applied, and my own sister had trouble remembering the name, though she blamed
me
for that, since I'd applied to Rawlings without my family knowing about it and—as a necessary result of that—without their permission.

—It's this school in the middle of nowhere called Rawlings.

—Rawlings
College
? she said more loudly than anything she'd said so far.
That's
where you go? As in, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country?
That
Rawlings?

I couldn't believe she'd heard of it. I couldn't believe she knew to say
liberal arts.
My surprise at this almost matched hers. She shook off her open mouth and said, Hold up, so you must be a super-genius.

—Not really, I said. But yeah, it's – it's like a
really
good school.

We both nodded, and I felt ready to brag a little, to tell her how a few weeks earlier the school had thrown an all-day party for everyone on campus—even us new students—under this huge tent on the quad to celebrate this one professor winning the Nobel Prize in economics. The school had sprung for hundreds of these goofy caps with part of the prize-winning theorem (which meant nothing to most of us, as several of the speakers that day joked) printed on the front and the words
'
99
NOBEL BASH
on the back. After eating my weight in free fancy cheese, I got up the courage to ask the now-super-famous professor to sign my cap's bill, and that request made him chuckle. (I feel like a movie star! I didn't even bring a suitable pen! he said.) Then, after we located a suitable pen, his hand shook as he signed and he accidentally smudged the signature. To the smudge he said, Oh drat!, which apparently meant he felt badly enough about it to find me
another
free cap, and he signed that one, too. I wanted to say how later, I caught him
offering
to sign other people's caps, and I couldn't believe
I'd
given a Nobel Prize winner an idea. Maybe I'd even tell her—since she was from home, since she'd gone to Gardens—that eating all that cheese had backed me up like nothing I'd ever felt, and so I didn't shit for two days, but neither did my roommate (she'd dragged me to the celebration in the first place but had disappeared by an ice-cream bar I didn't find until I was already too packed with cheese), and how just as my roommate confessed her no-shitting to me, she ripped this huge fart—the first of hers I ever heard despite us living in the same rectangle for almost two months—and I laughed so hard I fell out of my desk chair and onto the floor with a fart of my own.

But this woman, before I could think of how to best tell the story, put her hand over my hand and set her face in this serious way, her eyeliner thick under her bottom lashes, and said, It's
not
a really good school. It's a
fantastic
school. Congratulations.

I shrugged, said thanks, and tried to slide my hand out from under hers, but she grabbed it and said, No, really. Getting in there is a huge freaking deal. You should be proud as hell. And from a school like
Lakes
? Holy shit, girl.

Outside, the houses whizzing by had bars over their windows, which meant we were closing in on my old neighborhood, but those bars—it's like I'd never noticed them before. I shrugged again and looked down at the floor; it was covered in clear candy wrappers. I imagined someone here before me, on this same route, eating a thousand mints, readying her breath for whomever she'd come to Miami to see.

The woman lifted my hand off the seat and said, You know that, right? That you should be proud?

Her mouth was shut, the muscles on the sides of her jaw flaring in and out. I finally pulled my hand away, balled it into a fist. I said, Yeah, I know.

She said, Good, and slid her palms along the sides of her head to check the gelled-back precision of her hair. I shifted my feet and the wrappers crunched beneath them. Water stains climbed the canvas of my sneakers, where winter slush had soaked in and dried and soaked in again. They were ruined, and that officially made them my winter shoes.

—How are you doing in your classes so far? she asked.

I looked up from the floor and caught the driver staring at us in his mirror. He yelled, Hialeah! And since I knew that wasn't really my neighborhood anymore, and since this woman's question proved she didn't want my Nobel Bash story, I figured I'd try out how it felt to stop the game of me being this credit to where I was from, this beginning of a success story, and instead, finally admit the truth to someone who maybe would understand.

—I'm doing bad, I said.

Her thick eyebrows slid together and they somehow looked
more
perfect like that. She leaned her face forward, closing her eyes and crinkling the skin around them in a pained way that I thought said,
Go on, tell me, I'm listening
.

I said, I'm doing
really
bad, actually. I don't know why it's so hard. Everyone else seems to just
know
stuff and I – I
don't
. It's like I'm the only one. I don't even know how I got in sometimes, that's how hard it is, how much I'm messing up. So yeah. It's going really, really bad for me.

—Oh god, the woman said. It's – what's your name?

—Lizet, I told her.

—Lizet, she said. It's bad-
lee
.

—What?

—You're doing
badly.
Not bad. Bad-
lee.

I sat there with my mouth open, possibly making a dumb sound with the air seeping out from it. I could taste it then: my bad breath, the breath of someone who'd kept her mouth shut all day.

I blamed the new sting in my eyes on this breath and said, Right, okay.

Out the van's window, we passed my old high school, which hadn't changed since the summer: the eight-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped fence surrounding the city block on which it stood, the windowless two-story facade with the words
HIALEAH LAKES
painted on it in all capital letters, the whole building the same gray as the concrete surrounding it. It was the gray of the winter I'd just left, and I had to touch the window again to make sure it wasn't freezing. When my hand felt the warm glass, I let it rest there, my fingers a barricade sparing me from the next block we sped past, then the next block, with the mini-mall that housed the My Dreams II Banquet Hall, where, if we could've afforded the formal party, my Quinces would've probably happened. I tried to remember who I'd been friends with at fourteen, before Omar came along and replaced them: which girls or boys I would've asked to make up the fourteen couples of my quinceañera court. I chanted their names, first and last, in my head and over the word
badly
as each couple added themselves to the list; I invented last names where I no longer remembered them, all to distract myself from the salty water brimming at the edges of my vision.

—Oh no, the woman finally whispered. No, don't – I didn't mean it like –

—¿Señora? the driver said.

The van stopped.

—Shit, she said. This is me.

She dug around in her purse and said, Here, take this. I want you to e-mail me.

She held out a little card—a business card. I took it from her, making sure my thumb covered her name. The seal for the Michigan school took up the whole left side, the side my thumb couldn't cover.

—I know you don't know me, she said. But I'm – I'm a resource. We're two girls from Hialeah who left for, you know, better things, right? More opportunities? And I want to help you any way I can. We have to stick together, right?

That same square smile, wrecking her face. The driver unbuckled his seatbelt. He turned on the blinkers—the tinny, rhythmic tick of them flashing on and off behind me—and got out of the van. I nodded.

—Awesome, she said. Cool. OK, well.

She scooted her purse along the bench, pushing it ahead of her like a boulder. As she slid open the door, the humidity outside flooded the van again, and it hit me from behind too, as the driver opened the back doors to get her suitcase. I felt my bangs curl, but her hair stayed perfect, the gel doing its job. She hopped down, hauled her purse to her hip, then straightened out her pants and blazer, tugging at the wrinkles as she stood just outside the van. She leaned a little away from the purse, struggling to keep it balanced on her shoulder and looking crooked as a result. The wheels of her suitcase dragged against the asphalt outside. The grating sound they made moved away from me, ended when the driver placed the bag by her side.

—Gracias, she said to the driver, who'd already left her there and was on his way back to the van. She watched me for a little too long, her eyes zipping around my face like she was trying to memorize me sitting on that vinyl bench before sliding the door between us closed. She inhaled then, so hard that her shoulders rose, the purse slipping.

—Please e-mail me, she said. Do it, OK?

She shifted the purse to her other shoulder, said, Good luck with everything.

I got the feeling she really meant it, like she was saying this to some old version of herself, but when she shut the door—not hard enough; she had to open it again and then slam it—I took the card in my other hand and ripped it in half, then ripped it in half again, then again and again, until the feathery edges of the paper wouldn't let me pull them apart any more. I let this bland confetti, dampened by the sweat on my palms, slip piece by piece down to the van's floor, where they nestled in with the mint wrappers left by someone before me, someone who'd done a better job of planning for this last leg of their trip. I wished for a piece of gum, for something to bring the saliva back to my mouth. I knew I had nothing, but I tugged my backpack closer to me and looked anyway, hoping some other version of myself had thought ahead.

The driver—after shouting, ¡La Pequeña Habana! over his shoulder to me, his final passenger—left me alone in the back. I eventually found a stub of an eyeliner pencil at the bottom of my bag's front pocket, and I used my reflection in the now-dark window to line my eyes as best I could, the blocks of my old neighborhood blurring by. I also found an unwrapped cough drop, and after smudging the lint off with my thumb and blowing on it a few times, I decided to pretend I knew how it got there in the first place and tossed it in my mouth. It was so old that it didn't taste like anything, and little traces of the paper wrapper once protecting it somehow materialized and scratched around in my mouth like bits of sand. I swirled this almost-something for a long while, tricked myself into believing the cough drop hadn't yet totally disappeared.

 

4

I DIDN'T RECOGNIZE MY MOM'S
new building in the dark, couldn't remember right away which window on the second floor was hers: I'd lived there only three days before leaving for Rawlings. The complex was a brighter peach than my memory had made it over to be, an orangey hue that too closely matched the Spanish tiles curving their way across the flat roof. A reggaetón remix blasted from the open windows on the building's first floor, the noise giving me permission to ignore the male neighbors leaning against the chain-link fence that separated a block's worth of sidewalk-hugging grass into lawns. On my last day there, Mami, Leidy, Omar, and I had each pulled a stuffed suitcase down the stairs; now I replayed each turn we'd taken in reverse, decided on a window, and tugged my bag up the too-tall front steps of the building's entrance.