Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  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.

  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.