*
It would make more sense if what happened a day later had happened right away instead, but the truth is I had all afternoon and the whole night to let it sink in, to fret and fantasize about my summer in the faraway fantasyland of California. I showed the folder to Jillian when I got to our room, and after saying No fucking way! to every page—the loudest one coming when she saw the stipend—she congratulated me before grabbing her toothbrush and putting it in her book bag; she wanted to have it with her, she said, in case she ended up pulling another all-nighter with an All-Nighter, a joke we’d said so many times it had lost all its humor then circled back and regained it. She left for her afternoon class, and I sat in my chair, debating which parent to call first.
I couldn’t make myself pick up the phone though. I wanted to call Jillian’s parents. Her parents—her parents—would know what to say if she called with news like this. Oh my god, honey! That’s fantastic! When does it start? Maybe we can come out at the end and make a vacation out of it. Oh, sweetheart, what an opportunity! We’re thrilled for you, so thrilled.… It was a good thing, a happy thing, something that meant their daughter was performing at a very high level. Jillian would never have to convince them of that. They recognized good news when they heard it.
I decided to hold the offer in me for one night, to let the invitation and what it meant be just mine. The moment I told either parent would be the moment the news started to erode, to be questioned and confused. I wanted to be selfish and keep it, let it run around unencumbered through one night’s dreams. To put off for one day the fight toward not a Yes—I would never get a Yes—but toward the answer that got me to Rawlings: Fine, Lizet, do whatever the hell you want.
But I should’ve at least called my father that day. It turned out to be the only night when the internship offer stood even a chance of being received as good news, the last night before things got much, much harder.
28
THE WALK BACK TO MY ROOM from my Spanish section the next morning brought with it a phenomenon for which very few people or things—no ice-cream-infused orientation week assembly, no e-mail blast from the Office of Diversity Affairs, and certainly in my case no big sister or older cousin—could’ve prepared me. Later, I’d see it: Of course my not calling home had a flip side. Home, it turned out, was just as reluctant to talk to me. And much later, I’d learn from other first-in-the-family-to-go-to-college people—Jaquelin, other friends I made and sometimes lost—that I wasn’t alone, that at some point in our time away, we’d all had our moment of familial reckoning: one friend’s moment happening over a winter break, his first morning back home, when he woke up in his apartment and found his mother still there, finding out then that weeks and weeks earlier, she’d been laid off and was still not working; another friend’s moment coming in an airport, when she saw, next to her mother, her father waiting for her and in a wheelchair—a month earlier he’d fallen off a roof at work and would maybe never walk again. Why didn’t you tell us? we all asked, only to be told, You couldn’t do anything from up there, or, We didn’t want you to worry. Maybe they tried, You’re always so stressed, so busy. And we each heard these excuses exactly the way we thought we were meant to hear them, with a confused rage pounding in our ears that translated their words into brand-new hurt: Like you even care about who you left behind. Like you didn’t decide to abandon us first. We never admitted that we’d needed to believe them when they told us nothing was wrong.
I say this only as a long-overdue explanation to Caroline, Tracy, and the other two white girls—should they ever read this—who stood in the TV lounge as I passed it on my way back from class that morning. I was headed down the hall to my room, practicing in my head what I’d say to my parents to explain the internship, when I heard on the midmorning news show surging from the screen those girls watched a story about Ariel Hernandez. The last thing I expected to hear in the hallway was that voice, then to see, on that television screen, my mother’s face.