The third girl, now the farthest from me, said in too cute a voice, I just feel like he needs to go back, get back to his life, to his school and stuff.
—You feel like? Let me ask you, what kind of life do you think he’s gonna have in Cuba? Tell me. You really think he can go back? He can go back to school and say to the kid next to him, Oh in Miami I had a puppy and I ate steak every day and we had soap and toilet paper and freedom of speech and the air inside buildings was freezing cold? You really think Castro’s gonna allow a liability like that on his island? In a place where the news is censored? You’re telling me that can really happen? After how good he’s had it here?
They watched me with steady faces, with thin lips parted, as if dealing with someone holding a knife to their own wrist. I said, That kid’s life in Cuba won’t be worse because it’s Cuba. It’ll be worse because he knows what life is like here.
—He doesn’t belong here, Tracy huffed. Just because he got a taste of the good life –
But Caroline raised a hand up to her and said, No, Tracy. She looked at the TV, and I wondered if she remembered how she and Tracy and Jillian had left me behind the night of the dance party before the last week of classes, if she saw this moment as karmic payback for leaving without me. She said slowly, her hand still holding off Tracy, If that’s all true, then once he’s back in Cuba, if something happens, can’t his family just call the police?
I had no words. I smacked my own cheeks. I yelled, It’s a communist country. The police? The police!
She tugged her vest down at the waist and looked crushed. Her attempt to manage my anger was over, and behind me I heard my mom say, Of course this is personal, of course we are taking it personally.
—But they showed his desk in Cuba, the quiet girl half whispered. His classmates are saving it for him. It had the saddest sign on it.
Tracy whispered to no one and all of us: Their news is not censored.
—How do you know that they can’t call the police? Caroline said.
I said what I thought would convince them: I’m from there! Did you forget that’s my mom on the fucking television? Besides, look it up! Look up communism and fucking learn something.
Tracy said, Wait, you’re from Cuba?
—Trace, leave it alone, Caroline said as I pushed right up to Tracy’s face.
—Yes, I blurted, because I was tired of saying no and then explaining that maybe it didn’t matter. I said, I left when I was a baby. I still have family there and they all want out. And yeah, their news is fucking censored. You get arrested for speaking out against the government, or for being gay or trying to buy meat, so yeah, go smile at your fucking Che Guevara poster like you know some shit, you stupid bitch.
I spat all this out, my fury somehow making my mom’s new version of herself a fact: I’d made myself the True Daughter of Dusty Tits. This invention was the only way to explain the woman behind me to the women in front of me. It was the only thing I could do from so far away. In the silence surrounding their shock—of course calling this white girl a bitch had been the thing to produce shock—I heard my mother say, How can we deny her wish for her son to have a better life? How can we deny him his inheritance?
Tracy tried to sidestep my body and said to the others, You guys, she’s not really from Cuba. Jillian told me she’s not.
—What people have to understand, said my mom’s voice, swelling and cracking with grief now, is that this is our story, too. I came here with my girls the same way Ariel’s mother came with him. Ariel’s story is my story, the story of my daughters.
I took the help; I even wanted it. I got between Tracy’s blank face and the screen and said, You’re a fucking idiot.
She looked at my hands then, which I’d raised between us. I pulled them closer to my body and, because it came to this or hitting her, I said, Ariel’s mother died to get him here. Do you realize that?
I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but I kept talking.
—She died, I said. His mother drowned trying to get him here. That doesn’t mean anything to you? That sacrifice?
Tracy nodded. Her hands checked the position of her headband. She jutted one foot out in front of her, twisted her lips in this ugly way, pointed with her whole hand at the TV. Through her smirk she said, So what did your mother sacrifice for you to get here? For your taste of the good life?
The quiet girl gasped, Jesus, Tracy as Caroline came up behind me before I could do anything, hooked her hands on my elbows in a way that was so assured, so soft but strong, that they trapped me. I pulled with everything against her, couldn’t believe how much power her small frame held.
Tracy said, None of this would be happening if she’d stayed put.