Make Your Home Among Strangers

—Trace, for god’s sake stop, Caroline yelled.

 

I know Tracy meant Ariel’s mother. But the proof that she meant me too was on the TV screen. And I don’t know why, but Caroline was crying, and all I got to yell at Tracy as the other girl pushed her down the hallway and away from us was, Who the fuck are you? Say that to me again! I fucking dare you, come say it to me again!

 

I pulled and pulled then gave up. Once we were both breathing normally again and she saw I wouldn’t chase them, Caroline let me go.

 

She wiped her face and said, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have touched you.

 

Her calm voice made me feel so much shame. What had my yelling and my stepping on boots like in some fight at a Hialeah dollar movie theater made her think of me, of any Cuban she’d ever meet from here on out? Me and my mother on television, both of us spectacles, the two of us and the rest of the crowd a big enough sample size. My face began to burn, my eyes too, and as Caroline turned to shut off the TV, now blaring with news of a shooting at a Miami-area Chili’s thought to be connected to the Ariel situation, I swooped down for my book, then sprinted to the stairwell, ignoring her Liz, wait! and taking two steps at a time up to my floor, barreling toward my room, where I grabbed the phone, panting and dialing our house number with my thumb.

 

Of course it just rang and rang and rang, and I pictured Leidy holding Dante in a crowd behind the cameraman, keeping the knowledge of whatever the hell Madres Para Justicia was all to herself. My mom was lying to the whole country, was roping me into these lies, and me being far away had let that happen. I was supposed to call about the internship, but I couldn’t now: leaving home had been a mistake—one I needed to undo as best I could. When I slammed the phone back in the cradle as the answering machine beeped on, I saw my hand was trembling but didn’t feel it doing that—the hand seemed not mine. I picked up the receiver again, this time to call my dad. The day I’d seen him at Latin American Grill, he couldn’t even talk about my mom, couldn’t even bring himself to properly warn me. His phone would ring in that Hialeah apartment, and Rafael would reach for it, and my dad would say, Just leave it, don’t answer, I don’t want to hear it—not guessing that the person calling was me, trying to talk to him, trying to segue from what we’d seen on TV to my own news, the internship, which seemed silly and unimportant now. So a teacher, a weird one, thought I was a good student and wanted to work with me: Who the hell cared? It was garbage, a frivolous reason to miss summer at home, another selfish mistake.

 

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