6
THE STREET IN FRONT OF OUR BUILDING buzzed all morning, the sidewalks overflowing with crowds that trampled each yard’s overgrown grass. From our apartment window, the rally below looked more like spectators camped out for a choice spot along a parade route than an actual rally. Some people had salsa or talk radio playing out of boom boxes. Some sat on coolers and handed out water and cans of soda whenever a new person they seemed to know walked up. Wisps of conversations reached our window from the street: such-and-such reporter had said something about Ariel going back by the end of the weekend, so clearly she was a communist. The people down there, on the street, all nodded their heads and said, Claro que sí. I leaned forward more, Leidy, Dante, and the TV behind me, my cheek touching the window screen, and looked up and over the blocks of houses and palm trees spreading far out like stripes parallel to the horizon. It was gorgeous outside—bright white sky, not so hot you could kill someone, not so humid, almost a breeze—the beginning of winter in Miami. I couldn’t believe I had to go back to the gloomy half-lit days of upstate New York, to snow turned to dirt-slush pushed into every corner for miles, to inescapable cold everywhere you turned. Before ever seeing snow, I thought that even if I couldn’t bear the cold that came with it, its novelty would carry me through at least four years, no problem. I’d actually been eager for it to come after the surprise of fall colors wore off, after maybe half the leaves on campus ended up pressed between the pages of my textbooks. Once those were gone, everything looked stark enough that I asked Jillian one night, while she studied on her bed and I sat at my desk highlighting pretty much every sentence in my chemistry textbook, when the snow would show up and cover it all.
She pulled her headphones off and said, My brother told me that one year, they had snow here on Halloween. Three, four feet overnight. He said all the girls in slutty costumes couldn’t stand to put coats on over them, and like a dozen stupid bitches ended up in the hospital due to exposure.
—Wait, you have a brother? I said, and she gasped and smacked her book with both her hands, then pointed with a He-llo? to a photo of her and a guy much taller than her, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, her in a bikini top and shorts and him in a tuxedo. I’d assumed he was a boyfriend she only talked to when I wasn’t around, the way I did with Omar. I asked if he’d gone to Rawlings too, and she told me no, he went to another college—one I’d never heard of but that was just a few hours away by bus, and so he’d come to Rawlings to visit a high school friend a few years earlier. He was already a senior, she said.
—I can’t believe you’ve never even seen snow in real life, she said.
I looked out our window and tried to imagine a snow-friendly sexy Halloween costume. Sexy astronaut? Sexy female polar bear?
—I can’t believe you didn’t know I had a brother, she said a few seconds later. That’s weird, I thought you knew that.
A door slammed in the hallway and a male voice laughed.
I eventually said to my reflection in the window, It’s not that weird. You don’t know I have a baby nephew, do you? His name is – my sister named him Dante.
I’d imagined this moment already—the moment where I’d explain Dante’s name to my roommate—back when Jillian was just an idea, just a name printed in a letter from the school. I’d planned to tell the theoretical Jillian that Leidy named Dante after the famous writer, a name she came across when she looked over my shoulder at something I happened to be reading (not for school, just for fun, I’d say). This was nowhere near the truth: Leidy said the name Dante was super original and that’s the only reason she gave anyone for picking it. At the sonogram appointment where we learned the baby’s sex—I’d skipped sixth period to drive her—the tech had swirled a finger over the screen and said to us, There’s the penis, and Leidy was relieved: she thought Roly would be more likely to forgive her if she gave him a son instead of a daughter. I was relieved, too, since by then I’d learned about history’s Dante, and I could tell people, when they asked, that she took the name from that.