More people came down, from our floor and other floors. I ran back up to get socks and real shoes, threw a pair of baggy jeans over my soaked pajama pants, and returned to a full-on snowball fight. Later, amid Jillian and Tracy and other people I’d seen all fall trekking in and out of the bathroom in nothing but towels but whose last names I didn’t know, we collectively decided to skip class without saying this directly. One girl, a brunette named Caroline in a lilac vest and sweatpants, made hot chocolate for everyone using milk and not powder but actual chocolate, and we all sat in the hallway outside our rooms drinking it. I had the idea to call Leidy and my mom and tell them what it was like, my first time in the snow, but I didn’t want to be the only one to get up and leave, the first to say Thank you but and give back the mug. So I wrapped my fingers around it even tighter, let them get warmer.
A day later, during Jillian’s twice-weekly night class, I told my mom and Leidy about the snow over the phone. I almost blew the surprise of the Thanksgiving trip when I said I was thinking of getting a cooler so I could bring some down so they could see for themselves, saying at Christmas just in time to cover it up. Mami asked if I had any pictures of me in the snow and I said yes, someone took some and that I’d track them down. But I still hadn’t done that, thinking if Tracy wanted me to have them, she’d come to me.
Now that I was back home, I felt bad for not bringing any evidence along—no props to show my sister to make talking to her easier. I sipped the coffee Mami left for me and asked Leidy about Dante’s daycare, about her hours at the salon, about nothing that mattered as much as what I wanted to ask her: if she’d seen or spoken to our dad. I didn’t know how to bring him up. I hadn’t heard from him since the night before I left for New York, when he’d stood outside my mom’s building, hands in his pockets, and asked if I needed anything. I’d only shrugged and said no. After a few other vague yes-or-no questions (You know where you’re going? You know how to get there? You sure?), we hugged for a second too short and he left in his work van for his new place. He didn’t even have a phone there yet. He probably had one by now, but I didn’t have the number. I wondered if Leidy did and just had not given it to me any of the times I’d called home. I’d tried his work number when I made it to campus, to let him know I’d survived my first plane ride, but I got an answering machine. I called it again after moving in, meeting my roommate, and setting up my side of our room—things I’d imagined both my parents helping me do, though I don’t know how we would’ve afforded their tickets or if they would’ve left Leidy alone with a five-month-old Dante—but that time, it just rang and rang. After that, tired of wasting phone card minutes on answering machines, I left it up to him to call.
I wanted to ask Leidy if he’d been ignoring her the same way he was ignoring me, but we hadn’t so much as uttered Papi since the night before I left for New York: we still blamed him for our move. Our home was only in his name—something neither of us knew before that June when, a couple weeks after he moved out, some woman from the bank came on his behalf and told my mom he wanted to put the house up for sale. My mom was too confused and proud to fight it, and by the end of July, the house belonged to some new family—another set of Cubans. For three weeks we stayed with my tía Zoila, with Roly not even hinting that Leidy and Dante could stay with him and his parents, and the three of us plus Omar moved everything from Zoila’s to Little Havana just before I left for school. And because the second move of my life came so close to the first, I just missed the house; I didn’t really get to say goodbye to it, didn’t even know how to do that, since it was the only place I remembered ever living.
Leidy bounced Dante in her lap as she watched the TV. She rubbed his back and said, I freaking hate this neighborhood. It’s so freaking reffy, everyone got here like five minutes ago from some island.
Dante shoved his fist in his mouth, muffling his own noise. I let the blinds clink back into place and turned around, settled onto the couch next to them.
—So how’s school going finally? Leidy said.
—It’s okay, I said. I swallowed and rubbed at the sore spot on my neck, feeling for the old home of the strands twisted up in Mami’s ring the night before. I said, It’s way harder than I thought it would be.
—Ms. Smarty Pants can’t hack it, huh?
She flipped back to the news, where people in front of a chain-link fence a block away gave speeches. She tried to raise the volume, smacking the remote a few times to get it to register, and I was grateful for her distraction, since it meant she missed my recoiling at what she’d said. In my mind, I called her a stupid bitch, then pushed my anger into pity—of course she’d say that, she had no idea what college classes were like. She’d probably never know. I imagined myself paying her utility bill someday, or her calling me to help Dante with his biology homework. It wasn’t fair, but it helped me answer her.
—I can hack it. It’s just that Hialeah Lakes was a joke compared to the work I gotta do now.
She returned to the talk show, where a woman’s hands were lost in another woman’s hair. I let Dante wrap his hand around my finger and said in a voice that sounded a bit too high, So have you talked to Roly?
She nodded to the TV.
—He came by here to see Dante last week. He brought him that.
She gestured to a toy on the floor, the one with colored panels that I’d spent the morning showing him, singing along with the songs it played.
—It’s stupid, she said. He’s too little for it still.