—Perfect, Mami said, smiling. I need to be down the street by one for an Ariel meeting. You think I’ll make it back in time?
I almost said no, almost gave her the real time. My bad, I could’ve said, I had it mixed up in my head. But if I kept it from her, then that was me letting her go to that meeting—granting her that—rather than her picking the meeting over me. Somehow that made me feel better about the money I’d wasted to be there.
I said, You should be more than fine.
She squeezed my hand, then let it go and reached for my plate. With her fingers she picked the meat from my rice mess, placing each bite in her mouth as she looked out the living room window. Her shoulders lifted with a heavy breath, but her jaw kept grinding.
—This is such an exciting time, Mami said, mouth full, toward the night.
—I know, I said, pretending she meant it for me.
8
OMAR AND I HAD BEEN a couple since the summer before my junior year. He graduated a year ahead of me, was taking one or two classes a semester at Miami Dade while working part-time at Pep Boys, which is where he spent most of his paycheck in an effort to make his Acura Integra the most-tricked-out-est Integra in all of Hialeah. Though he never talked much about a future that was more than a year or two away, he had, the night after my own high school graduation, wondered out loud about getting engaged, and I’d made us both laugh by saying, You’d be smart to put this on lockdown. But I left for Rawlings without that promise, not wanting to be the one to bring it up again and thinking—because he’d admitted to being proud of me for going—that we were headed that way no matter what. I’d drifted away from that kind of certainty since leaving, and I talked with him less and less about school in the two weeks since he’d made me admit, when I started to sob on the phone the night after the meeting with my writing seminar professor, what was really freaking me out (another set of Holy Shits and Damns—he barely said anything else, and I started to suspect he didn’t understand how seriously a place like Rawlings took honor-code violations). But my decision to break up with him came after our most recent phone call, when I explained why I was so nervous about the hearing: that it could result in me being kicked out of school. He’d stayed quiet on the line and then finally said, That ain’t the worse thing, right?
I only managed to say, The worst thing, Omar. And yes. It would be.
You’re so dramatic, he said back. Then crackly sounds like he was breathing right into the phone. You don’t even like it there, he said.