Make Your Home Among Strangers

During my first weeks away, not wanting to admit to my mom or sister what a huge mistake going so far and to such a hard school felt like sometimes, he was the only person I’d confessed my homesickness to—and he had my sad list of Reasons Why I Shouldn’t Be There memorized by that point. But instead of telling me the usual (You are smart enough, Lizet; no, it’s better being away from your sister and the baby right now, she needs to figure her shit out; you won’t freeze to death, stop exaggerating), he presented the list back to me as evidence, used it against me. I sat on my end, silent, letting him pelt me with everything I’d cried about since August, each of my unspoken retorts sounding childish as they scrolled through my head (I don’t hate Jillian; I’m not the stupidest person in all my classes; not every single person on this campus is rich). As that new, defensive list formed inside of me, I decided I needed to start thinking of Omar as my high school boyfriend, leftovers from the old me. I loved Omar, but his reaction told me that he thought of my going away for school as an experiment that could fail, or an adventure that I might, at any time, give up. You can always just come home, he kept saying, but after that conversation, I heard it as a threat.

 

The night before my very first trip on an airplane, in the hours before I left for New York late that summer—after the too-short hug and too-short talk with my dad in front of my mom’s building, after I promised my mom that everything needing to be packed was packed, so yes, I felt fine going out for a little while—me and Omar were together together for one of the last times I let myself remember. We were parked in a new spot, one we’d never tried out before, and we were kicking ourselves for thinking of it so late, after a year of wasting gas while we argued the pros and cons of every other spot on our list of places one could park and fuck. Omar had made the trek from Hialeah to Little Havana to get me—had come into the apartment wearing baggy jeans and this gray V-neck shirt that stretched tight across his chest and shoulders, and then moved some heavy boxes around for my mom without so much as sweating, Leidy gawking at him, then at me for being such an idiot to leave such a perfect guy, one who obviously dismissed the fact that I wasn’t on the same level of hotness as him—and from there we went north, up through Miami Lakes, to a golf course we’d passed a million times, with its big islands of grass and spats of sand and palm trees and some other trees that didn’t belong in Miami.

 

It was my idea—we were both trying to save money, so neither of us offered to cover the cost of a couple hours at a hotel by the airport—and I wasn’t sure it was a good one until we made the familiar climb into the Integra’s backseat: I looked down at Omar’s jeans to tear off his belt and realized we were shrouded in such darkness I couldn’t see the buckle. We couldn’t believe it was as easy as just driving over a curb and onto the grass, out to the darkest place—the very middle of the course, behind the trunks of banyan trees whose branches spilled back to the ground to make more trunks. We couldn’t believe that we could just turn off the headlights and become invisible. We couldn’t believe there were no cops around. Cops were everywhere we went—our school’s parking lot, the back road by the abandoned overpass, behind the Sedano’s Market some gangbanger guys Omar sort of knew had tried to burn down. Here were most Saturday nights that year: Omar would come, and I’d be just about to, I thought, and we’d hear the thud thud thud of a flashlight against the rear window and see, behind me, a beam of light searching for my bare ass. It got so predictable that I joked that Omar was telling the cops where we’d be and then flashing them some signal when he was done and it was time to bust us—why else were they not giving us tickets for public indecency like they said they would with every next time? Omar didn’t laugh at my joke though. Omar didn’t think of me as particularly funny.

 

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