—I really don’t want to talk about it, I said.
Out the rear windshield, white and red lights blurred on the expressway, unsteady beams of color. When I was a little girl trapped in the backseat on our way home from visiting one of many aunts in other parts of Miami, I’d relax my focus on the road ahead and let the red on our side of the median blur into a torrent of blood, the white on the other side—coming toward me—a smear of lightning. I always wished we were going the other way, not realizing that nothing about my view would change with that flip.
—You know, you’re not the first person ever whose family hates each other, he said.
—Shut up, they’ve always hated each other, that’s not it.
But I didn’t move away from him. I just kept staring out the back windshield.
That first semester of college, as I grew more and more impatient during phone conversations with Omar, I started to tell anyone who asked that Omar was a monster. He was an animal—more like an animal than a human. It seemed like what other people wanted to hear. To them, Omar looked the part, with his earrings and the close-cut hair and goatee, the wide shoulders, the dark brows, him leaning on his Integra and throwing a sideways peace sign in almost every photo of him I owned. The girls on my floor would ask, Is that a gang sign? and instead of saying, No, you’re an idiot, I said, Maybe, who knows with Omar? Other girls would feel bad for me and claim they understood: the girl who’d made everyone hot chocolate, Caroline, even went so far as to mention she’d read The House on Mango Street in AP English. She said she knew about the kinds of relationships that plagued my community, had nodded in a solemn way when I told her yes, Omar could be rough. Part of me was angry that they were half right: my parents did have a version of that relationship, but it wasn’t at all accurate for me and Omar. Still, I was happy to have something to add to those late nights in the dorm’s common room when I was otherwise quiet, to be included in conversations even if I didn’t totally understand the part I was playing. When everyone around you thinks they already know what your life is like, it’s easier to play in to that idea—it was easier for me to make Omar sound like a psycho papi chulo who wanted to control me. At the very least, it made trying to make friends simpler than it would’ve been had I tried to be a more accurate version of myself.
The truth is, I had to abandon some part of myself to leave Omar in Miami. I had to adopt some twisted interpretation of everything that came before college to make my leaving him the right thing—I had to believe the story I made up for other people. A few weeks into the fall, I stayed up late one night listening to Jillian and half a dozen other girls like Tracy and Caroline talk in our room. I’d been invited by default, since I’d already climbed into bed before the first set of roommates from down the hall came in with an oversized bowl of popcorn. But then these people I knew only from our brief, shower-caddy-toting bathroom hellos sprawled across the foot of my bed like we were really friends. And even though the next morning wouldn’t bring anything more or less friendly when we skimmed shoulders at the bank of sinks, I listened hard to their stories, to what they said about the boyfriends they’d broken up with just before coming to Rawlings. How their mothers all had stories like theirs, how their mothers had all met their fathers in college after having wasted tears on some high school boy that so wasn’t right for them: I understood that the worst “best” thing that ever happened to my mother was falling for my dad. For your heart to screw over your brain—that’s the worst best thing that could happen to anyone.
Omar tugged my hair and said, Everything’s gonna be fine, El.
—I know, I said.
—I’ll come out next semester for sure, once I can save a little, he said.
—I know.
—And we’ve got three weeks at Christmas, he said.
—Right.
He held both my shoulders in his rough hands. Do you want to go? he said.
I didn’t think he meant the golf course. I thought he meant to New York, so I said, Yeah, of course. I think I’m ready.
He blinked twice like he’d just placed contact lenses in his eyes. Then he slid his hands down to my hips and tossed me onto the seat next to him. I bounced there and he reached for his boxers on the floor.
—What? I said, pulling my knees up to my chest.
—You’re ready, huh? He jerked his shorts up his hairy legs, found his jeans and belt, his shirt. You think you’re the guy? Like, I got mine, so peace, I’m out. Then fuck you, bro.
I held up my hands to him, palms out, and said, Okay, what?
He pulled his shirt over his head.