A NOW-DEFUNCT AIRLINE IS MOSTLY responsible for giving me and Ariel Hernandez the same day as our Miami Homecoming: Thanksgiving 1999. He was a five-year-old Cuban boy rescued from a broken raft by fishermen earlier that day after watching everyone else on the raft, including his mother, die; I arrived that night, a day later than I’d planned because I underestimated, having never done it, just how chaotic flying on the busiest travel day of the year could be. And even though we each eventually set foot in the city our families called home, no one was expecting either of us to show up the way we did.
That first flight back home from college—which, I should confess, was only my second time ever on an airplane—started off badly enough that when I got to Pittsburgh and learned my connecting flight was overbooked, I should’ve asked the airline to just send me back to New York for Thanksgiving. Staying on campus for the holiday was the original plan anyway, the one designed by my dad months earlier, before he’d moved out, the plan my mother and sister thought I was following: I was not supposed to come home for Thanksgiving. It was not in the budget, or el college lay-a-way, or any of the other euphemisms my dad had used to describe how we would finance the astronomically expensive education I was mostly failing to receive. The four thousand dollars a year my family was initially expected to pay toward my tuition at Rawlings College seemed to my dad (and to me, back then) an insane amount of money, a figure almost as ludicrous as the forty-five thousand dollars Rawlings expected from each of its students every year. The aid package later approved after our appeal—the one with my parents’ marital status revised to say “Formally Separated” and my dad’s address changed to “Unknown”—brought the amount down to something me and my mom together could earn, a flight to upstate New York and another back in December being all our final budget said we could afford. But we hadn’t taken into account something called federal work-study—a mysterious line in my aid package that I thought had something to do with working for the government or joining the army, and so I’d ignored it, hoping it would disappear. I got to campus for freshman orientation, marched into the aid office to pay my fall bill in person with a check my mom had written out three days before in tense, tired script, and learned from my aid officer that work-study was just a job on campus—an easy one, usually. Nothing to do with the government at all. I was one of the very first students to come in, which meant I had my pick of jobs, and so that fall, I’d spent the hours between classes working in the library, searching bags for mistakenly stolen books when the sensors hugging the doors went off. Which is how I’d managed to save enough for the Thanksgiving ticket and the shuttle ride to my mom and sister’s new-to-me address.