I didn’t even stop to take off my shoes. I stood on Jillian’s rug—I’d clean up any mud later—and unzipped my jacket, then the mesh pocket, let the other envelopes drop to the floor, and opened the Dean of Students letter. The paper was thin and beautiful, the school’s seal glowing through the middle of the page like a sun. It felt too elegant to be a piece of mail I’d been dreading. At the end of my hearing, an older white woman waiting outside of the conference room had touched the back of my arm as I’d left—I’d almost darted right past her—and walked me through another set of doors and around her desk in the lobby, telling me that she’d send a notice via campus mail with information about the next meeting once a decision was reached. I’d nodded but said nothing, staring only at the bright lipstick clinging to her mouth; she wore no other makeup, and the effect was both cartoonish and sad. As she opened one half of the wooden double doors I had come in through over an hour earlier, her mouth added that we’d likely meet in the same place. I saw now that she was right: I was to report to the same office in the same building on Monday at three thirty P.M. There was a phone number listed to call if that time was a problem, but also a sentence (one of only four on the whole sheet) stating that my supervisor at the library had already been notified of the conflict and had agreed to excuse me from the first half of my Monday shift.
I read those four sentences over and over again, bringing the letter closer to my face as I slid off my shoes, then as I sat on Jillian’s bed. I took the meeting being scheduled in the afternoon—after a full day of classes—as a bad sign, thinking it meant that the committee wanted to give me one last day to enjoy being a Rawlings student: one last morning bathroom rush among dozens of the country’s brightest students; one last hundred-year-old lecture room with heavy, carved desks; one last glasses-clad professor in a real tweed jacket at the chalkboard; one last walk across the snow-covered quad. Let her have at least that, I imagined the lone woman on the committee telling the four men. Let’s at least give her that. It didn’t feel like enough, and I thought about calling the number and saying that I wouldn’t be there, that I was still in Miami and involved in a local protest about a boy who’d come from Cuba, that as eager as I was to hear their decision, it would have to wait—or maybe not even matter, because maybe I’d have to stay in Miami and be proactive, have to advocate for something; I could use the committee’s own vocabulary against them. Sorry I can’t make it (I imagined myself saying after some beep), but don’t feel bad about kicking me out because really, there’s a lot going on down here, and really, I need to be home right now anyway.
I placed the letter on my desk and picked up the phone, but there was no dial tone. I gawked at the receiver—even the phones were gone for break?—then almost dropped it when I heard a voice: Omar telling someone to shut the hell up.
—Whoa, it didn’t even ring, he said after my confused Hello? You just sitting there waiting for me, huh?
—No, I said.
Behind him, I heard Chino’s voice and another guy—a voice I didn’t recognize—both laughing. I shoved the letter into my desk’s top drawer, heard it tear as it crinkled against Jillian’s gifted mittens. I pushed the drawer shut.
—I was about to call somebody, I said.
—Who?
—Don’t worry about it.
I grabbed my sneaker off the rug and launched it hard at the closet door.
—Oh it’s like that? he said. I thought you were gonna call me when you got there.
—I just walked in the door, Omar. Seriously? Can I get a fucking minute?
—Are you serious right now? I fucking call you and you talk to me like this?
I heard Chino say, Oh shit, and then a car door slam, then the voice that wasn’t Chino’s yelling, Bro, just hang up on that bitch already, we gotta go.
—Who the fuck is that? I said.
—Don’t worry about it.
I took the phone in both my hands and crashed it into the cradle, then lifted it and slammed it again. I picked up my other sneaker and hurled it in the general direction of the first one’s landing spot, then hauled my suitcase onto Jillian’s bed so I could pace in my socks around her rug while waiting for Omar to call back.
The longer the phone went without ringing, the more the things in my bag made it into my drawers, smashed back into place, until after a while, I reached in and found nothing. So I filled the suitcase with the dirty clothes I’d left in a pile under my bed and zipped it shut, then shoved it where the pile had been. On Jillian’s desk, which sat at the foot of her bed, lived the white egg of her Mac desktop, angled so that she could see the monitor from bed like a TV. I pulled back her butter-colored quilt, slipped one of her DVDs into her sleeping computer’s drive—a movie I’d never seen called Life of Brian by Monty Python, a comedy group I’d mistakenly called “The Monty Python” when Jillian first asked me if I liked them and I tried to play it off like I knew who they were—and got in her bed, tugging the quilt up around me. I’d never so much as sat on her bed before that night, but now I reached over from it to the dresser and grabbed the box of cereal I’d left perched there. I tucked the box under the quilt with me.
The movie played—the screen’s glow the only light in the room—and I had a hard time understanding the actors because of the British accents and the cereal’s crunch filling my ears between the jokes I didn’t know to laugh at. So I watched the movie two more times, looking for clues to the jokes, for the setups—the warnings I’d missed. I even turned on the subtitles the third time through. I laughed when it seemed like I should, until the act of laughing itself triggered the real thing.