It took a second to remember she was talking to me—I was Liz again, no more El—but I reached over and turned the heater’s dial to low. Going by Liz was easier than correcting people when they said, Sorry, Lisette? or Like short for Elizabeth? after I told them my name. I liked Liz fine, and it seemed more and more weird to me that no one had ever called me by that nickname before, but just a few days home had made it strange to me again. Even though Omar and other Miami friends had called me El since kindergarten, asking new people to call me El seemed annoying of me, like I was trying too hard, like how it hit my ear when any Rebecca wanted to be called Becca instead of just Becky or a Victoria, Tori instead of just Vicky. So I’d embraced Liz, had even covered up, with a lopsided heart filled in with blue pen, the E and T on the nametag our RA had taped to our door.
I hadn’t noticed the room was too hot, and said so.
—How have you not died of heatstroke? she said, not really wanting an answer.
Jillian was Jillian, never Jill. She’d said it just like that the day we met—Never Jill—and I liked her for it. She flipped over on the mattress and said, How was your break?
I meant to say great but instead I said, It was okay.
—Oh my god, that’s right! she said, bolting up from her pillows. That baby from Cuba. Was any of that happening near you? My parents were all, Isn’t your roommate Cuban? And I was like, she sure as fuck is.
I turned around at my desk, confused the news had made it that far north.
—He’s not a baby, I said. He’s like five or six.
—Whatever, were you near anything?
—Sort of, I said to my hands, to my lap. My mom lives around there. But how was your break?
—It went well. She reached to her nightstand drawer for a hand mirror. Same old same old, she said. Amazing food. My brother is a jackass. The bus back was a nightmare.
In the mirror, she inspected her eyelid for something, picked at whatever she saw, then said to her reflection, So did you see any of it? It’s such a crazy story, right?
—How’d you even hear about it?
She lowered the mirror and looked at me in a way that felt dramatic but that I’d come to learn was only her way of teasing me.
—Are you kidding? she said. It’s everywhere.
I leaned back in my chair until it hit the desk’s pencil drawer, where the notice from the dean’s office still hid along with her mittens.
—Why is the news in Jersey about some Cuban kid in Miami? I said.
Jillian tossed the mirror onto her quilt and hopped off her bed, swinging her slick black hair over her shoulder and saying a deadpan You are so funny, Liz as she opened the mini-fridge under her bed. She pulled out a bottled water and stared at me as she took a long drink; she had eyes I can honestly say I’d never seen before in real life, blue flecked with gray, crisp, the kind of color I’d seen only on models in magazines. Her eyebrows were perfect though I’d never seen her pluck them. She had very, very smooth skin, which she’d started wrecking a couple times a week by going to tanning salons with some girls she knew from intramural softball. She was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, but she made no sense to me back then: she was athletic but kind of prissy, super smart and always talking about being a feminist but still spending hours a day applying five different shades of eye shadow to various zones above and below her eyes before heading out to class or softball practice. I’d pegged her, on our first day as roommates, as Greek or Italian—way more interesting than Cuban because there was so much more ocean separating this country from either of those (you couldn’t build a raft out of random crap and make it across the Atlantic)—but when I’d asked her where her people were from, she said, Cherry Hill, and then, when it was clear I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, she added, In Jersey—the good part. She climbed back on her bed with her water after putting the mirror away in her nightstand.
—You have to tell me what it’s like down there. Is it like World War Three or what?
On my desk sat my bio textbook, opened to the chapter I was supposed to have read already. I said to it, You know, I didn’t even really notice anything?
—Why are you lying? she blurted. They had people losing their minds on television. It looked totally nutso.
—That’s just TV, I said.
—And now that kid is basically stuck living with strangers until he goes back home. Jesus, what a nightmare. What could possibly possess a woman to force a little boy to make that kind of a trip?
I sat on my hands to keep them under control. I’d encountered this a couple times so far at Rawlings—people hanging up Che posters in their rooms, not realizing that most Cubans know him as a murderer; people talking about the excellent healthcare system in Cuba and just not believing me when I explained how my mom sent a monthly package that included antibiotics, Advil, soap, Band-Aids, and tampons to my aunts still over there—but I hadn’t heard any of this from Jillian. Her worst offense (which I wasn’t even sure counted as an offense) was that, without fail, she introduced me to anyone she knew—the softball girls, the friends she’d brought along from high school—this way: This is my roommate, Liz. She’s Cuban. Her doing this bothered me but I didn’t know why exactly, so I kept telling myself: It’s not like it isn’t true, what would I even want her to say?
I said, I don’t think you understand how bad things are in Cuba.