Make Your Home Among Strangers

*

 

I read over the letter several times during the rest of my shift at the library’s entrance desk, distracted only by the scuffs of people’s boots as they whooshed in or out of the building. Again, Linda was right: it made more sense once I was out of that room, away from that table that predated Miami’s founding. I could concentrate better in the library—a fact about myself I should’ve recognized earlier in the semester. The letter detailed a series of if this, then that scenarios: If I failed chemistry—likely, since I’d failed the midterm after freezing up and not finishing most of it—my spring probation would involve a limit on the classes I could take and I’d be forced into a noncredit remedial course that didn’t count toward my eventual graduation. If I earned lower than a C-minus in any of my courses in addition to failing chemistry, there’d be more remedial courses—which meant I’d dip below the necessary credit hours to officially count as full-time and, as a result, a six-thousand-dollar grant in my aid package given to high-achieving minority first-generation college students (a crammed line in my bursar bill that read “Rawlings Minority Student Success Initiative: Fulfilling the Family Dream Scholarship”) would be revoked and replaced with an unsubsidized loan come the following year. Considering I already had five thousand a year in all kinds of loans, this was very bad news, and it also made me understand Linda’s comment about Rawlings being worth it. If I somehow passed all four of my classes with a C-minus or better, I’d be allowed to continue working toward a biology major and wouldn’t have to take anything with the word remedial in the course title. Most importantly, my financial aid wouldn’t change. But this seemed the least likely outcome: along with the failing chem grade, I had a D in biology and a C-minus in calculus. On their own, these two classes weren’t super hard, but taking them both the same term as chemistry made each worse. And because I’d failed the paper that I plagiarized (something the letter made clear but that I hadn’t left the meeting understanding), and because it counted for thirty percent of my grade, I was hovering at a D in my writing seminar. I had an A in my required PE—swimming, which was easy since I’d grown up doing it—but the grades in our PE courses didn’t count toward our final GPA. Had I understood that earlier, I would’ve taken the course pass/fail instead of for a grade: I could’ve missed a few classes, then, to study for the others without hurting my chances of passing.

 

Someone’s bag beeped as they went through the security scanner, and I jumped high enough at my tall desk that he laughed into his hand at me.

 

—Sorry about that, he whispered.

 

He couldn’t have looked less like Omar—ear-length red hair parted down the middle in a style well on its way out, a smattering of freckles across his nose, greenish eyes, eyebrows so pale they might as well not exist—but my brain understood he could count as attractive to a certain kind of person and so classified him as a new kind of male specimen, albeit one that would burst into flames if left unprotected on a South Florida beach. I put my letter down; my hands shook as I reached for his bag, which was covered with so many buttons and patches that I couldn’t discern its original color.

 

—I guess you never get used to that sound, huh?

 

—No, you do, I said. You get used to it if you work at it.

 

I checked his bag—his portable CD player the sensor’s culprit—and cleared it though the scanner, then slid it back to him with a cheesy smile and a thumbs-up.

 

He thanked me. I’m Ethan, by the way, he said, and I said, Okay.

 

I went back to my letter.

 

He drummed his fingers on my desk, then said, Right. OK. See ya around.

 

He pushed through the glass doors a few feet from my desk. Through the library’s huge front window, I watched him walk toward the quad, wishing I’d said, Yeah for sure, see you around back to him, making a kind of promise to myself that way: that I’d be around to do such a thing. I told myself I’d wave at him—a big, obvious one that used both arms—if he turned around, but he didn’t.

 

The commotion with Ethan was the night’s only distraction at work. For the most part, as I planned out the next three and a half weeks, people passed me in silence. For the most part, it’s like I wasn’t even there.

 

 

 

 

 

12

 

Jennine Capó Crucet's books