Before I left that day, I booked twice-weekly slots for chemistry all the way up to the final exam, and I made initial biology and calculus appointments for the next day. I took the brochure for the writing center, which was apparently housed in the basement of the student union, right next to where I worked, and during that afternoon’s library shift, while checking my e-mail during my break and seeing the string of appointment confirmations in my inbox, I created an online account and booked even more appointments in every subject, grabbing multiple time slots on the weekends and each day of study week. It’s free, I told myself, imagining them as mall-bestowed perfume samples hoarded in the hopes of never having to buy a whole bottle.
On my way to the writing center—where I’d made standing appointments on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and Saturday afternoons, and where I would eventually bring draft after draft of my final paper and its bibliography, driving my tutor close to insane with my paranoia about plagiarism—I had to pass several large-screen TVs mounted on a wall that also had clocks set to different time zones. Without fail, over those last weeks before winter break, one of those TVs had something about the impending Y2K doom (we got e-mails “preparing us” for this from the Office of Technology, but we didn’t seem to have to actually do anything to prepare) and another invariably blasted the latest development in “The Battle for the Boy,” which was what some stations were calling the Ariel Hernandez situation. Ariel’s father had emerged from wherever he’d been the first few weeks Ariel was in the United States and was now demanding that his son be sent back. On my way to my first Thursday writing center session, I walked by those TVs just in time to see a line of demonstrators stretching from Ariel’s house to beyond my mom’s apartment building, which glowed orange on the screen. The shot zoomed in and I stopped and stood on my toes to get closer to the screen, scanning the line for Leidy or my mom, but the camera angle was from above, from a helicopter, and the tops of everyone’s heads both looked and didn’t look familiar. A row of words popped up, white letters in a black bar: AND AS YOU CAN SEE, SUSAN, THINGS ARE UNDER CONTROL NOW BUT AUTHORITIES ARE STILL STANDING BY IN CASE THE SITUATION ESCALATES AGAIN. The black bar rolled away and another scrolled up to replace it: SUSAN: BUT DAN, ARE YOU SEEING ANY FLAMES OR SMOKE NOW FROM THE SKY SEVEN NEWSCOPTER? EARLIER YOU SAID—
Before the next box could roll up, I found the volume button on the underside of the screen, and even though a small placard asked that we not change any of the settings, I reached up and tapped it just a little louder so that the closed-captioning the mute setting triggered disappeared. I didn’t care if anyone saw me, but I had a joke ready—We have enough reading to do, am I right?—if anyone said something. No one did.
I stood back from the row of TVs and decided the marching looked almost peaceful now that there was no mention of fire scrolling across the screen, especially when compared to the nearby Y2K-related report showing the pandemonium of the Wall Street floor, where the hysteria of men in suits flapping paper around was matched only by the scroll rate of the words flying on and off the screen.
Halfway down the steps, the TVs safely behind me, I turned on the landing and slammed into the overstuffed backpack of Jaquelin Medina, who I hadn’t seen since the mandatory Diversity Affairs welcome meeting. Despite this, she gave me a tremendous hug, but I was too stunned to return it in time—my arms stayed pinned to my body as her hands pressed into my back.
—I was just thinking about you, she said.
Something moved across my face that made her say, No! Not like that, I mean I was just worrying because, you know, I heard about how bad things are getting.
I thought she meant my grades and my probation, so in too mean a voice I said, How’d you hear about that?
She pointed slowly behind me, up the steps. The … media? Plus we’ve been talking about it a lot in my government class.
I shook my head once and said, Sorry, I’m just – it’s hard. I know it’s everywhere, I’m just busy, I’m just – trying to ignore it.
—Is your family doing okay? They’re staying away from all the like –
She finished her sentence by waving both hands in front of her chest and giving an exaggerated frown, like she’d just been asked to dissect a cat and had to say no. I didn’t know what to tell her: part of my study plan for finals was to not call home as much as usual, since I didn’t think I could handle being much more than a Rawlings student for a little while. For three days in a row, I’d stayed in the library after my shifts until it closed at two A.M., and the four or five messages from Omar that Jillian wrote down on her yellow Post-it notes over those days had gone straight from my fist to our garbage can. The one message from Leidy I planned to return when I knew she’d be at work so I could keep it short and talk to the answering machine instead of her.
—I think so, I said.
Someone came down the steps behind me, and I searched his face as he looked at me and Jaquelin in the stairwell, but I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. Had he stopped to watch the Ariel coverage and now gotten the bonus of catching probably the only two Latinos he’d see on campus all day discussing the exact national issue he expected us to be talking about?