—Really! No wonder you’re OK doing that to your hair, she laughed. No biggie, we’ll figure something out.
She swept some colorless powder all over her face. I slid the iron down the last section of hair and headed back to our room. I changed into my strapless bra and pulled on a black tube top, threw on every bracelet I owned, and shoved my biggest set of hoop earrings through my earlobes. Jaquelin would recognize it as a lazy clubbing outfit, but it was more like Miami clothes than anything I’d worn in months. I parted my now-straight hair down the middle, rubbed a little pink lotion on my hands and smoothed it over the ends and the pieces that stuck straight up from the crown. I pulled Omar’s silver chain out from where it sat pooled at the bottom of the cup that held my pens and highlighters and draped it around my neck.
After a little while in my room, some fierce makeup on my own face now, I went into the hallway to find Jillian and the other girls. I bumped into the RA in the bathroom.
—Someone was smoking something in here, she said.
—No, it was – people were straightening their hair. With a flat iron. It was on a really high setting.
—You look amazing, she said to me. Jesus, I didn’t even recognize you for a second. Your hair is so long.
She reached out her hand to touch it. I let her. It feathered out of her hand and fell back stiff at my side.
—Jillian and them left a couple minutes ago, she said. Were you looking for someone?
—They left? I said. Like all together?
—You can probably still catch them. They said they were taking the campus shuttle.
I thought Jillian would come back to our room, at least to put her makeup away, but the case wasn’t on the counter—she must’ve left it somewhere else. I pulled my hair into a cord and wrapped it around my fist, out of anyone’s grip.
—No, it’s fine. I wasn’t really going with them anyway.
I’m meeting up with a real friend, I almost said, but that would only make my RA ask me questions and act interested in me, since that was essentially her job.
I went back to our room, taking a long body-warming swig from the bottle of vodka Jillian kept on the freezer shelf of her mini-fridge, and when I put it back, I didn’t bother to make it look like I hadn’t touched it. Let her say something to me about it, I said to the fridge door, then to my reflection as I checked my makeup again. But I knew I was stalling, waiting until I was sure the next campus shuttle had come and gone.
13
APPARENTLY JAQUELIN DIDN’T FUNCTION ON the half-Mexican, half-Honduran equivalent of Cuban Time: I was almost an hour late—so pretty much on time by our standards—but she wasn’t standing just inside the foyer like we’d planned, and as someone took my coat and someone else put a paper wristband on my outstretched arm, I searched for anyone I recognized. The only thing that kept me from panicking about being there alone was the music—hip-hop playing so loud that I’d heard it from a block away, meaning actual speakers and not some shitty computer ones buzzing a song beyond recognition. Meaning, at the very least, a PA system—maybe even an actual DJ. Huddles of females tittered just inside the door, screaming nonsense over the music into each other’s ears, radiating a kind of fear I’d never seen on them: no one in their pack was willing to take the lead and go in. But the music gave me the courage to walk down the gauntlet of males holding up the entrance’s walls while they sipped like mad from their beers. I safety-hoisted my tube top—made sure things were as secure as they got in a shirt like that—and strutted down the long foyer past all of them, flipping my hair over my shoulders and showing off my collarbone, refusing to make eye contact with even a single person, my face set to look as bored and unimpressed as possible. This is how you enter a club, motherfuckers, I thought, and I knew they could hear me thinking it, because they all turned and watched me.
A few steps before the archway leading to the dance floor, I heard a guy’s voice yell, Hey you!—a little different from the Hey girl, come here, or the Hey baby, lemme talk to you one normally heard while traversing the male-lined entryway of a Miami club, but it would do. I kept my eyes on the dark room in front of me, where the music came from, picturing those girls in the herds behind me totally incapable of taking even one step forward, until I heard, Hey OK! Hey OK! OK OK OK!
I tilted my head so I could see (without obviously looking) who was having some kind of OK-breakdown against the wall—but he wasn’t against the wall: he was lunging forward, reaching toward me, beer in one hand, the other hand and its different color wristband going for my arm as he yelled, OK! OK, hey!
When his fingers glanced the top of my arm, I swung out of his way and said, Who are you, trying to touch me? I scowled at his hand in the air between us, but even in the dim, red light, I could make out the freckles dotting his knuckles.