As classes ended and study week began, any social activities that did not involve studying came to a halt. Rawlings students prided themselves on the campus’s stress-inducing finals culture, one of the most intense in the country. I saw Ethan a few times coming in and out of the library, his wave and hello and occasional joke tinged with the strain I noticed on everyone’s faces. The tutors at the center were less patient, the dorm’s hallways quieter. Every table in the dining hall featured both a plate of food and a book, everyone choosing to eat alone. Leidy had stopped leaving messages halfway through study week, or maybe Jillian had stopped writing them down: neither of us spent much time in our room, as she’d started studying with her softball friends somewhere off campus. She didn’t come back one night, then the next, and when I saw her leaving the library one afternoon and I asked her where she’d been, she just said, as if I was the biggest moron around, Studying.
Even though I worked hard to avoid what other students jokingly called “the outside world”—the news, anyone back home who loved you—I did suffer from one moment of weakness: a Sunday, the afternoon before finals officially began. I had my chemistry exam the next afternoon (my first one), and I didn’t need the Office of Diversity Affairs to tell me sleep was more important than another last-minute session at the learning lab. I’d slept maybe eight hours total over the previous three days. (The number of hours you slept became a kind of shorthand when you ran into someone on campus—the lower the number, the more impressive, the harder you were working.) The lack of sleep, coupled with the nausea that accompanied too much coffee and not enough food, along with the fact that I was about to get my period (and therefore prone to crying into my chem textbook whenever I remembered that the exam would last three whole hours) pushed me into believing that there was no way I could face the week ahead of me without hearing my dad’s voice. I thought his distance from the things going on in my life would remind me that I’d survive, and if I could make him talk to me after so many failed attempts, then maybe I could do other difficult things. Unlike Omar, my dad wouldn’t ask to be filled in on my hearing’s outcome; he didn’t even know about it. And unlike my mother or Leidy, my dad would talk about his own job and ask me questions because he probably couldn’t care less about what was going on with Ariel; he was not, as he liked to say, political. He’d been a U.S. citizen for ten years but had never voted in an election. He only became naturalized because he literally lost his green card—could not find the original document, only a copy—and, because he worked in construction (roofing, electrical work, hired by whoever needed something pulled or wired or covered in tar paper), he didn’t want to keep getting confused with the workers who had fake documents.
I found the calling card I’d used the few times I’d tried to reach him stuffed far back in my desk drawer, his work number—a cell phone assigned to him by his boss—scrawled in red marker on the front of it, the phrase (emergency only!!!) underneath.
He picked up by saying, This is Ricky, and I was so thrown off by that—and by the fact that he answered at all—that I just said, Papi? without realizing until later how pathetic it must’ve sounded.
—Lizet! he practically screamed into the phone. Hey! Wow!
It was late afternoon, and he was on his way to a jobsite, a middle school expansion that should’ve been done by the time classes started but got delayed when some investigation exposed the contract as being full of kickbacks for the brother-in-law of the school board’s superintendent. Work could only happen when kids weren’t there; they paid him overtime because of the shift in hours. He blurted out these details as I got used to the sound of him talking, of his voice suddenly in my ear, that easy.
—I haven’t heard from you in so long, he said, as if it were my fault.
He told me he’d finally managed to talk to my sister a couple days earlier, that she’d bragged about how I’d been home for Thanksgiving. He didn’t sound hurt that I hadn’t tried to see him while in town, but him bringing it up in the first place meant this was definitely the case—and that Leidy had told him hoping to produce that exact effect.
—Yeah, I said. It wasn’t the best idea. Ariel Hernandez showed up and kind of stole my thunder.
—What about thunder?
—I just shouldn’t have gone, I said. It wasn’t worth the money.
Cars honked on his end of the line. I imagined him sitting in his work van, his cooler sweating on the floor in the space between the seats. I wondered where he was picturing me, if he had any idea how beautiful the snow outside my window looked with the sunset gleaming off it.
—Is it cold there? he asked.
—Yeah, it’s snowed a lot.
—I saw that on the Weather Channel, that it’s been snowing there.
I said yeah.
We didn’t talk for long. He didn’t ask about my mother or Leidy or Dante, not that I expected him to do that. I waited for him to give me the number to wherever he lived now so I wouldn’t have to call him on the work cell phone he’d said was only for emergencies, but he never gave me that. He didn’t ask when I’d be home next (granted, the date on my return ticket hadn’t changed, but still). He just kept saying, So you’re doing okay? So you’re really doing fine? So you’re really okay? And I kept wishing he’d believe me when I answered yes and ask something else.
—I went ice skating a couple weeks ago, I told him before hanging up.
—No shit, he said. I bet you fell a lot.
—Not a lot, I said. But yeah, I did, like three times. No big deal. It was still fun.