—Falling is fun? He laughed in a tired way and said, Okay, if you say so.
The sound of the van’s engine disappeared on the line, and when I said, Hello?—thinking we’d been disconnected—he said, No, I’m here. I just got to where I’m going.
He said, I guess good luck on your tests. I said thanks.
As he hung up he said, See you later, and those words loomed like a forecast behind each chemistry-related fact I reviewed that night. Hours later, at exactly midnight, every student on campus stuck their heads out of whatever window they were closest to and screamed. It was a Rawlings tradition: a campus-wide shriek the midnight before the first scheduled exam. But I didn’t know about it that year, and so when I heard those screams, I thought for sure I was going crazy: that all the various voices in my head—my dad’s, those of my professors, even an imagined one for Ariel that I’d silenced—were hell-bent on pushing out the facts and formulas I’d lived in for the last three weeks. And I was even more convinced the screams were in my head a minute later when I decided that, after I made it through finals and got back home, I would figure out where my dad lived, go there, and make him answer for selling the house, for not caring if he ever talked to me while I was away. And the second I made that resolution, the very instant that goal was certain to me, the screaming—it stopped.
15
THE FIRST THING MY MOM SAID when she saw me—what she screamed right into my ear as she hugged me in the airport terminal—was, You are so skinny!
It sounded more like a compliment than anything she was worried about. I lost eleven pounds that fall, seven of them in the weeks between Thanksgiving and my last exam. Unlike most students, who’d put on weight all fall like pigs before a Noche Buena slaughter, I had a healthier diet at Rawlings than I did at home, having finally made use of that famous salad bar to get through finals.
—I could say the same about you, I told her.
She looked several pounds thinner, her makeup weirdly askew, her body draped in a faux-silk gold blouse and matching leggings I’d never seen. When she broke our hug, she looked down at the airport carpet and tucked her short, coarse hair behind her ears. Her roots needed a serious touch-up, the gray and brown pushing up in a solid band around her head. The blond streaks she’d always maintained looked detached from her scalp. She pried my fingers from my carry-on bag and started wheeling it away from me.
—I’ve been so busy since you left, I barely have time to eat, she said. But look at you, you look so smart!
I didn’t ask what looking smart meant. I scanned the crowd of waiting people around us for Leidy, to give her a hug and take Dante off her hands, but my mom was alone. She was already walking a few steps ahead of me and then, as if realizing she’d left something behind, she stopped and said, It’s so good to have you home!
—Where’s Leidy?
—Work, Lizet. She’s at work.
She looked at the inside of her wrist, her watch’s face having rotated there.
—Though she’s probably on her way to get Dante from daycare by now.
—Oh, I said. Of course, right.
She started moving again, my suitcase in tow. I jogged to her side, and she fished something out from between her breasts and handed it to me—the ticket from the parking garage, stamped almost an hour before—and told me if we hurried, we could save the extra five dollars. I was secretly relieved that her rush was due to something unrelated to me: I’d barely talked to Mami without Leidy as my go-between since the last trip, and I worried the whole flight home that she was still angry about Thanksgiving, about how I’d planned that trip on my own—that it had made her draw some conclusion about me, that I was turning into someone she either didn’t like or didn’t trust.