—Ha ha, I said. Not yet.
Like any good first-generation college student, I planned to follow up my biology degree with a stint at med school, followed by whatever came after med school, followed by me opening my very own clinic back home, where I’d see everyone for free and give kids shots without making them cry. It was a good plan, one I believed in even after I heard it come from the mouth of almost every other student at the Diversity Affairs orientation meeting.
My dad’s leg hopped under the table, making the water in his glass shimmy.
—Listen, he said. I know you’re busy up there doing your studies and whatnot. But me too, with work. It’s crazy how much I’m working these days. I mean, really crazy.
He ran his hands through his hair three times and said, I’m at five or six different jobsites in one week sometimes, so, you know, I’m not around, like …
He looked up at the lights sprouting from the bottom of a fan overhead. He shrugged. I thought of Weasel a day earlier, saying into his father’s refrigerator, You don’t know where he lives? as his brother tried to make excuses for both of us.
—I know, I said. People get busy. I’m the same. It’s okay.
I smiled and he nodded and said, Good.
He picked up his menu like something was finally settled for him, and with that action, he was, somehow and suddenly, the easier parent for me to understand. A waitress with a head covered in tight curls came over and took our full order: a second café con leche, two orders of buttered Cuban toast, two plates of scrambled eggs with thin slices of fried ham chopped up and mixed in.
—?Revuelto? she asked after I said the number of the special I wanted. She raised a painted-on eyebrow at me, like I didn’t know what the word meant. It’s the only way I’d ever ordered it. Sí, claro, I said.
She hustled away and within seconds, the waitress who’d brought over my café con leche swept by with a matching set of beverage-assembling supplies for my father. He mumbled a gracias to her back.
—So you get straight A’s or what?
He poured the café into the milk, then streamed a line of sugar into it right from the dispenser, skipping the act of measuring it out into his spoon. In my hesitation, he looked up from the glittery trail tumbling into his cup and said, Oh no, did you get a B in something? He put the sugar down and laughed.
It wasn’t hard to do as well as I had at my high school. Our teachers ranged from the passionate (our saviors: those who’d started off as Teach For America recruits and stuck around long past their obligatory two years) to the supernaturally lazy (those who depended on movies to kill time: for instance, our Honors World History teacher, who over the course of one nine-week grading period, between classes devoted to “silent reading” from textbooks we couldn’t take home, showed us The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, the entire Roots miniseries starring—as the teacher put it—“the guy from Reading Rainbow,” Schindler’s List, Good Morning, Vietnam starring “the guy who was the genie in Aladdin,” and, for some reason, The Fifth Element followed immediately by Stargate, which was the one he’d “meant to show us” when he accidentally brought in The Fifth Element. But if you passed an AP exam with a score of three or higher (a rare occurrence at our school but something I’d done, to my own shock, for the first time in tenth grade), or if a guardian managed to show up for parent-teacher night, those were ways you could end up on the list of “good kids” I imagined the teachers circulating. I don’t know when it happened, but my teachers knew me as a good student even before I’d decided to be one. It probably had to do with Leidy being a so-so presence in their classrooms, the teacher logic being that, when you have two sisters so close in age, they can’t both be disappointments.
—I don’t know my official grades yet. They get mailed out soon, I said, as if waiting for them wasn’t an ordeal. But it’s way harder to do good there, I said. Way, way harder.
He finished a sip of coffee and said, Oh yeah?
I didn’t let much spill out. To give him the entirety of what I’d been through academically would require me to back up way too much, to admit how far I now was from his idea of me when it came to school. To tell him everything, to let so many feelings just plop onto the table, would make him so uncomfortable that I wouldn’t be surprised if he left his coffee behind and walked out to his van. He’d done much worse before.
—It’s really intense, I finally said. The professors – our teachers? They’re like obsessed people about their subjects. They are crazy.
—Sounds like people here with the Ariel Hernandez bullshit, he said. Sounds like your mother.