When I didn’t answer right away, she said, I went to Hialeah Gardens.
She said the school’s name like a punch line, pointed to her chest with four of her fingers, her thumb back at me, as if saying, Can you believe that? But I didn’t get the joke: Gardens was our big rival in football, a sport we tended to dominate, but they killed us almost every year in soccer. A handful of kids from both teams at both schools went to college on athletic scholarships each year; that was how most of the few students headed to college at all from either school managed to make it there.
—Oh cool, I said. I went to Hialeah Lakes.
—Wow, she said, nodding. Yikes, she said. That’s rough.
She lowered her head and nodded harder, waiting for me to nod along with her. A rectangle of light came in through the van’s window and scrolled over her face, turning her skin greenish, and I thought maybe she was lying about going to Gardens, or that maybe I was wrong and she wasn’t some kind of Latina like me.
—Were you crying just now? I said, crossing my arms over my chest. Because it looked like you were crying.
The woman let her hand drop from the seatback, and I added, I’m just saying.
—I’m, she said, I was being weird is all. She laughed a little and said, I just flew in from Michigan. I’m in my last year of a postdoc there.
Then she rolled her eyes, as if the definition of postdoc were written in the air above us. I lifted my chin and squinted, but she didn’t say more, and I tried not to think about how much I still didn’t know, even after almost a whole semester away at a real school. The rectangle of light slinked over the seat and found my arms, passing over them and turning them the same green.
—I’m in college, I said. I’m a freshman. I came home for the break but my flight got screwed up yesterday.
She showed me all her teeth again, but her lips slipped over them in a more natural way. She asked where I went to school, but I flapped my hand in front of my face, like the question smelled foul. I didn’t expect her to know the school. My boyfriend Omar had never even heard of it before I’d applied, and my own sister had trouble remembering the name, though she blamed me for that, since I’d applied to Rawlings without my family knowing about it and—as a necessary result of that—without their permission.
—It’s this school in the middle of nowhere called Rawlings.
—Rawlings College? she said more loudly than anything she’d said so far. That’s where you go? As in, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country? That Rawlings?
I couldn’t believe she’d heard of it. I couldn’t believe she knew to say liberal arts. My surprise at this almost matched hers. She shook off her open mouth and said, Hold up, so you must be a super-genius.
—Not really, I said. But yeah, it’s – it’s like a really good school.
We both nodded, and I felt ready to brag a little, to tell her how a few weeks earlier the school had thrown an all-day party for everyone on campus—even us new students—under this huge tent on the quad to celebrate this one professor winning the Nobel Prize in economics. The school had sprung for hundreds of these goofy caps with part of the prize-winning theorem (which meant nothing to most of us, as several of the speakers that day joked) printed on the front and the words ’99 NOBEL BASH on the back. After eating my weight in free fancy cheese, I got up the courage to ask the now-super-famous professor to sign my cap’s bill, and that request made him chuckle. (I feel like a movie star! I didn’t even bring a suitable pen! he said.) Then, after we located a suitable pen, his hand shook as he signed and he accidentally smudged the signature. To the smudge he said, Oh drat!, which apparently meant he felt badly enough about it to find me another free cap, and he signed that one, too. I wanted to say how later, I caught him offering to sign other people’s caps, and I couldn’t believe I’d given a Nobel Prize winner an idea. Maybe I’d even tell her—since she was from home, since she’d gone to Gardens—that eating all that cheese had backed me up like nothing I’d ever felt, and so I didn’t shit for two days, but neither did my roommate (she’d dragged me to the celebration in the first place but had disappeared by an ice-cream bar I didn’t find until I was already too packed with cheese), and how just as my roommate confessed her no-shitting to me, she ripped this huge fart—the first of hers I ever heard despite us living in the same rectangle for almost two months—and I laughed so hard I fell out of my desk chair and onto the floor with a fart of my own.