THE MAIL CAME EARLIER IN Little Havana than it did in Hialeah. We’d been a late stop on our old route and were an early one now, so most mornings over break, a rip of booms jarred me awake, the row of metal bins downstairs in the foyer all getting slapped shut. The registrar’s office had notified us that our grades wouldn’t show up before Christmas, so only after the holiday did I obey the leaping reflex at the slams and charge down the stairs—shoeless and usually wearing a long T-shirt like a dress—the mailbox key shaking in my hands. When my grades weren’t there, it was over: I had the rest of the day to forget they were en route, and I’d head upstairs newly exhausted. Mami and Leidy were already at work, so I usually got Omar to come over almost as soon as I got my toothbrush out of my mouth and his ring back on my finger (I kept it off and hidden at home to avoid Mami and Leidy asking any questions), and between having sex on the couch and/or the floor and/or my sofa bed (that last spot only if Dante was at daycare—I considered it really bad luck to do anything with a baby in the same room), we argued about New Year’s Eve. He wanted to call up friends—other couples we used to hang out with—and go to a club, do something huge, and I didn’t want to commit to anything out of fear that my grades, once they arrived, would after everything be too low. I couldn’t imagine getting dressed up and smearing makeup on my face, seeing people from high school and pretending to be happy about the future. So I lied and said I just wanted the night to be about me and him, together at the end of the millennium. I was shameless in my attempts to avoid going out—I even suggested we split the cost of a few hours at a hotel by the airport. He argued that going to a club did not prevent us from going to a hotel afterward. This argument led to more sex, which by then I recognized as the best way to keep us both distracted.
That pattern lasted until my grades showed up on Friday, on December thirty-first. The envelope sat crammed in the very back of the bin, bent as if the mailman had punched it down the metal tunnel. I pried it from the box’s back wall and ran upstairs, my bare feet slapping the steps, turning the envelope over and over in my hands and thinking of how it was Leidy, not me, who’d spotted the faint pencil marks on the gifts from my dad a week earlier. What if neither of us had noticed the scrawled names and she’d opened mine, seen what my dad had written about her and Dante? I’d hid that envelope inside a shoe and tucked the shoe into the front pocket of my suitcase, zipping it shut. I planned to shove this new secret in there along with that one.
Back inside, I scrambled onto the couch, folded my legs under me, and pulled my long T-shirt over them. The refrigerator rumbled against the kitchen wall, but otherwise the room was quiet—it hit me that the reason I could open my grades right away and with no one around was because Leidy and my mom’s jobs had them working a half day on New Year’s Eve. Their jobs meant I was always the only one home when the mail came. I should’ve felt bad, or guilty, but as I peeled back the seal in the same way I had with the envelope from my dad, I only felt grateful to be alone.
The sharply folded page stayed shut against itself as I pulled it out. I tugged at its corners and rested the paper on my lap. I’d expected, I realized, some kind of paragraph, some kind of explanation with words. I’d expected to have to scan sentences and search out the grades: for this information, like everything else at Rawlings, to feel hidden from me but also somehow in plain sight. So I was surprised to see, on the left-hand side, a list of the courses that had defined the last four months, and across from each, lined up on the right margin and connected to the course title by a series of underscores like a line of stitches, the grade. The only A listed was attached to my PE course, and I’d been expecting it (in fact, I think I would’ve been the most surprised by anything other than an A in swimming). What I wasn’t expecting was the column of B-minuses leading to that A.