A column of B-minuses: I ran my finger down the line to make sure I was seeing each one of them correctly. I held the paper up to my face, inspecting the curves of each letter just to be positive the Bs weren’t smudges. There was no need to sort through the conditions surrounding my scholarship money or what courses I would or wouldn’t be forced to take; the string of B-minuses meant none of that mattered. The grades in bio and chem meant that I’d done so well on the finals that I’d counteracted my earlier failing midterm exam grades, but the B-minus in my writing seminar meant both that I’d done well on the final paper and that my professor had shown mercy. I latched on to that last aspect—mercy—and instead of basking in the idea that these grades were a huge accomplishment, I sobbed: they’d all let me off easy. I remembered the tone of my hearing and thought, They want to keep their Cuban above water for another semester. They know how bad it would look, with so few of us even being admitted, or maybe they wanted to see how things with Ariel Hernandez turned out, and here I was, an authentic source of information (they knew my address, didn’t they?). But almost as quickly, another fact pushed that feeling away: the exams in the chem, bio, and calc courses were graded blindly—we were assigned ID numbers, and only those appeared on our answer sheets. So those scores were, in a way, pure. And somewhere inside of me, I knew this meant I was smart enough to be a Rawlings student, that whatever question I—or anyone—had about whether or not I deserved to be there should’ve stopped existing for me in that instant. But that’s not what I felt, sitting on the couch in basically my underwear, the bottoms of my feet black with dust from the stairwell, my stale breath wafting back at me from the paper. As I ran my tongue over my caked-on teeth, all I really felt was relief. I didn’t feel like celebrating because I’d proven I was capable of doing the work at a high level; I barely registered that that’s what I’d done. No, I felt like celebrating because my worrying about those grades—the dread lurking under the last month of my life—was over.
I sank into the couch and closed my eyes, mumbled Thank you to the ceiling. I considered calling my dad to brag before remembering the money—that he’d think I was calling for the extra fifty dollars. And what was there to say really, when for sure he’d see my B-minuses as weak grades. You haven’t gotten a B since middle school, he’d say. How could I explain it to him, or to my sister or to Omar—These grades are different—without sounding like an asshole? I decided not to call anyone, to instead give myself a few more minutes of just me and those grades and what they meant, to register the new subtext, even if I couldn’t name it for what it was: I can do this. I am, already, doing this.
*
When Omar eventually showed up at the apartment that morning, Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand, a greasy bag of buttered Cuban bread in the other, and with a visible boner I worked to ignore tenting his silvery basketball shorts, I told him that my grades had shown up—All As and one B, I said, a kind of translation of my real grades into how they felt rather than what they were—and he declared that news, as I knew he would, reason to really fucking celebrate.
We settled on Ozone. Omar got us on the list (which only meant he’d given his name and phone number to random people with clipboards standing outside other venues in the weeks leading up to that night) at three different clubs, but Ozone, because it was essentially a huge tricked-out warehouse in downtown Miami, was the one he felt most certain we’d get into before midnight. Leidy had always owned better club clothes than me, and now she willingly let me borrow something from her side of the closet—a big change from our typical fights over, say, a mesh or fringe-trimmed shirt that she’d claim I’d stink up with my armpits, her standard objection to letting me use her club clothes. She pulled out a ridiculous magenta halter top; I initially mistook it for a bandana and said, No I need a shirt. She unwrapped its straps, like tentacles, from around the hanger and held it up to her own chest. There was a big cutout shaped like a teardrop down the middle of it, presumably to show off some major cleavage. It didn’t seem like enough material to rein in Leidy’s chest—not after Dante. Her fingers worked the various tangles in the straps, then she tugged the halter into place over her T-shirt, revealing its snakeskin pattern: jagged zigzags shining in a darker magenta. I’d never seen this shirt before. She managed to corral her breasts into it, and even though she sucked in her stomach, a roll of new fat popped out under the shirt’s bottom edge. She put her hands on her hips.
—What do you think of this? she said.
I leaned back on my hands. That, I said, is one hot fucking top.
She laughed and undid the knots after glimpsing herself in the mirror.
—I bought this like a month after Dante was born. It’s my goal shirt.
Her breasts spilled back out and she was able to breathe normally again. She held the shirt between two fingers like a rag and dropped it on my lap. Go for it, she said.
I passed on her recommendation of her slit-up-the-side go-to club skirt—I imagined some strain of skanky Ozone bacteria lurking on Omar’s hands finding an easy way into my body; people were already referring to that club as Hoe-zone—and opted instead for a tight pair of black capri pants that sat very low on my hips.
Later, as she and Dante watched me in the bathroom mirror while I smeared on eye shadow, she said, You look so hot Omar’s gonna freak out when he sees you.
—Whatever, I laughed.
My mom yelled my name from the couch, where she was watching the news and also on the telephone with a neighbor, talking through the next day’s Ariel Hernandez rally. Neither Leidy nor my mom had asked about my grades, but neither even knew they were coming. I yelled back, What? And without getting up or lowering the TV, she yelled, Omar llamó ahora mismo que he’s on his way.
I yelled to the mirror, Okay!
—You want me to take a picture of you guys before you leave? Leidy said. Mami’s camera has film, though who knows if she’ll let me use it on you in that shirt.
A brush loaded with more silver-gray shadow hovered above my eyelid.
—Do I look way too slutty? Tell me the truth.