Make Your Home Among Strangers

He shrugged off the lesson by putting his hands up and saying, Whatever you want to call it, but that sounds like one way to put it.

 

—Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be? These angry exiles? I mean (—and here I borrowed Ethan’s “community building” air quotes, though I wasn’t quoting anything—), the world is watching us! My roommate in fucking New Jersey is watching us!

 

—El, what the fuck are you talking about?

 

Colored beams flicked over our limbs, parts of us bright, other parts in the dark. A red light flared above Omar’s head, but instead of making him glow the way Ethan did the night he learned my name, Omar’s head was just a black hole, his face all in shadow. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see myself anymore—I recognized it as exactly that, even at the beginning of it, when I couldn’t name it: Lizet playing a part. I’d thought a shirt from Leidy’s clubbing stash would cover me by not covering me, would turn me back into El, but I was separate from her now, aware I was putting her on, and that colored everything. Omar was grabbing my wrists to stop me from running away again.

 

—I want to go, I screamed. I want to go, I want to go now!

 

He yanked me to his chest and said through his teeth, Stop, stop it. My body slammed against his and I turned my face to the side, smearing lipstick on his shirt as I did it. That’s when I saw our audience: people were watching us argue. Women much taller and thinner and tanner than me—women who looked like the TV version of Miami that wasn’t me but that my shirt was striving for—tapped their grinding boyfriends with a long fingernail and then pointed that nail right at me. Look at her, the thrust of one’s chin said. Another’s forehead tipping my way: Check out that crazy bitch.

 

—What you looking at, you fucking hoe? I screamed at one, but she ignored me.

 

Omar turned me away from the dance floor, pinning my arms behind me in a hug.

 

—Have you seriously lost your mind? he said in my ear. I dropped like a hundred bucks to get us in here. You want to get us kicked out?

 

I said into his armpit, I don’t care.

 

I swayed for a few seconds and said again, I want to go. I want to go already.

 

He wrapped his whole hand under my chin; I thought of Rafael, how he’d done the same thing despite barely knowing me.

 

—El, it’s not even midnight.

 

—I don’t care, I said.

 

I wrestled my face from his grip to flick my eyes over the crowd, but I couldn’t find the woman I’d just yelled at. She’d been reabsorbed into the dance floor’s anonymous mass—or maybe she hadn’t been there at all. I looked back at Omar to find him scanning my face. He might’ve been saying something. His mouth dimmed as he peered into one eye, then the other, then back again: maybe I was closing them? The sky behind Omar and his face—both were dark enough. That I was closing them made enough sense. I lifted myself up on my toes, my legs stretching, and smashed my mouth against his.

 

He didn’t push me off, or stop me to say I needed to drink some water, or ask me to control myself. Omar was lucky; he was still just one Omar—not broken like me, an El and a Liz trapped in one head. Omar didn’t have to analyze what Omar would do. He just kissed me back, biting my bottom lip in a way that would later cause it to swell and crack. He lifted me off the ground, my arms still trapped behind me, and hoisted my body against his. But I didn’t open my legs. I let them hang, making him carry the whole deadweight of El until he eased me back to the ground.

 

—Okay, he said. That’s what you want, then let’s go.

 

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