IN THE HANDFUL OF DAYS BEFORE I flew north for the spring semester, Ariel’s uncle, at the urging of a team of Cuban-American lawyers working pro bono in response to the INS mandate that Ariel return to Cuba within two weeks of the day my mother collapsed in front of his house, sued for temporary custody. So he was not Ariel’s legal guardian—then he would pursue becoming just that, his daughter Caridaylis dutifully at his side. While I was on the plane back to school (somewhere over Georgia would be my guess), this custodial status was approved as an emergency measure by a Miami court as legalities got sorted out. I imagined poor Omar—who’d driven me to the airport because, when he came over that morning to say goodbye, I’d shown him the note my mom left saying that she couldn’t take me; she’d gone to the courthouse before I’d woken up—stuck in the Ariel-related traffic that no doubt plagued his drive home.
That court’s decision, according to some experts, nullified the order that Ariel be deported by mid-January. According to other experts, this decision meant nothing because a federal agency had already implicitly decided otherwise. I heard these news bites secondhand from the bank of TVs near the school store’s cash registers while in line to buy my spring books, or from the sets I passed on my way in or out of the student union—and not from our apartment’s window or my mom’s mouth. Although at some point I’d likely be required to take a government or history course like the one Jaquelin took in the fall that would explain the origins of these legal complications, I was far from anything close to that kind of understanding, and the truth was I didn’t want it; this was going to be some long, legal nightmare, and I planned to stay as ignorant about it as possible in order to avoid becoming the Representative Cuban at Rawlings College. But escaping that fate became almost as big a challenge as getting Ariel’s status in the United States settled.
That first week back on campus, many of the people in my dorm asked me my opinion—while I brushed my teeth, in line at the dining hall—and they thought something was wrong with me when I’d shrug and answer, I don’t know. They said, How can you not know? I wanted to hate them for asking—to prop the ever-gracious and ever-accommodating Jaquelin in front of them as the better Rawlings Latino Ambassador—but it was hard to do that because they were right: I did live two blocks from Ariel, even if they didn’t know that. Two days after we returned, my RA knocked on our door, and right in front of Jillian, said she’d gotten an e-mail from a woman in the Dean of Students office asking her to check in with me, to remind me of all the people willing and able to support me. Support me through what, I said. And Jillian answered for her: Through everything going on back home. Nothing’s going on! I laughed. He’s not my freaking brother, sorry to disappoint you. This outpouring had nothing to do with my mom’s participation in the rallies: I was careful to keep those facts from everyone but especially from Jillian, who thought she was hearing some nonexistent code in Leidy’s messages. But I might as well have been Caridaylis herself, the way people kept asking me what I thought. I feigned disinterest because I didn’t want their assumptions proven right. It was only a coincidence that I knew and cared about the protests, not a consequence of being Cuban, and so I denied caring at all. I just want to study, I told the RA, told Jillian again and again. I just wanted to lose myself in the spectacular classes on my schedule—spectacular to me mostly because they were courses I’d chosen rather than those I would’ve been forced to take had my fall grades been lower. I was enrolled in the next round of biology, the next round of calc, and the Spanish II class I’d placed into during orientation week but which I’d left off my fall schedule, thinking I knew enough Spanish and not realizing I’d need to prove proficiency in a foreign language in a Rawlings-certified way. I sat out chemistry just so I could tell my advisor, who now sent me a perfunctory e-mail every couple weeks, that I’d learned something about balance the semester before. In its place, I signed up for the Monday morning section of a weekly lab course called Investigative Biology Laboratory: Best Practices, a sort of boot camp for people hoping to do laboratory research someday. I figured it would help me, in some vague way, build the equally vague community clinic I’d written about in my admissions essay. I still worried that someone would hold me to the claims I’d made in that document, and I wanted to show I was already on my way to making good on those promises.