“We did fine here,” I say. “Did you see how the laundry hamper’s totally empty?”
“I did, and I know. But oh, mijita, I felt so torn. I started thinking about sending you girls up to Ohio until I got back. I was thinking about this as I was sitting with Abuela. It felt like I could never put my energy in the right place.”
I love hearing her voice beside me. It reminds me of when I would fall asleep listening to her read to me. I loved that so much that I almost wish I could fill that space with my story now—the Estate and how I got myself there.
“I missed you,” is all I manage to say. “And I miss Abuela too.”
“I know.” Mom gets up from the bed. I recognize the sound of her moving her perfume bottles aside and plugging in her electric toothbrush. “But, well, back to the real world for now. They wouldn’t let me take leave from work any longer, and I can’t afford to lose my job, especially with you graduating this year.”
“Yep.”
“Did you hear anything from your colleges?” she says.
I knew she would ask this. And the way she says it, quiet and languid, slipping it out of her subconscious where it’s been rolling around for weeks, makes me think I don’t have to answer it right now. I know she’s proud of herself for going to college. I know she wants everything to go right for me and Angela. And every time I consider that there’s so much about me she doesn’t know, I have to consider the same thing about her. Her childhood was in Spanish; her dreams and thoughts still are. I want us to understand each other.
She comes back to the bed and rubs my shoulder again. It feels amazing.
“I drove your car while you were gone,” I tell her sleepily. “Like, a lot. Every day.”
“Oh, Mercedes.” She laughs quietly. “If I was so worried about you driving it, I would have locked it up at the Tampa airport the whole time. And you probably still would have found a way to get it.”
“I appreciate that you appreciate my ingenuity.”
“Always have,” she says.
Sometime overnight, Angela has gotten rid of the piano. It’s just gone. And the living room looks how Mom probably thought it looked the whole time she was gone—cluttered with our stuff, not hers.
It turns out Mom changed up her sleeping habits when she was in Puerto Rico. It’s eleven p.m. on Tuesday and she’s baking bread for tomorrow’s dinner. I wander in and wait until she offers me a taste of her first finished loaf. I probably look convincingly like someone who is going to sleep soon, pajamas on and my hair pulled back in an elastic headband. She doesn’t know that we are engaged in a silent game of physical endurance called “Who Will Sleep First?” I glance at her face, at her eyes, without her taking too much notice, and I am pretty sure I am going to lose this round.
Twelve thirty, and she’s out in the living room, in the bare spot by the window, doing one yoga pose after another. I’m going to have to change my plans.
It’s Wednesday and the fifth-period English girls are suspicious of my presence. We’re sitting inside for lunch today, me on the periphery of their table beside the front windows as rain pounds against the school building. I used to imagine these days: the last quarter of senior year, when, as my mom always told me, everyone in the class becomes friendlier as they realize they’re going to miss one another. I think secretly I was waiting for that, maybe more as an exercise in performance art than anything else. I wanted to witness that moment when a kindly ambassador from the Smoking Corner residents visits the AP kids’ lunch tables, and bonds are formed on the basis of rebellion against the ruling class of Forever 21–clad statues to socially acceptable amounts of partying. But I have yet to see it happen. When I said hey and sat down next to the fifth-period English girls (Lizzy, always writing poems; Gianna, recently dumped after two years with the same guy; Em, queen of the swim team and possibly into girls), they looked at me like I was indeed a visitor from another place, and not one arriving out of goodwill. I think I regret not turning these girls from acquaintances to friends. I can’t blame them for how they’re looking at me.
“Hi, ladies. Can I join you all?”
A milk shake appears in the space on the table across from me. And then the familiar hands of Victoria Caballini.
I let the other girls officially invite her to sit. They want to know about her Juilliard audition, and so she holds court for a few minutes, telling them about each increasingly difficult dance section of the audition, and how dancers were sent packing after each part, with only a few making it all the way to the interview at the end.
“And so I finally got to sit down!” Vic says, which gets the expected laugh.
When she’s not talking, she’s been alternately sipping on and marveling at her milk shake, and I think she’s going to start reciting a poem about it any minute now. But whatever it is, it’ll have the rhythm that’s behind everything she says: I’m leaving, I’m leaving.
My fingers tremble against my water bottle. Shit. I hold one hand down with the other.
Vic glances at me.
She’s leaving.
The other girls are talking about the FSU party scene. Dorms and bars and how to start meeting people when you land in a place as big as the Tallahassee campus. I wouldn’t know. I nod along. An ache starts in my back, tugging its way up from my tailbone to my spine and into my shoulder and upper-arm muscles. Painting muscles, I sometimes call them.
I shift in my chair. My hand shudders against my water bottle, and I barely catch it before it falls over. The other girls look at me.
Vic says something about how Tallahassee isn’t as big as New York, which doesn’t land with the same success as her Juilliard story.
I want to thank her for being socially awkward. But my shoulders ache and the backs of my knees sweat. “Girls,” I say, standing up, “I’d like to announce that I have no idea where I’m going to college, and also that it’s been nice chatting with you.”
“Are you okay?” Vic says.
I’m not sure how to answer. The rain has stopped pummeling the windows, has moved aside for a minute to let me go. I hurry out of the cafeteria.