Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet

mailboxes, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a fistful of plastic and metal, more key chains than keys. I fumbled for the tiniest one while eyeing the crush of papers waiting inside, visible through the slit of a window lodged in my mailbox’s face. Through that slit I spotted the bright red envelope the school used to mail out the bursar bills. I had these sent to myself at my campus address because at first, when they went to my mom’s apartment, her and Leidy lost their minds over numbers so big, not realizing that most of the figures in one column were canceled out by the figures in another. I’d switched the delivery address and dealt with it myself after a second month’s round of panicked calls from home. In the box, too, were flyers for concerts I wouldn’t go to, ads for events in the Commons about which I didn’t give a shit—pool tournaments, marathon game nights, free popcorn and screenings of French films—paperwork for a housing lottery I might or might not be around to experience, and in the smash of all of it, in that little bin, there was, as I’d predicted for Omar, a sealed letter from the Office of the Dean of Students.
    I dumped the flyers in the recycling bin and shoved the bill and the lottery info and the letter into the mesh pocket inside my jacket. As empty as the Commons was, I wanted to open the letter in my room to guarantee I’d be alone, in case the reality of the set date made me cry.
    I didn’t even stop to take off my shoes. I stood on Jillian’s rug—I’d clean up any mud later—and unzipped my jacket, then the mesh pocket, let the other envelopes drop to the floor, and opened the Dean of Students letter. The paper was thin and beautiful, the school’s seal glowing through the middle of the page like a sun. It felt too elegant to be a piece of mail I’d been dreading. At the end of my hearing, an older white woman waiting outside of the conference room had touched the back of my arm as I’d left—I’d almost darted right past her—and walked me through another set of doors and around her desk in the lobby, telling me that she’d send a notice via campus mail with information about the next meeting once a decision was reached. I’d nodded but said nothing, staring only at the bright lipstick clinging to her mouth; she wore no other makeup, and the effect was both cartoonish and sad. As she opened one half of the wooden double doors I had come in through over an hour earlier, her mouth added that we’d likely meet in the same place. I saw now that she was right: I was to report to the same office in the same building on Monday at three thirty P.M . There was a phone number listed to call if that time was a problem, but also a sentence (one of only four on the whole sheet) stating that my supervisor at the library had already been notified of the conflict and had agreed to excuse me from the first half of my Monday shift.
    I read those four sentences over and over again, bringing the letter closer to my face as I slid off my shoes, then as I sat on Jillian’s bed. I took the meeting being scheduled in the afternoon—after a full day of classes—as a bad sign, thinking it meant that the committee wanted to give me one last day to enjoy being a Rawlings student: one last morning bathroom rush among dozens of the country’s brightest students; one last hundred-year-old lecture room with heavy, carved desks; one last glasses-clad professor in a real tweed jacket at the chalkboard; one last walk across the snow-covered quad. Let her have at least that , I imagined the lone woman on the committee telling the four men. Let’s at least give her that. It didn’t feel like enough, and I thought about calling the number and saying that I wouldn’t be there, that I was still in Miami and involved in a local protest about a boy who’d come from Cuba, that as eager as I