was to hear their decision, it would have to waitâor maybe not even matter, because maybe Iâd have to stay in Miami and be proactive , have to advocate for something; I could use the committeeâs own vocabulary against them. Sorry I canât make it (I imagined myself saying after some beep), but donât feel bad about kicking me out because really, thereâs a lot going on down here, and really, I need to be home right now anyway.
I placed the letter on my desk and picked up the phone, but there was no dial tone. I gawked at the receiverâeven the phones were gone for break?âthen almost dropped it when I heard a voice: Omar telling someone to shut the hell up.
âWhoa, it didnât even ring , he said after my confused Hello? You just sitting there waiting for me, huh?
âNo, I said.
Behind him, I heard Chinoâs voice and another guyâa voice I didnât recognizeâboth laughing. I shoved the letter into my deskâs top drawer, heard it tear as it crinkled against Jillianâs gifted mittens. I pushed the drawer shut.
âI was about to call somebody, I said.
âWho?
âDonât worry about it.
I grabbed my sneaker off the rug and launched it hard at the closet door.
âOh itâs like that ? he said. I thought you were gonna call me when you got there.
âI just walked in the door, Omar. Seriously? Can I get a fucking minute?
âAre you serious right now? I fucking call you and you talk to me like this?
I heard Chino say, Oh shit , and then a car door slam, then the voice that wasnât Chinoâs yelling, Bro, just hang up on that bitch already, we gotta go.
âWho the fuck is that ? I said.
âDonât worry about it.
I took the phone in both my hands and crashed it into the cradle, then lifted it and slammed it again. I picked up my other sneaker and hurled it in the general direction of the first oneâs landing spot, then hauled my suitcase onto Jillianâs bed so I could pace in my socks around her rug while waiting for Omar to call back.
The longer the phone went without ringing, the more the things in my bag made it into my drawers, smashed back into place, until after a while, I reached in and found nothing. So I filled the suitcase with the dirty clothes Iâd left in a pile under my bed and zipped it shut, then shoved it where the pile had been. On Jillianâs desk, which sat at the foot of her bed, lived the white egg of her Mac desktop, angled so that she could see the monitor from bed like a TV. I pulled back her butter-colored quilt, slipped one of her DVDs into her sleeping computerâs driveâa movie Iâd never seen called Life of Brian by Monty Python, a comedy group Iâd mistakenly called âThe Monty Pythonâ when Jillian first asked me if I liked them and I tried to play it off like I knew who they wereâand got in her bed, tugging the quilt up around me. Iâd never so much as sat on her bed before that night, but now I reached over from it to the dresser and grabbed the box of cereal Iâd left perched there. I tucked the box under the quilt with me.
The movie playedâthe screenâs glow the only light in the roomâand I had a hard time understanding the actors because of the British accents and the cerealâs crunch filling my ears between the jokes I didnât know to laugh at. So I watched the movie two more times, looking for clues to the jokes, for the setupsâthe warnings Iâd missed. I even turned on the subtitles the third time through. I laughed when it seemed like I should, until the act of laughing itself triggered the real thing.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
During orientation week, Iâd missed a different sort of warning the day I met the handful of other incoming Latino students (we comprised three percent of that yearâs class) as well as the black students (another four percent) at an assembly. We each
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