Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet Page B

showed up to the lecture hall with the same letter dangling from our hands, an invitation from the college’s Office of Diversity Affairs promising fun at yet another ice cream social. I’d already had so much ice cream that week that I wondered if Rawlings made some deal with a local dairy farm—I’d seen enough cows during the ride in from the airport to think this possible. The letter stated, in bold type, that this meeting was mandatory (which sort of detracted from the fun aspect), and it also stated that this would be our chance to familiarize ourselves with the various campus resources available to students of color. It was the very first time I saw that phrase— students of color —but I was still brown enough from life in Miami to understand it meant me.
    I sat near the aisle in the last row of the lecture hall and watched the room fill in that direction: from last row to first. A small group—maybe seven people—came in together like they already knew each other, rowdy and talking loud as if headed to a pep rally. I later learned they were from the West Coast and part of a program called TROOP—an acronym for something—which meant they were all bound by that program to enroll at the same college as a unit, the program’s premise being that having each other on campus would make things easier, would keep each of them alive. But most of us came in alone, or in pairs if we were lucky enough to have bumped into someone else who’d gotten this rare letter in their orientation welcome packet.
    Eventually a girl sat two seats away from me, close enough that we had to talk. I said hey first and told her I liked her earrings—gold dangling things with feather-shaped pieces hanging from quarter-sized hoops—and the twang in her voice when she said Well hi there back made me wonder what she was doing at that meeting. She said her name was Dana and that she was from Texas; her father was from Argentina, and she visited relatives there every year, sometimes for a whole month. She’d spent most of the summer there, had just returned from relaxing on the family’s ranch before coming to Rawlings.
    â€”Hence this tan, she said with an eye roll.
    She held out her arms, turned and inspected them, then lifted her legs and wiggled her Christmas-red toenails, her feet in gold sandals. She said her mother was American, which was why she didn’t really speak Spanish. She was rooming in a program house called the Multicultural Learning Unit, a new building I’d thought about applying to live in until I read about the extra fees associated with program houses—I wasn’t sure if financial aid would go toward covering those. I nodded at everything she told me, relieved like nothing I’d ever felt that she wasn’t asking about my family, my summer, my tan.
    â€”Don’t worry, she said. I think this meeting is more for the black students. It’s hard to be black on a campus like this.
    She looked at her nails, long and polished and completely natural—not the acrylics I thought I’d spied when she first sat next to me. She watched the group who had come in together settle down in the very front row.
    â€”I love black guys, she told me. My ex-boyfriend was black.
    â€”That’s cool, I said.
    â€”He gave me this, she said.
    She tugged a thin chain out of her blouse. A gold medallion hung at the end of it, the letter D raised on its surface, little diamonds dotting the letter’s backbone. It was the kind of jewelry I imagined rich husbands who worked too many hours giving their wives on some anniversary.
    â€”We’re still friends, she said. I still love him a lot. He’s at Middlebury.
    â€”Oh, I managed.
    I pretended to pick something off my knee to avoid giving away that I didn’t know if Middlebury was a school or a city or something else entirely.
    â€”Yeah, I didn’t get in there, but whatever, it’s