The ticket in my hand said Zone 8: Little Havana. I read it twice before remembering that it wasn’t a mistake. I’d lived in Hialeah my whole life except for the very last week before I left for Rawlings. I’d memorized the new address, but only because I’d entered and reentered it on all sorts of forms during orientation, correcting and updating it on anything I’d submitted before that fall. Even to someone from Hialeah, Little Havana was a joke back then, the part of Miami only the most recent of refugees called home, a place tour buses drove through, where old Cuban men played dominos for tourists and thought that made them celebrities. But none of these geographical distinctions mattered at Rawlings. There, when people asked, So where are you from? and I said, Hialeah, they answered: Wait, where? And so I gave them a new answer: Miami, I’m from Miami. Oh, they’d say, But where are you from from? I was from from Miami, but eventually I learned to say what they were trying to figure out: My parents are from Cuba. No, I’ve never been. Yes, I still have family there. No, we don’t know Fidel Castro. Once I learned what I was supposed to say, it became a chant, like the address I’d memorized but didn’t think of as home.
People packed in around me. An elderly white couple—the wrinkled man helping the wrinkled woman up the steps of the van, holding her by her bracelet-crammed wrist—creaked their way onto the seat bench in front of me, spreading out in the hopes of keeping anyone from sitting by them. It didn’t work: a young-looking lady pushed in beside them. She wore smart gray pants and a matching blazer with patches on the elbows, and she looked like she could maybe be a professor somewhere except for the fact that she was clearly Latina; I’d yet to see a Latino professor on the Rawlings campus, though I knew from pictures in the school’s guidebook that there were a few somewhere. But then I thought, Maybe she teaches at FIU or Miami Dade. Maybe she’s new there. Her hair was pulled back tight, slicked smooth with gel. To the old couple she said, Good evening, and they nodded back at her. The old woman scooted closer to her husband, the orange cloud of her hair touching his shoulder. She turned her face—the side of it dotted with brownish spots, a few whiskers sprouting from a fold under her chin—and inspected the young woman the way I’d just done before turning away.
—Coral Gables, the old woman said. She leaned forward, put her hand on the driver’s chair. Our stop is Coral Gables, near the – Gerald, just tell him how to get there.
—The man knows, Sharon. It’ll be fine.
He grunted this with a sturdiness that would’ve shut me up. It’ll be fine. I rested my forehead against the window—surprised, after so many cold weeks in New York, by the warm glass. Outside, the sun dipped behind buildings and palm trees, only the red welt of it still visible. I hadn’t decided yet if I should use this trip home to confess my issues at school to my mom; I’d bought my ticket weeks before things started to look so bad. I was straight-up failing my chemistry course, but by Thanksgiving this problem was only a footnote to a list of other issues, the most serious being that I had accidentally plagiarized part of a paper in my freshman writing class and would soon be meeting again with the Academic Integrity Committee about what this meant in terms of my status as a student at Rawlings. I’d testified at my hearing a week earlier: I’d attempted to correctly cite something, but I didn’t even know the extent to which that needed to be done to count as correct. The committee said it was taking into consideration the fact that I’d gone to Hialeah Lakes High. Several times during my hearing, they’d referred to it as “an underserved high school,” which I figured out was a nice way of saying a school so shitty that the people at Rawlings had read an article about it in The New Yorker. They’d expected me to know about this article—You mean to tell us you aren’t familiar with the national attention your former school is receiving?—as well as that magazine when the only one I ever read back then was Vanidades, which my mom sometimes mailed me after reading them herself during her shifts directing calls at the City of Miami Building Department. I’d swallowed and told the committee no, I was not aware. The committee was also, in general, worried about my ability to succeed at Rawlings given that I was considering a biology major. The truth was, I didn’t really know if I should major in biology, but I planned to major in biology anyway because I’d read it was one of the largest, most popular majors at Rawlings, and therefore (I reasoned) couldn’t possibly be that hard. The truth was, I had enough to worry about that Thanksgiving before my flight got canceled, before I’d ever heard the name Ariel Hernandez. And just like the fact of me even being in the city in a van headed her way, my mother knew about none of it.
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