But this woman, before I could think of how to best tell the story, put her hand over my hand and set her face in this serious way, her eyeliner thick under her bottom lashes, and said, It’s not a really good school. It’s a fantastic school. Congratulations.
I shrugged, said thanks, and tried to slide my hand out from under hers, but she grabbed it and said, No, really. Getting in there is a huge freaking deal. You should be proud as hell. And from a school like Lakes? Holy shit, girl.
Outside, the houses whizzing by had bars over their windows, which meant we were closing in on my old neighborhood, but those bars—it’s like I’d never noticed them before. I shrugged again and looked down at the floor; it was covered in clear candy wrappers. I imagined someone here before me, on this same route, eating a thousand mints, readying her breath for whomever she’d come to Miami to see.
The woman lifted my hand off the seat and said, You know that, right? That you should be proud?
Her mouth was shut, the muscles on the sides of her jaw flaring in and out. I finally pulled my hand away, balled it into a fist. I said, Yeah, I know.
She said, Good, and slid her palms along the sides of her head to check the gelled-back precision of her hair. I shifted my feet and the wrappers crunched beneath them. Water stains climbed the canvas of my sneakers, where winter slush had soaked in and dried and soaked in again. They were ruined, and that officially made them my winter shoes.
—How are you doing in your classes so far? she asked.
I looked up from the floor and caught the driver staring at us in his mirror. He yelled, Hialeah! And since I knew that wasn’t really my neighborhood anymore, and since this woman’s question proved she didn’t want my Nobel Bash story, I figured I’d try out how it felt to stop the game of me being this credit to where I was from, this beginning of a success story, and instead, finally admit the truth to someone who maybe would understand.
—I’m doing bad, I said.
Her thick eyebrows slid together and they somehow looked more perfect like that. She leaned her face forward, closing her eyes and crinkling the skin around them in a pained way that I thought said, Go on, tell me, I’m listening.
I said, I’m doing really bad, actually. I don’t know why it’s so hard. Everyone else seems to just know stuff and I – I don’t. It’s like I’m the only one. I don’t even know how I got in sometimes, that’s how hard it is, how much I’m messing up. So yeah. It’s going really, really bad for me.
—Oh god, the woman said. It’s – what’s your name?
—Lizet, I told her.
—Lizet, she said. It’s bad-lee.
—What?
—You’re doing badly. Not bad. Bad-lee.
I sat there with my mouth open, possibly making a dumb sound with the air seeping out from it. I could taste it then: my bad breath, the breath of someone who’d kept her mouth shut all day.
I blamed the new sting in my eyes on this breath and said, Right, okay.
Out the van’s window, we passed my old high school, which hadn’t changed since the summer: the eight-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped fence surrounding the city block on which it stood, the windowless two-story facade with the words HIALEAH LAKES painted on it in all capital letters, the whole building the same gray as the concrete surrounding it. It was the gray of the winter I’d just left, and I had to touch the window again to make sure it wasn’t freezing. When my hand felt the warm glass, I let it rest there, my fingers a barricade sparing me from the next block we sped past, then the next block, with the mini-mall that housed the My Dreams II Banquet Hall, where, if we could’ve afforded the formal party, my Quinces would’ve probably happened. I tried to remember who I’d been friends with at fourteen, before Omar came along and replaced them: which girls or boys I would’ve asked to make up the fourteen couples of my quincea?era court. I chanted their names, first and last, in my head and over the word badly as each couple added themselves to the list; I invented last names where I no longer remembered them, all to distract myself from the salty water brimming at the edges of my vision.
—Oh no, the woman finally whispered. No, don’t – I didn’t mean it like –
—?Se?ora? the driver said.
The van stopped.
—Shit, she said. This is me.
She dug around in her purse and said, Here, take this. I want you to e-mail me.
She held out a little card—a business card. I took it from her, making sure my thumb covered her name. The seal for the Michigan school took up the whole left side, the side my thumb couldn’t cover.
—I know you don’t know me, she said. But I’m – I’m a resource. We’re two girls from Hialeah who left for, you know, better things, right? More opportunities? And I want to help you any way I can. We have to stick together, right?
That same square smile, wrecking her face. The driver unbuckled his seatbelt. He turned on the blinkers—the tinny, rhythmic tick of them flashing on and off behind me—and got out of the van. I nodded.