Make Your Home Among Strangers (16 page)

—Who knew! I said. Hey, maybe go get some air?

She closed her eyes and nodded, then jolted them open and squealed, I want to see you dance later!

I kept my mouth shut but smiled.

She grabbed me in a bear hug—said, You are one fucking
hawt mamacita
!—then freed me and ran away, yipping as she sprinted outside.

I shrugged at Ethan and said, She sucks sometimes.

—I can see that, he said. He took a sip from his cup, leaned down even more, then said, Li-
zet
.

—Are you drunk, too? I said.

He tipped the cup down. This is water, he said. I don't drink shitty beer.

—There's non-shitty beer?

—
What?
he laughed. Where are you
from
?

—Miami, I said. I braced myself for the follow-up
But where are you
from
from?
by watching people's shoes turn slush into water on the floor, but it never came.

—Well that explains you not knowing there's good beer in the world.

I asked him where he was from, and he said Seattle.

—Which explains
my
excellent dancing outfit, he said. He pulled open the plaid shirt even more. The T-shirt underneath said
YIELD
.

I grinned. I didn't say anything about your clothes, I said.

—You didn't need to. He sipped more water, then sniffed his armpit. Damn, I
really
have to do laundry.

I recoiled with extra theatrics but then turned to stand by his side against the wall. I said, I can smell you from here, and he laughed and said, Right on.

—
Yield?
I said. I prefer
Stop
.

—Oh, right, so you're too
sophisticated
for Pearl Jam, like everyone else now?

—What does Pearl Jam have to do with anything?

He scratched the red hair sprouting on his chin, then pointed to the word on his shirt. He said, You know this is a Pearl Jam album, right?

I didn't. I couldn't even name a Pearl Jam song, though of course I'd heard of the band. I looked at his shoes—big, black boots—then up at his face, to his eyes, which sort of startled me with how light they were. A blast of cold came down the foyer as the song playing melted into another—one I loved. I knew exactly how many seconds I had until it got to the hook.

—But it's also – I work on campus as a street sign, he said.

I bent forward and laughed. The next school of girls flitted their way into the vast room where the music lived. Inside that room, just past its entrance, was some of the worst dancing I'd ever seen up to that point in my life. Even though the song playing had a heavy bass beat, had been all over the radio for months, even though the music video for it showcased a wide array of booty-dancing options for the viewer to imitate, either no one in there had seen that video, or something got lost between their brains and their bodies. Some people were just sort of jumping in place, not even moving their arms, while others thrashed from side to side—all to slightly different rhythms, as if they had on headphones and were listening to other songs. The girls who'd just walked in shoved out their butts, squatting as if doing some slutty aerobics. One girl started pumping her shoulders and high-stepping like a bird searching for a mate. I looked back at Ethan and expected to see him laughing at them, but he wasn't—not at all. He was tapping his foot. I slung my thumbs into my belt loops and tugged my jeans down my hips a little more.

—You gonna go dance or what? I said.

He smiled into his cup. I don't dance.

—You
don't
dance? Then why are you here?

—I came with some of my residents – I'm an RA in Donald Hall. Before you got here I was actually about to go.

—Uh-huh, I said.

He held up his arm, turned his wrist, showing off his wristband.

—Really, he laughed, I was
really
leaving. Probably head up to the bars and see who's around. It's twenty-one-and-over, though, so, sorry.

He pointed at my wristband and I snorted. The new song had been on for at least a minute by then. If I moved now, I'd catch the chorus.

He said, You're a freshman, right?

I looked away from him, back at what passed for dancing.

—Dude, he said, don't be ashamed. Enjoy it.

There was no way I looked only eighteen and he had to know it. He raised his cup to his mouth in an awkward move meant to hide his eyes as they moved over my waist, then my chest. I leaned back on the wall, pinning my hair against it with my shoulders.

He said after the long sip, I'm graduating this spring, and every time I think about it, I feel like I'm going to hurl. Time flies, Lizet.

I said, Would you say it
yields
for no one?

He cringed and said, OK, that was a good one, that was clever. But, on
that
note.

He pointed down to the ground. He said, The underage beer is in the basement, but you didn't hear that from Ethan the RA.

—You're really leaving.

He handed me his empty cup, gave me a crooked salute, then shot each of his thumbs toward the house's front door. He took one step away, then swung back to me and said, Do you like ice skating?

I scrunched my face, shook my head no. Never been, I said.

—
What!
He shoved his hands in his outdated hair and pulled it. You're
kidding me
.

—Remember when I said I was from Miami?

—So what? That means you're too cool for ice skating? I mean, it's
ice skating
!

—You don't
dance
.

He hopped in place and said, OK, tomorrow? One thirty in front of Donald Hall, I'm in charge of – it's a program for my residents. Not that many people signed up. You should come.

He stopped hopping and held up both his hands and said as he rolled his eyes, Don't worry, I know you have a boyfriend.

He backed away with his hands still up, like I was suddenly dangerous.

—I don't have skates or whatever, I said.

—Don't need 'em. Provided free of charge courtesy of Rawlings College.

He raised his arms to the ceiling as if Rawlings was God in the sky.

—Maybe I'll be there, I said.

—Stop being a poser and just show up tomorrow, he yelled from a few feet away.

—I'm not being a –

He made a buzzer sound, then yelled, Poser! Look at you posing! before ducking into the new crowd at the door.

The other people in the foyer all looked at me as he left, and I wondered if I
was
too cool for ice skating. I wondered what he'd meant by that—if I'd come off as snotty as I'd walked in rather than just confident and in control, finally in my element. Maybe it was simpler than that: maybe RAs got bonuses for recruiting another dorm's residents to their programs—double points for minorities! Why go through the show of inviting me otherwise, if I seemed
too cool
for it?

Jillian tumbled down the foyer toward me, way too excited about something.

—And who was
that
? she said.

Her hands slipped back to my shoulders. She pressed them against the wall, but I pulled her hands away and freed my hair by swinging it forward.

—Some guy I met at work. He's an RA.

She lurched at me and said, He
totally
wants you.

—And he's
totally
not my type. He's – it's like someone set fire to a palm tree.

—No! He's
cute
! she said. Wait! Is
he
why you've been avoiding Omar?

She wagged her finger in my face and I smacked it away.

—Don't you fucking do that, I said.

She cradled her hand and said to it, Whoa Nelly, calm down, Miss Thang.

—I don't even know that guy. And why do you – you smell like shit.

She stood up straight and grinned—said, I. Vomited. And now? More dancing!—then she darted back into the music before I could say anything.

A minute later I surveyed the perimeter of the massive room—the ceiling high and crisscrossed with wooden beams, the windows twelve feet tall and swathed in poured-looking curtains. Hundreds of people pulsed on the dance floor, and a DJ and his equipment stood far off on a platform in front of it. I finally found Jaquelin near that platform, right up against a speaker. She hugged me—her arms damp and cold from her sweat—then yelled, Look! and pointed to the DJ, a muscular guy wearing a red bandana over his hair, a pair of mirrored sunglasses shielding his eyes. It's a miracle! Jaquelin yelled, and we immediately started dancing together, immediately fell in sync. When we'd lift our hands in the air, the girls around us did it too, a few seconds later. When we went from a slow grind to shaking our asses as fast as we could, the girls around us tried to match us. Eventually the DJ threw on a song with a beat enough like a merengue, so then we danced as a couple, deploying every turn and spin we knew, and a circle started to grow around us. I was happier than I'd been in weeks, just moving like that, but Jaquelin kept pulling people into the circle with us, trying to show them a turn we'd just done. I heard her yell, Like this! to one girl, then she put her hands on the girl's hips and pushed them from side to side. Even though the girl was half a beat off, Jaquelin said, You got it! You're doing it! She came back to dance with me for another thirty seconds before spinning out and pulling another shitty dancer back in with her. When enough of them were around us that the circle had collapsed, she told me she was going to the bathroom, not to move from that spot. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the chill of some guy's sweat-soaked shirt as he edged behind me, pressing against me to dance, and I felt closer to home in that moment than when I'd been back there for Thanksgiving.

The DJ, a guy they'd brought from the closest big city, had been watching over the top of his sunglasses as me and Jaquelin danced, and now that it was just me grinding on some faceless stranger, he leaned down from his kingdom and yelled an invite up to the platform in my direction. I didn't need to answer: he grabbed my whole forearm and yanked me the three feet up to his side. A silver ring circled each finger he'd wrapped around my elbow. He wore a white tank top—a
wife-beater
, is what Omar would've called it—and what I'd first thought was a Mexican flag tattooed on his shoulder was actually an Italian one. He slid a headphone back from his ear, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled the side of my head to his mouth.

—I'm not supposed to let people up here, he said. But you're not people.

He asked me what I was doing at
a party like this
, and when I said I was a Rawlings student, he said, No fucking way! When I said, But I'm from Miami, he kissed the top of my head.

He set up the next song—another intense favorite, this one by a morbidly obese Puerto Rican rapper who, at 698 pounds, would be dead of a heart attack in less than two months—and as I danced with him, I slid his sunglasses off his face. From so close I saw he was older than I'd thought. I hid my own eyes behind the mirrored lenses. The heads in the crowd, hundreds of them, bobbed and swayed and jerked, their bodies packed together. Jaquelin was edging closer to the speaker again, standing in a new circle, the only nonwhite girl in it, her back to me. I spotted Jillian near one side, up next to one of those colossal windows, doing what looked like a very drunk impression of someone who couldn't dance. The farther out she stuck her ass, the more obvious it was that she didn't have one, and I laughed, hard.

Behind me, the DJ put his thick hand on my waist. I shifted so we stood side by side, bodies churning in front of us. He leaned over and said, Baby, tell me what you want me to play for you. I pulled my hair off my back—it was hotter up there, a few feet closer to the ceiling—and tied it into a loose knot on top of my head.

—What songs you got, I said out to the crowd, with the word
ass
in them?

He lowered the hand to my hip, and I pretended not to notice. I slipped the headphones from around his neck, avoiding the film of sweat clinging to him, and put them over my own ears.

 

14

I LEFT JILLIAN (IN HER CLOTHES
from the night before, minus the boots) sleeping facedown on her still-made bed, getting dressed and leaving without waking her. After a few hours in the library rereading the early chapters in my chem textbook and outlining them the way my tutor had suggested, I hauled myself and my stuff to Donald Hall. It was one of the more modern dorms, with a wide entrance and a sort of concrete porch, which is where a group of ten or so people—Ethan not among them—stood waiting, a few with skates hanging from their shoulders. As I walked up to the circle, I glanced through the building's glass doors and realized I'd never been inside any dorm but mine.

Ethan materialized from a stairwell door and met me with a huge wave, saying, You made it! as he came outside. He introduced me to the other residents all up for ice skating that afternoon, most of them freshmen like me. Everyone looked exhausted, pale: Ethan even said, I'm thinking this is a much-needed break, you guys. Just one week left before study week starts. We can do this!

We slouched across campus to the rink where the hockey team played and practiced. I'd seen it from the outside during an orientation week tour, but it was up near the athletic fields—a part of campus I never needed to visit. Ethan asked me how the party had wrapped up, and all I said was, Good. He mentioned that a few of the people walking with us now had been there, had I seen them? He herded us together into a little group of three and then abandoned us for another subset of residents. We proceeded to have an awkward conversation about the DJ and whether or not he was
sketchy.
They declared me the ultimate authority on this issue, since they recognized me as the girl who'd gotten closest to him.