Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet

Author:Jennine Capó Crucet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466865044
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

21

I CALLED OMAR THAT NIGHT. I waited until my head was clear, until Leidy and my mom were asleep. I used the kitchen phone, my back against the wall and my butt on the floor again, this time in my mom’s apartment. I was ready to hear it from him too now, for him to chew me out for being a baby and a bitch and a bad girlfriend.

—I was wondering if you were gonna pull another Thanksgiving on me, Omar said almost right away, after sighing at hearing me say, It’s me, it’s El.

Despite what I’d thought up to that moment, it felt good to hear his voice, to hear him say he missed me. He’d just gotten home from his own family’s party and was sweet instead of angry because he’d been drinking. But only a little, he said. We were flirty, joking around in a way we hadn’t since we’d first confessed to liking each other. He told me some of our friends had called him to go out, telling him to let me know too, since no one had the apartment’s new number, but that he was waiting on me to call him first.

—You’re the one visiting, he said.

He admitted he did and didn’t understand what was up with me, but that he knew I was freaked out about school and the hearing results. I know how you get, he said—the same phrase my dad had used at breakfast to warn me about my mom.

—I thought maybe they’d given you the electric chair or something, he said. You never called me back. How bad was it?

I kept quiet. Only a few days had passed since my last exam, but it all felt so far behind me that I couldn’t go back to it, not with his voice so close in my ear, with how easy it was to talk to him about anything else.

—It wasn’t bad, I said. It was a big misunderstanding. It’s fixed now, it’s over.

I closed my eyes, praying he wouldn’t ask for more because there was nothing else about it I could bring myself to say to him.

—So you don’t have to come home?

—No, I said. Are you sad?

I meant it sarcastically, but he said, Yes and no. He said he’d been thinking a lot about me, about how I pushed him away whenever I got stressed, but that he figured we were meant to be, so neither of us had to work too hard.

—What we are is bigger than talking every night on the phone, El, he said, and every little hair on my arms stood straight up. Maybe I was making my own problems. When he asked if he could come over the next day, on Christmas, I twirled the phone cord around my finger and said, Why? You got a present for me?

—I do, he said. Got it a while ago.

I let the cord unravel back into place. I hadn’t gotten him anything and said so.

—I didn’t expect you to, he said.

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