Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet Read Free Book Online Page A

Sexy female polar bear?
    â€”I can’t believe you didn’t know I had a brother, she said a few seconds later. That’s weird, I thought you knew that.
    A door slammed in the hallway and a male voice laughed.
    I eventually said to my reflection in the window, It’s not that weird. You don’t know I have a baby nephew, do you? His name is – my sister named him Dante.
    I’d imagined this moment already—the moment where I’d explain Dante’s name to my roommate—back when Jillian was just an idea, just a name printed in a letter from the school. I’d planned to tell the theoretical Jillian that Leidy named Dante after the famous writer, a name she came across when she looked over my shoulder at something I happened to be reading (not for school, just for fun, I’d say). This was nowhere near the truth: Leidy said the name Dante was super original and that’s the only reason she gave anyone for picking it. At the sonogram appointment where we learned the baby’s sex—I’d skipped sixth period to drive her—the tech had swirled a finger over the screen and said to us, There’s the penis, and Leidy was relieved: she thought Roly would be more likely to forgive her if she gave him a son instead of a daughter. I was relieved, too, since by then I’d learned about history’s Dante, and I could tell people, when they asked, that she took the name from that.
    But I hadn’t anticipated utter silence as my roommate’s response when I planned this conversation in my head, hadn’t visualized the bags under my own eyes staring back at me in the dark window. I couldn’t bear to turn around and see Jillian’s open mouth, or maybe she was laughing so hard that she couldn’t make a sound. I waited for the rustle of her turning a page, but there was nothing. Down the corridor from us, a rollicking song with a female singer started playing from someone’s stereo, but the stereo’s owner closed their door seconds after the first notes hit the hallway. From the kitchen came a peppery smell—someone cooking instant soup.
    â€”You smell that? I tried. When Jillian didn’t answer, I decided to go back to snow and said, You know, there’s places in America where people can trick-or-treat without worrying about freezing to death.
    She didn’t laugh, so I turned around to face her judgment only to see her nodding along to a song: at some point—I couldn’t tell when—she’d put her headphones back on.
    The morning that snow finally came—a week into November—Jillian woke me by slapping two damp mittens on my back. I jumped, and before I could ask why her hat and coat were flecked with water (Had she showered while dressed? Got caught in a sprinkler?), she screamed: Liz! It snowed! All last night and this morning!
    I rubbed my eyes and slurred, Class is canceled?
    She barked just one Ha! and pulled my comforter all the way off me.
    â€”Wake up, wake up , she said. Let’s go, before you have to get ready for class.
    She ran from our room and left the door open, pounded her hands on the doors down from us and yelled, You guys! It’s Lizet’s first snow! Let’s do this! Tracy, get your camera. Is Caroline still – Shit, Caroline, finish drying your hair and come outside!
    As her voice disappeared into the cave of the hall bathroom, I looked out the window. I’d seen snow on TV, had played in some soapy, manmade snow at the mall when I was little, but to see that now-familiar square of campus totally transformed: what was, as I’d fallen asleep, a brown swath of dead grass and trees suddenly cleaned up and covered. I couldn’t believe it was the same Outside. I would’ve bought that I’d been moved in the night to a different planet; I couldn’t believe the planet I’d lived on for eighteen years was capable of looking like this—and I couldn’t