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

believe people lived in it, vacationed specifically to glide over it. More than anything, I needed to touch it—immediately—to know it like everyone else did as quickly as I could. I flung myself from the bed, slid my feet into my shower flip-flops, ran past Jillian and her Hey, wait! in the bathroom doorway, and charged down the stairwell at the end of the hall to the nearest exit—the dorm’s loading dock—throwing my whole weight against the metal double doors.
    Those first fifteen seconds: down the loading dock steps, flip-flops slipping on ice, stepping on the snow—two feet high and still falling—and expecting to walk on top of it. Hearing a soft crunch, then one leg then the other crashing down, the snow reaching just past my knees, hugging my feet and calves. And I was stuck. And I laughed so hard I fell on my butt into more snow, soft but not soft enough, the white stuff packing into my armpits because I’d extended my arms to brace for the fall. Those first fifteen seconds, I got it: I got how people could love snow. But then, creeping in like the very real tingle I started to feel in my feet, was the fact that snow was frozen water—that snow was wet and not fluffy like cotton or like the mall’s soap-bubble snow. I’d locked myself out of the dorm by accident, and as I held a clump of snow in my hand for the first time and squeezed it hard, my skin turned red. It burned. My toes burned, too—I scrunched them to make sure I could still feel them, thinking of those stupid girls on Halloween—and I looked up to find Jillian next to Tracy, both waving from the other side of the door’s glass square. Then Tracy lifted her camera to her face.
    Jillian pushed her way out and yelled, Oh my god, you are crazy ! You’re practically naked! She pulled off her coat and twirled it over my shoulders.
    Tracy took another shot from inside, this time of Jillian with her arm around me and giving a thumbs-up.
    â€”Make sure you get her flip-flops, she yelled.
    More people came down, from our floor and other floors. I ran back up to get socks and real shoes, threw a pair of baggy jeans over my soaked pajama pants, and returned to a full-on snowball fight. Later, amid Jillian and Tracy and other people I’d seen all fall trekking in and out of the bathroom in nothing but towels but whose last names I didn’t know, we collectively decided to skip class without saying this directly. One girl, a brunette named Caroline in a lilac vest and sweatpants, made hot chocolate for everyone using milk and not powder but actual chocolate, and we all sat in the hallway outside our rooms drinking it. I had the idea to call Leidy and my mom and tell them what it was like, my first time in the snow, but I didn’t want to be the only one to get up and leave, the first to say Thank you but and give back the mug. So I wrapped my fingers around it even tighter, let them get warmer.
    A day later, during Jillian’s twice-weekly night class, I told my mom and Leidy about the snow over the phone. I almost blew the surprise of the Thanksgiving trip when I said I was thinking of getting a cooler so I could bring some down so they could see for themselves, saying at Christmas just in time to cover it up. Mami asked if I had any pictures of me in the snow and I said yes, someone took some and that I’d track them down. But I still hadn’t done that, thinking if Tracy wanted me to have them, she’d come to me.
    Now that I was back home, I felt bad for not bringing any evidence along—no props to show my sister to make talking to her easier. I sipped the coffee Mami left for me and asked Leidy about Dante’s daycare, about her hours at the salon, about nothing that mattered as much as what I wanted to ask her: if she’d seen or spoken to our dad. I didn’t know how to bring him up. I hadn’t heard from him since the night before I left for New York, when