After the Hurricane(75)
Santiago didn’t mind sharing a room, in fact, he was rather happy not to be alone after his years of solitude. But Neil did. Neil was pale, vampire pale, his eyes adorned with deep dark blue circles every day no matter how much sleep he got. Neil was twitchy, and a little odd, and he looked shocked when anyone spoke to him, at all. At first Santiago thought that Neil was terrified of him because he was Puerto Rican, but after their first meal together in the cafeteria, which had so much food, more than Santiago could have ever imagined, Santiago realized that Neil was terrified of everyone. Neil’s father was a military man, a general, in fact, and he had grown up near Quantico. Neil didn’t talk much about him, but it was clear from the comments Neil made that his father wasn’t particularly proud of his timid little son. Santiago wasn’t tall, but Neil was shorter than he was, slight, soft-spoken.
Neil was anxious about everything, but Junior learned quickly how to adapt to him. He announced himself before entering the room, calming Neil’s shaky nerves; he told Neil whenever he was turning the light on, or off; he made sure never to touch Neil’s things or leave the room differently than he’d found it. Neil was appreciative, and apologetic, and deeply neurotic, and Santiago began to long for the horrible apartment he’d lived in alone in the East Village, where he hadn’t had to tell anyone anything.
Santiago hadn’t known exactly what it was he wanted to study in college, but he met with his advisor and described what interested him, what he wanted to know more about in the world, what he was curious about, what he had done well in in high school, which was everything, and therefore no help at all, and what he might like to do with his life. Santiago didn’t know about that many professions, but he liked the idea of the law. Lawyers were the ones who defended people. Most of the great figures he had learned about in his high school history classes, John Adams, Monhandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Cromwell, were all lawyers. Lawyers had changed the world, made it a better, more just place. It seemed as good a job as any.
His advisor told him to try political science. He had thought it sounded interesting, and it was interesting, in fact. It was also a lot of reading, writing papers, learning about politics, history, law. It was hard, harder than he had ever known school could be.
Understanding things had always come easily to Santiago. Learning made sense to him. It was the only reason he had been able to be at the top of his class, year after year, despite his family, his poverty, the violence that lived in his world, his mother’s illness. No matter what, school had been easy. Santiago had always been one of the smartest people he knew. Of course, he met people who knew more about things than he did, people like Mrs. Schultz, but he had always been confident that this was a matter of time, and exposure; that if he had some more years, and more money, more hours to read, less exhaustion from work, he, too, would know as much as she did, if not more.
However, Stanford was, quickly, and with astounding force, challenging this assumption. It was challenging him. Everyone was like him, but more so: smart, very smart, and all confident, ready to talk, to question, to answer, to debate. They had done the reading, yes, but also knew about secret readings, things that hadn’t been assigned but for some reason they all knew about, had read, and they connected those things to these things to other things, making a mosaic of information and thoughts that Santiago did not understand. They spoke their ideas and thoughts with such definitive tones that Santiago was tempted to write them down as facts. Their teeth gleamed and their hands moved and they knew what they were saying. He did not dare speak, most of the time, did not dare raise his hand to answer any question. He worried that they would see his missing tooth, see the mended lines on his clothing, hear the touch of Spanish at the back of his English, and know him as a fraud. He began to have nightmares that it had all been a mistake, his admission, that he was in class, his hand raised, finally ready to answer a question, and just as his mouth opened, a group of goons in suits entered the classroom and announced that he was a fake, a phony, that he never should have been admitted in the first place, and they dragged him out of the room as the other students laughed, relieved that their suspicions had been true. The goons carried him off the beautiful campus, so pristine and clean, and threw him out of the gates, where his uncles were waiting to beat him and take him back to New York. He usually woke up just as Roberto was aiming the first punch, and Neil woke up with him, terrified by Santiago’s moaning and harsh breathing.
When he got his first paper back in his English class, he was astounded to see that he had earned himself a C on it. He had never gotten a C in his life. He hadn’t gotten a B since the seventh grade, and that was because he had fallen asleep during the test, having been up all night with his mother, assuring her that she was not, in fact, a tropical bird, but was his mother, and that they could not fly to Brazil, but had to stay in New York and sleep.
His other classes were no better, some were worse. He did not know what to do. He had no way to understand this, no way to deal with being challenged academically for the first time in his life. Physically he had never been better: he slept and ate well, he even played basketball with a small group of Black and Mexican students sometimes on the weekends. He went for walks around the beautiful campus and the weather, while very strange to him, being neither good nor bad, rarely promised rain. But he was struggling. The work was so intense, so much more than ever before, trying to keep up with the reading, trying to understand his fellow students, his professors. It was in his first year at Stanford that Santiago realized just how much he had missed, just how much these other students had learned in their high schools. He was behind, so very behind, and he did not know how he would ever catch up.