Sweet Water(20)
Alisha: Can I speak to Finn please?
Shit. “She wants to talk to Finn.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Martin says.
“You don’t have to get a crappy attitude with me.” I sniffle.
He’s staring me down as if I’ve said the wrong thing, and he’s the mercurial Martin again—the bad one. I shiver. Then he rips my phone out of my hand.
“Martin.”
“Let me.”
He pulls it farther away, and I feel violated, like the last time he took it away. “What’re you saying? At least let me agree to what you’re sending, since it’s my phone.”
“Yes, it’s your phone. It can be tracked.”
He pushes characters into the text window and flashes the screen at me.
Sarah: Finn is sleeping. He has been for hours. Please let me know if you still can’t find Yazmin in the morning.
I nod, approving even though I never would’ve had the strength to write that message myself, and he knows it. That’s why he stole my phone. Sadly, I feel a little relief that he asked my permission before sending it.
Yazmin’s mother doesn’t text back.
We both stare at the phone, waiting for her to reply, but she doesn’t. She’s probably angry, and I don’t blame her.
I try to think about what I would do in this case, and I’d probably ask the parent to wake up their child and question them, but not everyone feels comfortable crossing those kinds of boundaries. My father would’ve gotten in his truck and driven to the parents’ house and shaken the answer out of the kid. His actions wouldn’t have surprised me one bit when I was Yazmin’s age. That first year I’d gone to college was the hardest on him, separating from me indefinitely.
And now Alisha will be separated from her daughter forever, and she doesn’t even know it yet.
CHAPTER 6
Carnegie Mellon Campus—Fall 1996
There’s a sweet buzz of excitement in the quad as upperclassmen help freshmen carry cardboard boxes into their rooms. From my small dormitory window, it looks like a Costco has exploded on the pristine lawn. So many rolls of unopened toilet paper and paper towels are scattered around, I wonder if the parents know those supplies come included with tuition.
Dad said this would happen on move-in day, overly prepared parents storming the buildings with too many paper products—“emotional supplements for sending off their firstborn.”
“We won’t be victim to these first-timer crimes,” he declared.
The pretty brick buildings crouched among the other historical sites in and around downtown Oakland are nothing new to me. However, today one of them will be my new home. Dad used his university connections to have me placed in one of the newer dorms with a mix of upperclassmen and a few lucky freshmen.
I feel privileged for the first time in my entire life. Other students will ask which dorm is mine, and I will proudly announce “Resnik” with the kind of coolness reserved for the kids at my old high school who rented out the riverboats on the North Shore along the Allegheny for their sixteenth birthday parties. Resnik doesn’t have an upper deck fit to host a dance floor or a big red paddle wheel like the riverboats, but it’s the best I could’ve asked for on campus.
While everyone else schleps in their overflowing boxes and laundry baskets, I’m already spreading my tie-dyed bedspread over my single mattress in anticipation of meeting my mystery roommate, Hanna.
Dad is absent from helping me fix up my room, rigging free television cable to my dorm, because after all his years of service to the university, he decided I should have it. I don’t think that’s the real reason he isn’t helping me settle in, though. The other parents may have padded their empty nests with extra Charmin, but Dad is dealing with my leaving the only way he knows how—by fixing something, using his hands.
I realize sending me off is probably the hardest thing he’s had to do since burying my mother, so I’ve tried my hardest to go along with all his shenanigans. It seems as though Dad has spent his whole life trying to make up for everything my mother never had the chance to do for me. “Free cable, who wouldn’t want that?”
I asked him if he wanted me to commute instead of living on campus, and if he’d be okay on his own, but he insisted that I have the full college experience with all the benefits of my family-affiliated free tuition, which includes campus housing. Dad always wanted what was best for me, and giving me the gift of a free education at a premier institution is, to him, the best offering he has.
I couldn’t say no, not to the school and certainly not to the coolest dorm on campus.
Although we both know my absence isn’t what’s best for him.
As my elbow jabs a package of ramen noodles and a box of hot cocoa on the windowsill, I’m reminded of the fact that Dad can’t cook all that well. He still mixes up his whites with his reds when he does laundry, and God knows what will become of the indoor plants without me around to water them.
We could still spend our weekends together, but will we? Dad said Sundays would be our day, and this makes me sad, because every day was our day prior to the start of college.
“Wow, either you’re the quickest unpacker in the history of mankind or you somehow got an early pass.” I jump slightly. One of the movers has poked his head into my room.