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  Every time we moved to a new place, my parents would enroll me in a new school. I would spend a few weeks settling in, make a friend or two, then have to move again. Many of the older kids who were in school with me would eventually drop out and start working in the fields with their parents to make money, but my parents wouldn’t let me. The fields were for them and not for me, my father said. Me coming to work in the fields with them would be like them washing their hands and drying them in the dirt, my mother said.

  Every night after work, my father would check my homework, which he pretended to understand even when he didn’t. I was ordered daily by my mother to study hard and make something of myself so I wouldn’t turn out to be a teenage mom or a farmworker. My dream was always to have a stable home and to stay in one place.

  The place that felt most like home, and where my parents kept returning for the summer harvests, was a trailer park in Belle Glade, Florida, where, when we were lucky, we could rent a two-room trailer away from the hot and noisy parking lot and near a canal in the back, where you could smell the earthy scent of the soil, rather than the pong of the concrete when it rained. It was in Belle Glade that I attended, every summer, a six-week program for migrant kids, a kind of educational camp, which made up for all that I missed while constantly changing schools so that my parents could chase harvests, sometimes four or five times a year. The summer camp showed the hundred or so of us kids who participated in it that plants could be grown to just be beautiful in the botanical gardens we visited, and that some people owned old and new things that they displayed in museums and galleries. I learned to swim in the pool at the high school where the program was based. We went to concerts and plays. We were taught how to take tests and were encouraged to dream of going to college.

  I remember hearing Neah sniffle in the dark when I told her all this during the first day of orientation week and our first night together in our room.

  “See, we were not randomly matched after all,” she said, once she’d collected herself. “Academics’ kids are migrants of a different kind.”

  “Neah will be fine,” I told Dr. Asher before he left our room with her copy of Illuminations that night. “I will go find her and talk to her.”

  * * *

  —

  Unlike the Haitian restaurant and barbershop next door, which blasted lively konpa and rasin music from giant speakers into the street and had people walking in and out of them, the glass-fronted Leve office in Little Haiti was quiet. The walls, which were completely visible from the street, were covered with more photographs of sad, but also many hopeful-looking, women, their eyes aimed like laser beams at the camera. I could see Neah and another woman in profile as they worked at their desks across from each other. Even in the eighty-degree-plus heat, Neah was wearing a thick brown jacket that looked like it was older than she was. She had probably picked it up from one of the Salvation Armies and Goodwills that provided most of our wardrobe, me out of necessity and her out of choice. Her face was gaunter now than when I had last seen her more than a week ago. She was stooped over, her back at a sharp and uncomfortable-looking angle.

  I watched her all morning from a wobbly table outside the coffee shop across the street. She kept staring at her computer screen. Finally, she got up from behind the desk, walked over to the other woman’s corner, and exchanged a few words with her. She then strolled out onto the street, where she pulled a cigarette from her jacket pocket and cupped her hands around her mouth to light up. I didn’t realize she was a smoker, but then again, she might have been secretly smoking without me knowing it.

  I finished my coffee, then crossed the busy street. I was still hoping I could make our meeting seem accidental.

  “Hey Né,” I said, when she looked up and saw me.

  “Hey,” she said while absentmindedly stroking her flat chest.

  She seemed to be expecting me. She opened one of her palms, spat in it, put out the cigarette with her spit, then put the wet stub in her jacket pocket.

  “I see you got my e-mail,” she said.

  “So you went on the Thanksgiving-break trip and now this is all you want to do with your life?” I asked.

  She looked back at the office and sighed. She had left one of the drawers in her desk open, and she seemed torn between going back in to close it and standing there talking to me.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  She turned her face away from me, and I followed her gaze to a fox terrier, which was sleeping while tied to a parking meter in front of the coffee shop across the street. The fox terrier was mostly white, with black patches. Or at least I thought Neah was watching the terrier.

  I remembered telling her during one of our late-night chats how the summer I turned fifteen, I convinced my parents to let me get a learner’s permit. My dad bought an old station wagon with over two hundred thousand miles on it and taught me to drive.

  One Sunday afternoon, I was driving on the edge of one of Muck City’s many cane fields with my father in the passenger seat and my mother in the back. We were approaching a row of shotgun houses on the side of a canal when a liver-colored pit bull came out of nowhere and ran in front of the car. The car windows were down because the car had no air-conditioning.

  When I hit the dog, I heard the crash, a long whimper, then a pleading moan as both the car’s front and back wheels ran over it. I stopped and looked out through the side mirrors. The dog’s body was still and looked crushed, but I didn’t see any blood, which maybe was hidden by the coat. I knew it was a pit bull because a few of our neighbors in the trailer park had them. A couple of the boys from the summer program had their pit bulls fight in the cane fields. I never had the heart to go watch, but a bunch of the other girls went and bet on those fights.

  My father panicked and told me to press on the gas.

  “We can’t leave it here,” I said.

  “What will you do with a dead dog?” my mother asked.

  The car stalled as I hesitated. My father got out and raced to the driver’s seat. I started crying as I jumped into the passenger seat before my father sped away.

  “We could have taken it to a vet,” I said.

  “Stop being stupid,” my mother answered. “You have that kind of money? Besides, it will die soon, if it’s lucky. Who knows what the owners would do to us, if they find us. If we’re killed because of that dog, there will be no one to cry over us.”

  I remembered telling Neah one night how I was never able to look at dogs again, any dogs at all, without thinking of that day, or could never watch my parents make a quick collective decision without thinking of death, which is why, right before classes started, I had the image of a small, brown, living pit bull tattooed on the inside of my right wrist, on the hand I’d kept on the wheel as that dog died. Neah looked down at my tattoo, reached over, and stroked it gently.

  “Come and have a coffee with me,” she said, “even though you’ve already had some.”

  “You saw me sitting there and you didn’t come out?”

  “You came for me.” She turned back for a moment to look at the open drawer and at the other woman in the office who was also watching us. The woman looked older, though not old enough to be, say, my mother. She was wearing a red sleeveless jumper and had her hair in two large cornrows with white thread woven through them. This, along with her bright red fingernail polish, made her seem overly glamorous for her line of work. Holding up one index finger, Neah pointed at me, then at the coffee shop. The woman nodded her approval.

  I felt like holding Neah’s hand protectively, the way one might hold a small child’s hand, to cross the street, and I would have, I think, if she wasn’t walking a whole lot faster than me. Neither one of us stopped when we passed the sleeping terrier.

  I followed Neah to a table in the back of the coffee shop, near the bathrooms. The air was cooler there than it was outside, bu
t it was also much darker in that spot than in the rest of the place, which was filling up slowly with lunchtime customers. The waiter came over and, though he recognized me from earlier, seemed annoyed when we ordered only two cups of hot chocolate and none of the panini and sandwiches and desserts he kept recommending to us.

  Sitting there, I felt as though our time together had no limit, like we might be sipping our hot chocolates forever. But just as I had seen her do in the past when she was trying to figure out what to say, Neah began rubbing her cheeks so hard that I was worried she might buff them down to the bone.

  “The trip was awful, Luce,” she blurted out. “It wasn’t the trip itself that was awful. It was the circumstances.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Remember that class we dropped where they tried to teach us how to draw without looking down at the paper?”

  Blind Contour Drawing was the only class we had attempted to take together. Even though it did not result in either one of us making more friends, we had tried to branch out on our own, even choosing different mandatory first-year seminars, hers leading her to Rimbaud, and mine to Taino mythology.

  “This trip was blind-contour everything,” she said while still rubbing her cheeks. “I had no idea what I was getting into at the rape recovery clinic.”

  “I’m sorry.” I reached over and pulled her hands away from her face. She looked down at them as though she wasn’t sure what to do, then she raised her body up a bit and sat on them, all while avoiding my eyes.

  “I saw all kinds of things you wouldn’t believe. I saw women who’d had their tongues bitten off by the men who raped them,” she said.

  She spent most of her week there with teenage girls, some as young as thirteen and fourteen, with fistulas as wide as the top of the cups we were drinking from, girls with syphilis scars running down their legs. She met a few girls who’d been working street corners in badly lit areas, where they were gang-raped by clients, and others who’d been recruited for orgies with international aid workers, trading sex for food, then realizing that they had no control over how much sex or food they were there for.

  I was the one who was now avoiding her eyes. I couldn’t even look at the cups on the table in front of us.

  “I can understand now why you didn’t want to go on that trip,” she said.

  But she wasn’t entirely right. My not wanting to go with her was both simple and complicated. First of all, you had to pay for the airfare yourself, and I didn’t have the money. Neah’s father had paid for her airfare. She had offered to get him to pay for mine, but I was too proud to accept. And yes, I did not want to see any of the stuff she was talking about on my first trip there. I first wanted to see the beaches, the mountains, the citadel, the waterfalls, the cathedrals, the museums of Haiti. I also hated being constantly reminded that I was lucky to not be among those women that groups like Leve were helping. I hated that their help was needed in the first place.

  Neah had seen hopeful things, too. Along with counseling, therapy, and meditation, older Haitian neighborhood women comforted the girls with storytelling and song. Others came to teach self-defense classes. Not speaking Creole, Neah mostly held the girls while vowing in a phrase that the Haiti-based Leve women had taught her—m pap janm bliye nou—that she would never forget them.

  When she came back to Miami, she had a symbol of her commitment tattooed on her chest at the same tattoo parlor, a few miles off campus, where I’d had the pit bull tattooed on my wrist. Her tattoo, she said, was on her chest bone, near her heart. I was afraid to ask what the tattoo was of, but soon I didn’t have to.

  One morning, she explained, she woke up in the rape recovery center, where she was also staying, and in an open window frame saw two clear plastic bags filled with water. The residents had strung them to the windows to keep out the flies. The flies and their many eyes saw—it was believed—magnified, giant, monstrously distorted versions of themselves in the water-filled plastic bags and fled.

  “How do you tattoo that on your chest?” I asked.

  “The same way you tattoo a dog on your wrist,” she said, “but I had someone incompetent do it, and my tattoos don’t look like water bags, but two hot-air balloons.”

  “Can I see?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “It is not for viewing. It’s private.”

  Even as she said this, she smiled, which meant that she might eventually let me see her tattoo after all.

  “What do you do in there?” I asked, pointing in the general direction of her desk across the street.

  “I’m not an official employee,” she said. “Not really on the books. They don’t have the funds for it, but they—and ‘they’ is mostly Josette—she lets me write grants and donation-request e-mails and letters.”

  “Are you going to move in with your dad now?” I asked.

  “I’m staying with Josette right now, but my mom is going to help out,” she said.

  “So your mom’s okay with what you’re doing?”

  “She thought I needed a gap year anyway, but Dad insisted I start right away.”

  Obviously tired of the subject, she added, “I better get back to work.”

  She got up from the table and started walking toward the door. I had no choice but to follow her, and as we reached the doorway, I slipped in next to her and let my fingers brush against hers before she moved ahead.

  Outside, the terrier at the parking meter was gone. Standing where it had been, Neah said, “My parents would call my saying this redundant, but, Luce, there’s so much suffering in the world.”

  The type of music being blasted from the record store across the street had changed. A Creole gospel song was now blaring from the speakers.

  “Can I come see you again?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, then began walking across the street.

  She was nearly halfway to the curb when a car screeched to a halt and the driver honked loudly because she was walking too slowly. Looking lost, as though the man peeking his head out the car window shouting obscenities at her was an apparition in a strange dream, she walked back to the parking meter, where I was standing. Leaning in, she looked at me with the same intense sadness I was feeling, while longing to both yell at her for being careless and pull her into my arms to celebrate the fact that she was okay.

  I thought she was about to walk away when she pivoted and raised her arms, as if reaching for something above me. Her fingers landed on my back, shaking. She smelled like chocolates and cigarettes. She leaned over, buried her face in my neck, and hugged me. I felt as though she was trying to squeeze into me everything she was feeling, everything she had ever felt. I tried to keep us linked for as long as I could, clutching and clinging to her back, but then she gently drove her palms against my chest and pushed me away.

  Suddenly the rest of the world was there again, the cars and the waiter, with the bill we had not paid.

  “I got this,” I told both her and the waiter.

  I paid the waiter with part of the hundred dollars my parents were still wiring me every week in spite of my scholarship and work-study pay. Neah crossed the street, walked back to the Leve office, and sat down at her desk. She turned her chair away from the street and started a conversation with Josette. Josette smiled at something she said, but I couldn’t see Neah’s face and couldn’t tell whether she was smiling or not. After their brief chat, she and Josette went back to reading their e-mails and making their phone calls. The wobbly table where I’d spent most of the morning opened up, and I went back to sitting there, on the sidewalk, outside the coffee shop. I kept waiting for Neah to look my way, but she never did, not even when I got up and left.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Dr. Asher came back to the room to pick up some of Neah’s things. I supposed he’d gone to see her, too, and she’d convinced him th
at working for Leve was the best thing for her.

  “She looked good,” I said, keeping to my side of the room as he moved around briskly packing some of her clothes and books into a large duffel bag he’d brought with him. I wasn’t sure what he was taking with him and what he was leaving behind, and I did not want to get in his way.

  “She seemed fine.” He stopped and slid his hands over the bright yellow sheets on her bed, but left them in place.

  I wanted to tell him how much I’d enjoyed that Friday night Neah had invited me to have dinner with the two of them at his off-campus apartment, before she left for Haiti. I wanted to tell him how I had also slid my hand over the tan brown leather sofa in his living room, the one whose seats and back cushions felt softer than my own skin. I wanted to tell him how I also stroked the spines of his books while trying to memorize the titles, even though his wall-to-wall bookshelves looked like wallpaper to me. I wanted to tell him that though I did not understand most of the art in his bedroom and guest room and the paintings he insisted on having Neah show me, I liked that they looked like spilled paint and ice-cream swirls, and even mistakes. I wanted him to know that I also liked the wooden and bronze African masks in his home office and the black-and-white and color photographs in his bathroom and kitchen, especially the ones filled with sunsets and outdoor marketplaces from all over the world.

  His goat roti and corn soup were already cooked by the time we’d arrived at his place. He had asked Neah and me to make a salad, and while we were gathering the ingredients from his fridge, Neah told him that she’d started reading Rimbaud.

  “That’s my girl,” he’d casually said, as if he had been hearing about her extraordinary interests and discoveries all her life.

  “What’s your favorite so far?” he’d asked.