Page 23 of You've Got a Place Here, Too

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it should betowardsomething.”

Mami didn’t mean to be all deep and shit,

when she uttered those words from her sickbed,

but I repeated them in my head like lyrics

you run back again and again.

I’ve left home so many times.

First when we left Moca for the U.S.

Then when Tía, Moms, and I moved from my tía’s house

in Miami to our apartment in the Bronx. From the Bronx

to the prep school Mami insisted I apply to—and when the

scholarship came through, the same school she forced me to attend

because she didn’t want me daily seeing how sick she was getting.

I wasn’t in charge of any moves, until this one.

And the only direction I wanted to go was upward.

I knew very few kids in my hood, the New York one

or the D.R. callejón of my childhood, who left home for college.

But everyone at my prep school had been in boarding school dorm

rooms since they were chamaquitos with scar-scabbed knees.

At the end of our junior year, the prep school had college recruiters

visit. And the BSU held a panel with HBCU reps.

Afterward, a lanky dude with a fro, the rep from Morehouse,

came up to me and asked, “Where you from?”

And maybe because this question always weighed, I threw my

shoulders back, lifting the answer off my chest like a barbell:

“So many places. New York, Miami, Dominican Re—”

He laughed and smacked my back. “De lo mio! I know our

people anywhere! Where are you applying?”

And then I heard it: soft, and padded like a bed of plantain leaves

under his English, our Spanish tucked around his words.

Of course, we were instantly homies. I told him

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