How to Leave Hialeah

How to Leave Hialeah

153 How to Leave Hialeah It is impossible to leave without an excuse— something must push you out, at least at first. You won’t go otherwise ; you are happy, the weather is bright, and you have a car. It has a sunroof (which you call a moonroof—you’re so quirky) and a thunderous muffler. After fifteen years of trial and error, you have finally arranged your bedroom furniture in a way that you and your father can agree on. You have a locker you can reach at Miami High. With so much going right, it is only when you’re driven out like a fly waved through a window that you’ll be outside long enough to realize that, barring the occasional hurricane, you won’t die. The most reliable (and admittedly, the least empowering) way to 15 4 H o w t o L e a v e H i a l e a h excuse yourself from Hialeah is to date Michael Cardenas Junior. He lives two houses away from you and is very handsome and smart enough to feed himself and take you on dates. Your mother will love him because he plans to marry you in three years when you turn eighteen. He is nineteen. He also goes to Miami High, where he is very popular because he plays football and makes fun of reading. You are not so cool: you have a few friends, but all their last names start with the same letter as yours because, since first grade, your teachers have used the alphabet to assign your seats. Your friends have parents just like yours, and your moms are always hoping another mother comes along as a chaperone when you all go to the movies on Saturday nights because then they can compare their husbands’ demands—put my socks on for me before I get out of bed, I hate cold floors, or, you have to make me my lunch because only your sandwiches taste good to me—and laugh at how much they are like babies. Michael does not like your friends, but this is normal and to be expected since your friends occasionally use polysyllabic words. Michael will repeatedly try to have sex with you because you are a virgin and somewhat Catholic and he knows if you sleep together, you’ll feel too guilty to ever leave him. Sex will be tempting because your best friend Carla is dating Michael’s best friend Frankie, and Michael will swear on his father’s grave that they’re doing it. But you must hold out—you must push him off when he surprises you on your eight-month anniversary with a room at The Executive Inn by the airport and he has sprung for an entire five hours— because only then will he break up with you. This must happen, because even though you will get back together and break up two more times, it is during those broken-up weeks that you do things like research out-of-state colleges and sign up for community college classes at night to distract you from how pissed you are. This has the side effect of boosting your GPA. During these same break-up weeks, Michael will use his fake ID to buy beer and hang out with Frankie, who, at the advice of an ex-girlfriend he slept with twice who’s now living in Tallahassee , has applied to Florida State. They will talk about college girls, who they heard have sex with you without crying for two hours afterward. Michael, because he is not in your backyard playing catch with your little brother while your mother encourages you H o w t o L e a v e H i a l e a h 155 to swoon from the kitchen window, has time to fill out an application on a whim. And lo and behold, because it is October, and because FSU has rolling admissions and various guarantees of acceptance for Florida residents who can sign their names, he is suddenly college bound. When you get back together and he tells you he’s leaving at the end of June (his admission being conditional, requiring a summer term before his freshman year), tell your mom about his impending departure, how you will miss him so much, how you wish you could make him stay just a year longer so you could go to college at the same time. A...