Green Card

1 Oh Right... I'm Married (Piper)

I met Lucas Vega my freshman year of college. 6 foot 3 inches, 155 pounds of sun-burned, stubbled Argentinian male. He had wire rimmed glasses that had gone out of season a decade ago and long, shaggy dark hair, a lingering remnant of the Justin Bieber era.

It was a Halloween party a few months into the year. He was there alone and I'd been dragged along with my roommate, Heather. She was just the sort to use any excuse to expose her midriff, not that she needed one, so Halloween was her favorite holiday.

I was dressed like a cat, having had to find myself a costume last minute. Luckily, every girl owns a pair of black skinny jeans and a passably tight black long sleeve shirt. Even more luckily, the only convenience store on campus had one last pair of kitty ears. Though it cost half my meal plan to buy them.

Lucas was dressed as a robot, cheesy aluminum foil taped sparingly to the cardboard boxes on his forearms and the one he wore like a hat.

We bonded over our lame costumes and our lack of any desire to be there. He told me that he had a girlfriend, someone back home in Argentina where he'd grown up who had promised him that long distance would work. And it was long indeed seeing as he was attending UCLA. I told him about my sister who had just gotten into med school and my parent's lack of appreciation for my art. He thought it was cool that I wanted to be a screenwriter. I thought it was cool that he programmed. We were a friendship match made in nerd heaven.

For the next few months, we did everything together, even planning our class schedules around one another's for the following semester. I tutored him in English every afternoon and he taught me Spanish every evening. I drove him to the airport when he flew home for both major holidays and was always there to pick him up when he returned.

As the winter turned to spring, we were together through it all. He was there when I got my first internship at a local studio. I was there when his hometown girlfriend broke his heart. He was there when my father got remarried to a woman my age and I was there when his debate club won regionals. We were each other's profoundest supporters, biggest cheerleaders, and best confidantes.

Nothing changed for sophomore year. Friday nights were for staying in, watching a terrible old horror movie and laughing so hard we snorted, trying to throw candy into one another's mouths from across the room. Saturdays were spent out, exchanging amused glances anytime someone from our broader friend group got too wasted and did something foolish. Sundays were for catching up on homework we neglected the rest of the weekend, sprawled out on the floor of my dorm listening to music and asking each other questions about what part of the world we wanted to see the most or who we wanted to become.

Junior year brought me my first serious boyfriend and Lucas welcomed him with open arms. Until he broke my heart by cheating on me with Sarah Waller and Lucas broke his nose with a mean right hook in the parking lot of the seven eleven. He held me close while I sobbed against his chest in his 1997 Pontiac Sunfire.

I swore off men and made new friends Senior Year. Girls from my women's studies class. They were wild and fierce and Lucas had a major crush on one of them. Abby Rhodes. I spent the whole first semester trying to get them together and the whole second one gagging whenever I came across them making out in his room.

But their passion was as short lived as it was bright. Abby joined the peace corps and left UCLA before she even finished her classes. Lucas said there was no future for them and it was my turn to hold him in the dingy lobby of my shitty off campus apartment building.

I loved Lucas. I loved him more than anyone I'd ever known outside of my family. So when he came to me one day, a week before graduation, eyes ringed red from a sleepless night of crying and screaming into the void, claiming that he'd received a letter from ICE that he was going to be deported the day after graduation as that was when his student visa expired, I didn't hesitate.