Chapter2
1114 Words
I pack in forty minutes.
One bag. Military duffel, the olive green one I’ve had since freshman year. I am deliberate about what goes in it: clothing, toiletries, my three best books, the photograph of my father I’ve kept on my desk since Mira gave it to me at twelve, my laptop, my journal. I leave everything else. I leave the Ashvale pin I was supposed to receive tonight. I leave the dress I bought two months ago for the post-ceremony celebration. I leave the box of mementos I kept under my bed that I’m now deciding never existed.
I work fast because if I slow down I will start making decisions about objects and I don’t have the bandwidth for decisions about objects right now. The duffel gets heavy. I drag it to the door.
It feels wrong for my room to look the same — it should look different when you’re leaving it for the last time. There should be some physical evidence of departure. But it’s just a room and I’m just a girl in a room and none of it knows what happened tonight.
I drag the duffel downstairs.
Mira is in the kitchen. She has made tea, which is her response to all disasters, and she is sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around the mug and her eyes red and her face doing its best impression of collected. I’ve always appreciated that about Mira. She knows how to look composed even when she isn’t. It’s a skill I’ve been studying since I was eight.
She looks at the duffel. “You don’t have to take so little.”
“I want to take this much.”
She is quiet for a moment. “ have a room for you in my house — the one across the city. I’ve been keeping it ready for…” She stops. “I have a room ready.”
“Is there a school nearby?” I say in response.
“Westfield High. Ten minutes.”
“Okay.”
She puts her mug down as she stands up. Picks up her car keys.
“Do you want anything before we go? I can—”
“No.”
She nods and picks up my duffel before I can stop her. I almost argue, and then I decide that letting her carry it is a kindness I can give her right now. She needs to do something. I understand needing to do something when I’m anxious.
We leave the Ashvale house for the last time at 4:17am.
The drive takes forty-three minutes. I know this because I count them. I sit in the passenger seat with my knees up and my arms wrapped around them and I look out the window at the city going by, the streetlights and the empty intersections and the particular grey of a city at five in the morning, that pre-dawn color that belongs to nobody. I’ve always liked it. Liminal things appeal to me. Things that exist between.
Mira doesn’t speak. She turns the radio on very low and then off again. She drives both hands on the wheel, jaw tight, eyes forward.
At minute forty-seven she says: “Sera—”
“Not yet.”
She goes quiet again.
That’s the thing about Mira. She knows when I mean not yet versus not ever. She’s always known. It is one of the few things in my life that has been consistently correct.
We reach her house at 5:02am. It is a narrow Victorian in a quiet neighborhood — old trees, old houses, the kind of block where people mind their own business because everyone has learned to. The room she has ready is on the third floor. It has a window that faces east. It has a desk and a bed and built-in bookshelves that are currently empty.
I stand in the doorway and look at the empty shelves.
I think: I have three books in my duffel. I think: I will fill them eventually. I think: this is a room and I can live in a room.
I put the duffel down. I sit on the bed. I put my face in my hands for exactly sixty seconds.
Then I take my hands away.
I look at the east-facing window. The sky outside is just starting to lighten — that specific shade of dark blue right before it commits to dawn. My wolf is still silent. The c***k in my chest is still there. My eyes are dry.
I say out loud, to myself, to the empty room: “I was so sure.”
I let that sit.
Then I say: “If I was wrong then...that means I can be wrong about other things.”
I stand up and begin unpacking. Start with the three books on the shelf. I put the photograph of my father on the desk. I plug in my laptop. I make the bed with the sheets that are already there, still folded, like someone was expecting me.
At 6:30am I hear Mira moving downstairs. Making breakfast.
At 6:47am I go down.
She is at the stove. She turns when she hears me. Her eyes go to my face and whatever she sees there makes her exhale slowly, like she’s been holding her breath for hours.
“I made eggs.”
I sit down at the table.
She puts the plate in front of me and sits across from me. She wraps her hands around her mug. We eat.
After a while she says “I need to tell you something.”
I look at her.
She says: “Not today. But soon. There are things—” She stops. Starts again. “There are things you should know that I should have told you before now.”
I put my fork down. I look at her face. I look at the way she’s avoiding my eyes. I look at the way her hands are too tight around the mug.
“How big?”
“Big.”
I nod and pick my fork back up.
“After I’ve slept.”
“Yes.”
We finish breakfast. The sun comes all the way up. It is officially the day after the worst night of my life, which means it is also officially the first day of whatever comes next.
I wash my plate. Go upstairs. Llie down on the bed that Mira apparently had waiting for me.
I stare at the ceiling.
I do not sleep for a very long time.
But I am fine. I am absolutely, definitively fine, and anyone who suggests otherwise is the one who isn’t fine.
- Writer
