808 Miles Away From Home Chapter 10
It was the spring semester of my freshman year.
In March, the university held its annual writing competition. I entered an essay called ‘Low-Maintenance’.
It was about a child in a family who was never remembered. I did not use real names or describe specific events, but every word had been scraped out from somewhere deep inside me.
It won first place.
The campus paper reprinted it, and a local online publication picked it up as well. They ran it under the headline, When ‘Low-Maintenance’ Becomes a Wound’.
The readership was not enormous, but the comments section was busy. A lot of people said it felt like I had written their story.
I had not gone out of my way to spread it, but the internet had a long memory.
One day in May, I got a phone call. It was from Bria.
I hesitated for a few seconds before picking up.
“Hey, Paige.”
Her voice sounded different from the way I remembered it. The bratty sweetness was gone, replaced by something
careful and tentative.
“Hey.”
“I read your essay. A friend sent it to me.”
I did not say anything.
“Paige, are those things true?”
“Which things?”
“The acceptance letter that Mom thought was junk mail. The gift money that got put under my name. You going to the testing center on your own.”
“What do you think?”
The line went quiet for a long time. Then, I heard the muffled sound of a 15-year-old girl trying not to cry.
“I’m so sorry. I really didn’t know. I thought you weren’t taking the SATs until next year. I thought your grades were bad and you didn’t care about school. I thought you just didn’t need any of that stuff. Mom never once told me how you did. I really didn’t know anything.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Can you forgive me?”
“Bria, I was never angry at you. You were 14. None of this was your fault.”
She cried harder.
“But Paige, think about Mom. Mom really does know she was wrong. She’s lost so much weight in the last six months, and her hair’s started going gray. Every night she sits in your room in the dark. She just sits there without
turning on the light.
“And Dad barely talks anymore. He just stands on the balcony smoking and staring at nothing.”
I listened to all of it, but none of it stirred up much inside me.
It was not that I was cold. It was that I had spent too long teaching myself not to expect anything.
“Paige, can you come home? Just once.”
“Bria, I’m doing really well right now.”
“I know, but this house isn’t the same without you. I used to think everything was fine, but now every time I sit down for dinner and see that empty chair, I feel sick.”
That chair.
For as long as I could remember, an invisible person had been sitting in that chair. Now, the invisible person was gone, and the chair was finally, truly empty. They could finally see it.
However, they only saw it because it was empty. They had never seen it when I was the one sitting there.
“Bria, tell Mom and Dad something for me.”
“What is it?”
“Tell them I don’t hate them, but I’m not coming back, not right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I spent 18 years learning how to stand on my own, and I’m not going back to a place where I had to make myself small just to fit into your worlds.”
The other end of the line went silent.
After a long pause, Bria’s voice came back, thick and stuffy from crying.
“What about later? Will you come back someday?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I will, or maybe I won’t. But whether I go back or not, I’m Paige Sumner. Not ‘the older one ‘, not ‘the easy one’, not somebody’s sister. Just Paige.”
“I’ll remember that,” Bria said. “I’ll remember.”
I hung up.
Outside the window, the southern city glittered with neon, and someone was playing music on the street below.
Vera came in from outside, saw me sitting by the window, and asked, “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Family called.”
“Ah.” She did not push it. She just pulled a box of strawberries out of her bag and handed them to me.
“These are for you. I passed the fruit stand on my way back and grabbed them.”
I took the box and bit into one. It was sweet.
That was my life now.
There were no banners, no custom cakes, and no celebration dinners with someone else’s name on them. However, there was a box of strawberries that someone had thought to pick up for me on her way home.
There was an acceptance letter with my own name printed on it. There were 808 miles of distance between me and my past, and there was a life that finally belonged to no one but me.
It was enough.
