808 Miles Away From Home Chapter 07
Three days later, Mom and Dad drove the thirteen hours south to the university.
They did not know my dorm number. They did not know which campus within the university’s several that I had been placed in. They did not even know my major. All they had was the name of the school.
Mom stood in front of the massive campus gates, watching students come and go. She looked like a bird that had stumbled into an unfamiliar forest, lost and frantic.
“Go to the admissions office,” Dad said. “Look up her information.”
They found the office and explained why they were there. The woman behind the desk glanced at them with a carefully measured expression. “You’re the student’s parents? I’m afraid we can’t release a student’s personal information without their consent.”
“She’s my daughter!” Mom’s voice cracked. “Her phone’s off. We can’t reach her!”
The woman looked at them with obvious discomfort. “What I can do is connect you with the student advisor for her department. They can reach out to her and confirm.”
They waited forty minutes.
The advisor called back.
“Hello, this is Paige Sumner’s student advisor. I’ve been in touch with her. She says everything is fine and that she doesn’t need her family to come to campus. Her exact words were that she would like you to go home.”
Mom’s hand was shaking around the phone. “That’s all she said?”
“Yes. She said she’s doing well and that you don’t need to worry.”
She did not need to worry. She should go home.
Those two sentences landed like a door being closed in their faces, gently, politely, and completely emotionless.
Mom refused to leave.
She stood outside the campus gates for the entire afternoon, scanning the face of every girl who walked out, trying to find mine in the crowd. However, the campus was enormous. There were tens of thousands of students, and she could barely remember what I looked like.
That was not an exaggeration.
She scrolled through the hundreds of photos in her phone’s camera roll, and every single one was of Bria. The most recent picture she had of me was a family portrait from three years ago, and even in that one, I was standing at the far edge of the frame with half my shoulder cropped out.
By evening, Dad pulled her away from the gates.
“She doesn’t want to see us.” His voice was low. “Forcing our way to her won’t help. It’ll only push her further away.”
Mom stood under a streetlight. The light stretched her shadow long and thin across the pavement.
“Am I a failure?”
Dad did not answer.
“I didn’t know about her SATS. I didn’t know what city she went to. She was inside me for nine months, yet I had to check a security camera just to realize she wasn’t even home.”
She crouched down on the curb, both hands pressed over her face.
She was not crying. It was something deeper than crying, a suffocating wave that rose from somewhere behind the ribs when a person suddenly realized they had made an unfixable mistake.
Dad stood next to her and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted into the humid southern air and vanished almost immediately.
“Let’s go home,” he said. “Give her time.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know.”
They drove back the next day. Thirteen hours on the road, and neither of them said a single word.
Mom leaned against the passenger window and watched the landscape blur past.
I had traveled this same distance alone. Twenty hours on a bus, in a coach seat. No one had seen me off, no one had been waiting for me at the other end, and no one knew what time I arrived.
Mom had been putting on sunscreen on a beach that day.
