“I’m just concerned that this isn’t the right path for you,” she says, but she picks up her pen and slides my early graduation form in front of her.
“It is. I know it is.” Boone was the detour. Going home—going back to Leka is my course correction.
* * *
“She signed it, didn’t she?” Audie, my roommate, exclaims when I walk into our shared room.
I wave the paper wildly in the air. “How did you know?”
“Because you have that stupid grin on your face.” My roommate tries to muster up a smile, but she fails because she hates this idea of me graduating early so I can go back to “the Deserter” as she calls Leka.
It’s hard to blame her, because from her perspective, Leka brought me here when I was fifteen and has never returned. The only thing she’s ever seen of him is his handwriting on the label of the packages he has shipped here every month. Guilt gifts, she calls them.
I received a particularly extravagant one a month ago for my nineteenth birthday. Four estheticians and five licensed massage therapists drove a couple hundred miles to give me and all the fourth-year girls in my dorm a spa day. I was very popular after that event. We wrote Leka nice notes which he acknowledged with a terse two word text. You’re welcome.
Audie knows all about guilt-induced presents. She receives plenty when she goes home. Her mother, a narcissistic hypochondriac, makes Audie feel guilty for being alive while her stepdad actively ignores her. The one person that is decent to Audie is her grandmother, who Audie stays with over the winter break. After finding out that I spent my first Boone Christmas here at the school with the cows, goats and Ms. Blair, Audie made me go to Connecticut with her. I got a first-hand look at how intact families can be as messed up as ones that are stitched together by grit and determination.
“Liz.”
“Audie.” I pull out my suitcase and throw it onto my cream bedspread with the dark blue flowers.
My roommate comes over and slaps a hand on the top of the case. The dark fringe of her bangs hangs low over her eyebrows, giving her usually round face a fiercer expression. She needs a haircut but refuses to get any work done here in Hicksville. Boone is a sweet, quiet town with a decent coffee shop and not much more. Main Street’s biggest store is a pharmacy full of walkers, motorized carts, and more shoe inserts than any geriatric truly needs. I’ve never been able to get that keratin treatment and eyebrow shaping the lady at the dress shop recommended. It’s on my list of things to do once I get home, along with eating a decent piece of pizza.
“Don’t go. Stay here until May and then come to the Hamptons with me. My grandma would love that. She thinks you’re fun.”
“I have to go.” While I’ve been alone, so has Leka. For years, it was only the two of us. He misses me. I refuse to believe otherwise. “But don’t worry. We’ll stay in touch.” I reach up and pinch her cheekbone. “Otherwise, I’ll miss your face too much when I’m gone.”
“Then stay!” She shakes the suitcase so hard that the wooden headboard rattles against the wall. “He’s not worth it.”
“Audie.”
“He’s a jerk!” she exclaims. She swings away in disgust. “He left you here when you were a kid and has visited you all of zero times. Worse, he’s not like my mom, who is so self-absorbed she doesn’t see how she’s fucking me over. He knows. That’s why he keeps sending you shit all the time as if boxes from Saks could be a replacement for someone who actually gives a shit about you.”
“If he didn’t leave me here, we wouldn’t be friends,” I point out.
No matter how many times I try to tell Audie that Leka did this so that I’d have a better life, she doesn’t believe it. My hands are tied to some extent. Leka won’t come here because he doesn’t want anyone back home to know where I am. He explained that to me in a text after he’d left me. And while he never explicitly said I shouldn’t tell people how we connected, I could tell by the careful way he always introduced me, how he gave the barest details, that private information should never be shared.
“Right, and if you leave now you’re going to miss out on Friday movie nights and Saturday morning runs. Who else will watch Queer Eye with you and cry at the end when the dude’s life is totally transformed by a little hair gel and throw pillows? And what about my period? I can’t ever keep track of that without you. Our cycles are the same!” She throws her hands up dramatically. Audie says she’s going to be a teacher, but I think she’s better suited for the theatre. “Plus, track season is coming up. We all love track season. Why would you go away before you get to see Calvin Kellogg run the 400 meters in those tiny little shorts?”