I pick the furthest school I got into.

  Papa drives me. We load the car in the morning and he carries boxes up three flights of stairs without complaining. He sets up my desk lamp. He looks around the small room and nods like it’s acceptable.

  “You’ll be okay,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “Call if you need anything.”

  “I will.”

  He hugs me. It’s a real hug, actually. I’m surprised by it. He holds on for a second and I feel him take a breath, slow, like he’s trying to hold something down.

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  “Elise,” he says into the top of my head.

  “Yeah.”

  He lets go. He clears his throat. “Call if you need anything,” he says again. Then he goes.

  I stand in the empty room and listen to his footsteps go down the three flights.

  He almost said something. He was right there.

  I sit on the bare mattress.

  For the first time in a very long time I feel something that’s almost like relief. Not because I don’t love him. I do, in the complicated way you love someone who has been hurting you without meaning to. But there’s air here. Nobody to move quietly around. Nobody whose silences I have to manage.

  Just me.

  That night my roommate invites me to a thing. I go. I wear the practiced smile and ask the right questions and laugh in the right places and I’m good at it, I’m really good at it by now, and nobody knows that inside the performance I am very, very tired.

  But I’m here. I’m away. I’m eighteen and I have a laptop and a search bar and I am going to find my mother.

  I’m ready now.

  I wait until my roommate is asleep. I open the laptop.

  I type in Mama’s name.