I did not shed a tear when my mother said they would miss my graduation for a resort trip with my sister. I simply asked if they preferred the live stream link or photos later. My father asked if I understood, and I said I did because I understood. I altered one line on the university paperwork. By the time the announcer invited my parents to stand, my folks were holding cocktails three hundred meters away. They dropped them.
My name is Aurora Hill. I am twenty-three years old, and until last Tuesday, I was the daughter of Robert and Linda Hill. I suppose biologically I still am, but biology is a weak tether when the emotional line has been severed with a pair of rusty shears. I live in a town called Marlin Bay, a place that looks beautiful on postcards but feels suffocating when you are the one trying to breathe inside of it. I attend, or rather I am about to graduate from, Lake View State University. The degree I earned there is in communications, but my real education came from the eight minutes and forty-five seconds I spent on the phone with my parents three days before the ceremony.
The kitchen of my small apartment was quiet. The refrigerator hummed its low electric drone, a sound that usually faded into the background, but in that moment felt deafening. My phone sat on the laminate counter, speaker on, vibrating slightly with the resonance of my mother’s voice.
“Aurora, honey, you know how proud we are,” she said. Her voice had that specific pitch she used when she was asking for a favor that was actually a demand. It was a soft, breathy tone designed to make you feel guilty for even thinking about saying no. “It is just that Sloan is in a really bad place right now. A really dark place.”
Sloan is my older sister. Sloan is always in a place. Usually, that place is the center of the universe, but currently, it was apparently a dark pit of despair because her on-again, off-again boyfriend had broken up with her for the fourth time in two years.
“We understand that graduation is a big milestone,” my father chimed in. His voice was deeper, more pragmatic—the voice of a man who believed he was negotiating a business deal rather than cancelling on his youngest daughter. “But we found this last-minute package for the Sapphire Coast Resort. It is an all-inclusive wellness retreat. The therapist recommended a change of scenery for your sister immediately. We leave tomorrow morning.”
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