Part 1
The phone in my hand was black. Silent. Heavier than my backpack.
Find your own way home.The words echoed in the sudden, roaring silence of my head.
The laughter from the call—Kylie’s, Noah’s, Calvin’s—felt like it was still happening, a tinny, cruel sound buzzing in my ears. The gate agent was still smiling, her voice a distant, muffled sound over the intercom, announcing the final boarding call for Honolulu.
My flight. The flight that was leaving without me.
I sat motionless, my fingers locked around the plastic armrest.
I tried to make the tears stop, but they wouldn’t. They weren’t loud, sobbing tears. They were the hot, silent kind that just spilled over, blurring the world into streaks of fluorescent light and moving shapes.
Pathological and needy.
I shrank into the chair, trying to make myself invisible. People were walking past, rolling their bags, their faces excited.
They were going somewhere. I was… nowhere.
I was an eight-year-old piece of “baggage” left behind at Gate 14.
“Honey? Are you okay? Is your momma in the restroom?”
I looked up.
A man in a blue airport uniform was frowning down at me.
He had a kind face, but his eyes were full of procedures. “She… she left,” I whispered, the words choking me.
“Lost, then. Okay, that’s fine.
We’ll find her.” He reached for his radio.
“I’m not lost,” I said, my voice a little stronger. “I was left.”
His hand paused on the radio. He didn’t believe me.
I could see it in his eyes.
Who leaves an eight-year-old at an airport? “Honey, let’s just go to the office.
We’ll make an announcement.”
“She’s on the plane,” I said, pointing at the gate, where the last passengers were disappearing down the jet bridge. “She’s going to Hawaii.
She told me to find my own way home.”
The man’s face changed.
The procedural kindness disappeared, replaced by something sharp and serious. He spoke into his radio. “I’ve got a possible… situation.
Gate 14.
A minor. Unaccompanied.”
It took twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of me sitting in a sterile, beige room painted with cheerful, mocking primary colors. Plastic chairs.
A teddy bear with one eye missing sitting on a shelf.
The room smelled like hand sanitizer and stale coffee. A woman named Mrs. VGA—I saw the name on her badge—knelt in front of me.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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