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And I sit there with that sentence.

For four years, that sentence was the floor under everything. The last place. The one I could fall back to, no matter what. I built every plan I ever made on top of it.

“I know, Grandma,” I say. “Thank you.” And I mean it. I’m grateful for it. I just don’t need to stand on it anymore.

“Your mom asks about you,” she says. Careful. Testing. “She called on Tuesday.”

“Okay,” I say, and I realize how much I don’t care.

She waits. I don’t say anything else. After a second, she starts talking about the tomatoes again.

We hang up a few minutes later.

I sit on the steps for a long time afterward in the sun with the phone in my lap.

That night, I log into the portal.

I’ve been putting it off for three weeks. There’s a form. There’s been a form since April first, with a deadline, which is Friday, and a red banner across the top of my student page that says Please confirm your intent to return for the fall semester, and two buttons under it. I’ve looked at the buttons so many times I could draw them.

I sit at my desk with my laptop. Kylie’s at Nash’s. The room’s half boxes now. My side’s mostly packed. My mailers are sorted by size in a box marked MAILERS in Paige’s handwriting.

I click on the banner. The form opens. My name. My student ID. My scholarship, listed, with first year only in gray letters under it.

I will return to University of Woodbury for the fall semester.

I will not be returning to University of Woodbury for the fall semester.

I move the mouse over the second one. And I stop there.

Not because I want to stay. I don’t. I checked. I sat with it for three months and it didn’t change.

It’s just that this was everything. This school. This building. I got the letter at my grandmother’s kitchen table and held it so hard the paper wrinkled where my thumbs were. It was the only door. The one way out. I wrote the deposit amount on an index card and taped it inside my closet in high school and looked at it every night for six months. I sat on a bus in August with my backpack strap around my wrist and my whole life in one duffel to get here.

And it got me out. It did exactly what I needed it to do. It got me out of that house and three doors down from a boy I hated, who turned out to be somebody else, and into a life I didn’t know I was allowed to have.

I just don’t need it to do that anymore.

I click.

My heart races.

The page reloads. A gray box. Thank you. Your response has been recorded. The red banner is gone.

That’s it.

I look around the room. The boxes. Kylie’s bed with her stuffed elephant on it. The window. The tape gun on my desk. Nothing’s different. The room looks exactly the same as it did a minute ago.

I thought it would feel bigger. I thought I’d cry, or something would break. It doesn’t. I just closed a door I don’t need anymore, and the room is the same, and I’m still sitting in it.

Rafe comes over at ten after the weight room.

He stops in the doorway and looks at the boxes. All of my things on my side is almost gone. Just the bed, the desk, the lamp, and me on the floor in the middle of it in his T-shirt, putting tissue paper around a glass bottle somebody gave me for my birthday that I’ve never once used.

He doesn’t say anything for a second.

“You’re really doing it,” he says.

“I did it.” I nod at the laptop on the desk. “An hour ago. There was a form.”