No one likes good-byes.
Good-byes are like bad haircuts: it takes time to get over the shock and adjust to the “new you,” and it’s never a pleasant process.
The short summer before I went away to Pine Mountain Academy1 seemed to be a long, drawn-out, and awkward good-bye. I had already said good-bye to my friend James Jenkins, who had moved away to Austin during the school year, and now there were all these other things to say good-bye to, lining up like a gauntlet of extended family on a chilly Thanksgiving evening when you’re the first one out the door: my friends Karim and Bahar, Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course,2 Mom and Dad, Dylan and Evie, that awful Colonel Jenkins’s Diner, Blue Creek,3 and everything about Texas that had grown to be a part of me—right down to the color of the dirt and the smell of the air in April. I had to say good-bye to all of it.
And although going to school at Pine Mountain Academy was the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, I also didn’t want to leave everything else behind.
It was a real predicament, and I kept telling myself how grown-up all this made me feel, but if this was what being a grown-up was like, you could keep it. Because I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t want to say good-bye, but I had already gone too far to change my mind.
Besides, I didn’t want people to think I was too anything—too small, too young, too sensitive—to do something as daring as leave for boarding school in Oregon (which I already knew was going to be colder, rainier, greener, and lonelier than Texas), even if I would have agreed with anyone who told me those things.
So there I was: stuck.
Stuck and wondering how to manage all those long good-byes.
1. Pine Mountain Academy is a private boarding school in Oregon. I won a scholarship to go there, which was something I wanted more than anything else in the world—up until a few weeks before I had to leave, that is.
2. My family’s business.
3. The town where I grew up, which is in Texas, which is also far away from Oregon.