I don’t know what his Spanish words mean, but they make my heart sad. My whole body feels heavy with sadness, and I’m not sure why. I imagined that meeting Frank Gómez would be exciting. Thrilling. Not sad. I feel a rush of heat thrumming through my body. I’d rather feel angry than sad. I clench my fists. But then the large brown hand on mine squeezes even harder. I loosen my fingers. The angry feeling seeps into the cold floor.

Frank Gómez sniffs. He clears his throat. “How did you get here? Girls your age cannot be at the college without parents, can they?” He looks from me to Mattie and back to me again. Can he tell running away was my idea?

“We—”

“I—”

Me and Mattie in unison. Again.

Only this time, I’m glad.

“Our moms aren’t here, actually,” she says. “It’s just us.”

“We wanted to meet you,” I add.

And we tell this man, this stranger, this Frank Gómez, the story about meeting each other, about our day and our night and about how we didn’t plan the ending. We don’t tell any lies. Only the truth. We tell as many truths as we can. Frank Gómez just nods as we talk. He doesn’t get off the floor and he doesn’t let go of our hands.

“And now,” Mattie says, a quiver in her voice, “we don’t know what happens next.”

We’ll be fine, I mouth.

Then she asks in a small voice, “Are you mad at us?”

The whole time we’ve been sitting here, I’ve been hoping that Frank Gómez isn’t mad at us. I know what mad is. I know what it feels like to be angry at someone, at no one, at everyone.

“Of course not. How can I be angry?” He scoops us into another group hug. “Mis niñas.” He shakes his head. He smiles. Then his brow wrinkles. “But,” he says, “it looks like we need to figure out what happens now. The rest of the story.”

“How will we get home?” Mattie asks.

Then he smiles again. “I have an idea.”

“You do?”

For once, I’m glad I’m not in charge. Usually, I love being in charge. I love telling people what to do. Another reason why Mom thinks I’ll make a great CEO of a big company. I feel a rush of relief that I don’t have to decide what to do now. It’s not up to me to figure out what happens next.

“Breakfast,” he says with a wink. “I haven’t had my coffee yet. Let’s go to the cafeteria.”

It’s the least parent-like thing he could say. It sounds like something I would say. I smile.