She got up and dressed and left the apartment and got on the subway, intending to go to gymnastics, but when the train pulled into the stop where she was supposed to get off, she just … didn’t. The doors opened and stayed open, and she didn’t move from her seat, and then they closed. It was that easy.

Her parents hadn’t heard her, hadn’t taken her seriously. But she had heard herself. She was serious enough about quitting that she’d said it aloud and that had to mean something.

She checked her phone.

Scrolled through headlines.

A data breach at a large retailer.

Charges filed in that shooting in California.

A new wildfire out there, too.

Same old, same old, basically.

Last night’s selfie had ten more likes.

She had to kill four hours before she could go home.

Actually, before then her coach would note her absence and call or text her and then her mother so she’d be caught.

It was reason enough to turn off her phone.

So she did.

And she stayed on the train until she arrived, a solid hour later, at the last stop—Coney Island. She knew her way around there a little bit since her parents liked to go out to dinner on Brighton Beach, and both neighborhoods were on the same boardwalk. So she walked out of the station and crossed the street toward sky/ocean and then started to walk down the boardwalk to the left, in the direction of Brighton.

A lot of the amusement park rides and stalls were closed, but some were open, and there were a healthy number of people also out walking the boardwalk. When she passed the aquarium she thought about going in but didn’t feel like spending money to be inside dark rooms with little kids shouting “Dory!”

If they even still did that.

It was so nice out.

Again.

Fall was her favorite.

No one knew where she was.

No one could ruin this for her.

Her mother would be absolutely losing her mind.

The thought of it brought a smile to her lips. Because her mother was always talking so nostalgically about life before smartphones. About printed maps and having to follow directions that people gave you and that you wrote down. And pay phones. And phones with stretchy coiled wires. And letters. She claimed to like it better when you didn’t know why a friend was late until they showed up; didn’t have headlines delivered to your pocket but had to read the newspaper at the end of the day like everybody else. She said things like, “Back then, when your father was late, I’d think he was dead in a ditch. But it always turned out he wasn’t. And we survived.”

Ilanka would ask, on occasion, how all of that could possibly be better.

Her mother would check her phone and say, “It just was.”