The realization rains down like hail, clobbering me mercilessly, but I don’t make a sound. I don’t even wince from the hurt. I run from it. Out the door, into the crisp fall air again, across the campus, and back to my dorm room to pack a few important items and the last of my savings. Six hundred eleven dollars and eleven cents. I pray it’s enough. I peel off my bloody skeleton costume and snatch Jesus off the wall. “We’re going home,” I tell him. The portal and its spinning reminder of everything wrong with my mind taunts me. Mandy is nowhere to be found, per usual. I wonder what adventures she’s getting into now. Wherever she is, I hope she’s avoiding him and his fangs.

Then, away. Out to a taxi that whisks me to the airport, where I’ll catch the first flight to Cleveland tomorrow, the only place I belong, where I’m a human being and not an invisible Black creature of the night that no one wants to love. Darth, resurrected from his burning palace on his favorite night of the year, trampling Jennifer’s promised lands with that wicked smile, prepares to carry me back to the den of trauma and suffering that raised me. I won’t leave the place that made me again. Not ever.

PART II

The Last Supper

The Last Supper. A ceremony of release. Orchestrated by us for her rising. Everything reborn in the light. A timeline of healing. Reserved only for that purpose. Home is where the Chosen One must heal. When one timeline is healed, all timelines are healed.

Old wounds, the deepest, finally mended. Pain released, then forgiveness rolling down like water.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Home.

The word takes root deep inside, but nothing grows. The soil is barren, without sustenance. I’ve been “home” for one day, but it already feels like an eternity. I didn’t know leaving for such a short amount of time could change the core of you this dramatically. Before I left, I imagined the entire world was like my neighborhood. In just a few months, Dartmouth exposed me to wealth, privilege, and different kinds of people from all over the country. Exposure changes what grows inside a person, blossoming new ideas, beliefs, and thoughts. Then you can never go back to what you were. After Dartmouth, I feel like spring and this place, my home, feels like midwinter, dark and brooding.

I will have to make this place home again, I think to myself, but I know it’s impossible. My home is the in-between now. The space between where you were and where you’re going. The problem is I don’t know where I’m going. Wherever it is, I’m not headed to an Ivy League degree anymore. That dream is shot, just like Mr. Walsh predicted.