There’s always that moment, coming home. Sometimes when I get to the gate, sometimes stepping into plane itself. The moment I realize that that no one around me looks like me.

The flight is long. I stare out the window at the cloud layer beneath us. These trips always feel like I’m in a haze. I put music on earlier, but it just sounded like noise. Something in my mind just couldn’t parse it. I thought I might feel differently this time, given the circumstances, but I don’t.

Layover in Hartsfield Jackson airport. It’s quicker to walk between the terminals than to take the little train. Less crowded too. I’ve been here so many times, but this trip might be the last.

It’s a short hop crammed into an even smaller metal tube. A taxi ride. Pearl, my little sister, got in this morning. I leave my bags in the hallway.

I’ll be at the school A text from Pearl.

It’s not too far. A walk I’d done a million times. Years spent walking from this house to school and back again. The water of the retention pond next to the road gleams reflections of the setting sun. The roar of the crickets fills the night. You don’t notice it when you live here, but you notice it when you visit.

I find pearl outside the high school gym, illuminated by a single downward facing light. A cigarette in her hand.

“Should you really be doing that by a school?”

“It’s the middle of summer, give me a break”

“Fair enough” I lean my back against the brick wall. A single car drives down the road it’s headlights washing across my field of view before disappearing into the trees.

“How many times have we stood out here?” The way I say it, it’s not exactly a question.

“It really fuckin’ sucked, didn’t it?” Not exactly an answer.

“Yeah, it did”

“It’s sort of comforting now, though. Do you remember the music they’d blast in there?”

“I remember, always loud in there” I say, “I wouldn’t go back though, not even for a day”

“Me neither”

A gust of the humid, night breeze blows past us. It’s fully dark now.

“It’s funny but the only thing I’m worried about is what dad would think of me wearing a dress to his funeral?”

Pearl turns her head towards me, her back still pressed against the wall, “You like nice, Alice.”

She turns her head back. In a few minutes we will walk back to the house, back to paperwork and phone calls; funeral arrangements and real estate agents. Sleeping in the last dead echo of our childhoods.

Pearl takes a drag of her cigarette, the wisps of smoke fan out in the beam of the light above us.