That day, Claire Williams woke up fifteen minutes before her alarm.
Not exactly out of a sense of responsibility, because that would have meant getting out of bed immediately, having turned off the alarm before it went off, and starting her day. Perhaps by rolling out a yoga mat on the floor and doing ten minutes of stretching. Perhaps by immediately squeezing herself into a pair of those tight synthetic-fabric leggings and going for a run around the park, like one of those functional adults who seemed to exist by the dozen at the University of Florida. Those special creatures she saw all the time on the streets tied their hair back without a single strand out of place, carried colorful planners, knew exactly where they would be five years from now, and, perhaps most incredibly of all, drank coffee without making a face.
No, unfortunately, she hadn't been born that way, chosen by destiny. Claire had woken up fifteen minutes early that day simply because the apartment was too hot. The old window-mounted air conditioner made a desperate, asthmatic noise throughout the night, like a grandfather determined to prove he could still change a car tire. And it wasn't as though she wanted to put it through any more suffering than it already seemed to endure just from the thought of turning it on.
Instead of immediately rolling out a yoga mat or grinding coffee beans while reading the Tampa Bay Times, Claire remained motionless for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling—while silently acknowledging that, yes, it was still just as ugly as the sheet metal roof of the trailer that had been her childhood home in the middle of some Appalachian backwater. The same ceiling that used to make a scratching sound whenever rainwater hit it, keeping her awake at night.
There was also a yellowish stain near the light fixture and a thin crack above the bed that she had been watching every morning since moving to Gainesville. She was still debating whether the fact that the line hadn't grown, despite all that humidity, could be considered a major victory.
A lazy silence settled over her tiny apartment—a luxury in a city that seemed never to sleep.
She stretched one arm out of bed and fumbled across the makeshift nightstand, first finding the hard corner of a book, then another, then an entire stack of them. There was probably some cruel irony in the fact that, after spending her childhood wishing she had more books, she now woke up surrounded by them and with enough reading material to fill three entire human lifetimes. But it wasn't as though she had time to contemplate the peculiarities of human existence right now.
Only after bumping into a Russian classic she'd bought at a secondhand bookstore and an introductory textbook on child psychology did she find her phone, its bluish light immediately illuminating her tired face with a message from her mother, sent at six in the morning:
Morning, sweetheart. Don't forget to bring a jacket. I saw on TV that it's going to rain.
Behind that little moment of tenderness, she was also greeted by a bank notification, two advertisements, an email from the university, and, instantly, that little Pavlovian reaction she'd been developing ever since signing her student loan papers. Apparently, her heart would forever beat a little differently whenever she saw an institutional notification now—as though she expected to find a bill or some other catastrophe carefully arranged to happen while she slept.
But Claire tried to focus on better things and smile because... Well, the forecast called for ninety degrees today, but her mother lived in Blue Ridge, and for a woman from rural Georgia, anything below the temperature of an active volcano seemed to justify wearing a jacket.
So she replied to the message with a heart. Then she decided to send another one to her younger sister, even though the message she'd sent the night before was still unanswered, since that little brat was probably still asleep. Claire couldn't help wondering, once again, how Emily was managing now that she no longer had her older sister around to wake her up after those extra five minutes she always begged for...
She dropped the phone onto the mattress and, perhaps because she'd just been thinking about Emily, closed her eyes for a few more seconds. Just a few more seconds. Only long enough to imagine Blue Ridge.
A little over two thousand people, two main streets, a town square, and an old church. A town so small you could walk across the whole thing without even finishing a song.
Sometimes she missed it, and sometimes she felt embarrassed for missing it. After all, the University of Florida had been her dream for so long that admitting to any nostalgia felt like a kind of betrayal.
She had made it. She was there, far away, free. So why did she still wake up most mornings thinking about home?
Well, apparently, she wouldn't have much longer to think about the answer... Her alarm answered for her promptly, going off with all the emotional violence of a red-alert siren.
Claire muttered something deeply offensive and switched it off. Time to survive another day.
The kitchen and living room coexisted in an uneasy truce, with the old coffee maker (bought at a thrift store on her very first day) taking up half the counter and her university textbooks occupying the other half. A pile of clothes, in various stages of folding (depending on her mood at the time), occupied the only chair, since the table existed in name only—in practical terms, it was more of a storage unit.
Claire turned on the light, but immediately switched it off again when she remembered that the electricity bill came at the end of the month. Besides, perhaps the sunlight could handle things after all.
Her shower was cold and equally brief, almost as though she were apologizing for having dared to turn the faucet. There was barely any time to look at herself in the mirror, even while brushing her teeth and putting on the same button-down shirt, the same knitted sweater. But she knew she was still the same old Claire Williams: short, flat as a board, and always dressed like a grandmother because the alternative was being mistaken for a high school student.
She hurried back into the kitchen, already opening the cupboard, a small part of her hoping that yesterday's version of herself had certainly not let her down, only to be met with a harsh reality check—bread, peanut butter, and instant noodles. And if she happened to want a little variety, there was a box of cereal at the back of the cupboard that looked as though it had survived the Civil War.
She decided to make her usual two slices of toast.
Meanwhile, she checked her phone with the spirit of someone who still believed hope springs eternal, only to find that her banking app was displaying exactly the same balance.
Unbelievable. It was practically harassment.
Claire chewed slowly, since doing so was good for digestion—certainly not because eating slowly helped disguise the fact that she was consuming fewer nutrients. Absolutely not. She wouldn't know anything about that from personal experience, of course.
And meanwhile, perhaps even motivated by that very thought, she opened a job-search app. Barista, server, receptionist, administrative assistant, babysitter, grocery store cashier... Claire examined one listing after another.
Most required experience, and one even demanded full-time availability. Their only common feature was a salary so low it seemed like a joke. Good Lord, one particularly cruel listing required both previous experience and a college degree just to answer phone calls.
"Because obviously nobody could press a button without four years of higher education!" she muttered with a humorless little huff. Now that she was living alone, she seemed to be learning, in addition to her college coursework, that some sentences felt less depressing once you said them out loud.
She kept scrolling, trying to ignore the numbers, the student loans, and that constant feeling that her life had turned into a collection of countdowns—to rent day, the end of the month, loan payments, the next assignment deadline, the next résumé submission... Oh, she could go on.
Sometimes she felt as though she spent so much time preparing to live that she barely noticed when she was actually doing it. And usually, afterward, she felt guilty for thinking that way.
After all, she also thought, thousands of people would do anything to be where she was.
Besides, it was an investment. That was what everyone kept saying. An investment.
But her brain, always the contrarian, that same brain that had decided she should sell all her belongings in exchange for a bus ticket to a university 435 miles away from home, chose to translate it as: an absurd amount of debt with extra steps.
Claire huffed, but despite that, she kept searching. Because she was stubborn, of course, because she hadn't come all this way just to go home after the first month. And above all, because she'd left her mother behind and promised her sister that she would be the first person in the family to graduate from college, that she would get them both out of that miserable trailer, and get herself out of this apartment, which, even so, seemed almost luxurious in comparison.
And because, despite all of that, there were moments when she looked across the campus and felt her heart race inside her chest like a frightened bird.
Sometimes it happened between one class and another. Other times, through the window of a bus. She had even noticed it happening whenever she passed by the library and saw hundreds of students crossing those stone pathways, carrying backpacks, computers, and futures.
Always that same word appearing in lectures and brochures, in freshman orientations, in conversations while waiting in line at the coffee shop... Future.
Claire loved that word so much it almost hurt—and she trusted it, trusted it an awful lot, because she had bet her entire existence on it, along with all her money. The very money she didn't have. Not to mention her years. The years she hadn't lived yet.
Everything seemed to have been placed, like chips on a casino table, on that invisible idea, bright as liquid gold.
But sometimes she managed to forget, for a few moments, the anxiety that always seemed to seep into her bones. She would fix her enormous brown eyes on the place that, somehow, she felt was exactly where she had always been meant to be. The enormous buildings, the libraries and laboratories, the perfectly manicured lawns, the hundreds of people walking back and forth... Every now and then (or, she might as well admit, almost always), the whole place still seemed ridiculously modern to someone who had grown up in a town where the main tourist attraction was a mountain hiking trail.
Sometimes (or, again, almost always), she even felt like stopping to take pictures—not exactly like some country bumpkin, but more like someone who still couldn't quite believe she'd made it there.
And, well... Maybe she really was a country bumpkin. But she was a country bumpkin enrolled at the University of Florida.
And at that particular moment, that was enough.
As if it, too, wanted to put an end to that train of thought, the toast decided to perform its final service, promptly washed down with the rest of her coffee. Deciding that the dishes could be a problem for her evening self, Claire immediately stood up and grabbed her backpack, checking whether she'd forgotten anything. Even after several weeks, she still didn't quite trust herself, needing to check once, twice. Rural anxiety, as her mother called it.
And when she finally approached the door, she allowed herself one last look around the little apartment.
The sink needed cleaning before it could even accommodate any new dishes to be washed, and those clothes had practically celebrated their anniversary lying on that chair in the same position. The floor needed sweeping, too... She could have sworn she hadn't been this messy back in her childhood home. Maybe the big-city air was slowly changing her...
And... If she were being honest with herself, perhaps she also needed more sleep...
But not today—not today. Today there were classes and readings and job applications and listings to answer and chapters to get ahead on before they piled up on top of other chapters, which piled up on top of assignments, which piled up on top of field observations, which piled up on top of much bigger worries and...
Apparently, there was always something else.
And perhaps, at the risk of spending even a single second of her day on a bit of self-analysis she simply didn't have time for, that was exactly why she kept moving.
Because if she stopped long enough, she would be forced to listen to all the fears she'd been leaving behind, and God knew how hard she was working to earn those words. Future, jobs, things like that.
Yep, she truly liked those words.
She liked them so much that she was carrying tens of thousands of dollars in debt on her back because of them.
And because the alternative was to collapse right there in the doorway from the sheer misery of remembering that, she smiled to herself.
And so, she stepped out to face another ordinary day.