The Return

by Rachel Harrison

Later, Mae sent me the link to the hotel and a number that made me clutch my chest like I’d been delivered bad news in an old movie. I cried myself to sleep over that number and the realization that the gap between my friends and me had grown so wide that soon I wouldn’t be able to jump the distance. It hurt. It was bad enough to be poor and unsuccessful, to make half of what they did, but to know they knew it and weren’t sensitive to it? That made it all so much worse. Resentment began to take shape. This trip would be the last time I would tolerate it. In the years I’d been in Buffalo, no one had come to see me. Not once. They had the means. They found other excuses. I understood that where I’d ended up was far less glamorous than where they had, but it shouldn’t have mattered. The fact that it did told me something about them I didn’t want to hear.

Excuses