Chapter Three
I wanted to stay awake for the trip back from Uoria like I did when I first left Earth, but two days into the trip, I couldn't take the thoughts rolling through my mind anymore. Every time I stopped reading one of the books in my luggage or glanced out of the window at the stars beyond my pod chamber, all I could think about was Ero. I hated that I was still thinking about him and the feelings it brought up when I did. He was so beautiful and had made me feel things that I hadn't experienced in my entire life. I wanted to think that having sex with him in the forest had been just a one-time fluke, a momentary loss of clarity and judgment, but my heart felt like it was something so much more, which made the pain even worse.
It didn't matter how I felt when I thought about him. What mattered was how he had spoken about me and how he looked at me. I had been through enough years of being mistreated and made fun of for my size. I had dealt with enough of the taunting and teasing, the hurtful jokes and the backhanded comments, from the person in my life who was supposed to care about me the most. I had gotten rid of him two years before and I wasn't about to put myself back into the same situation just because Ero made me feel breathless and all I wanted was to be back on Uoria with him.
Finally I called in the flight attendant over and asked her for her to let me go to sleep. She gazed down at me with wide, sad-looking eyes.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
Since I had spent less than 24 hours on the planet after stepping off of the university shuttle, the staff was the same from the trip there. There was generally a 24 to 36 hour break between the two legs of any journey that long to allow the pilot to rest and give the staff some time off from their sometimes grueling responsibilities on board. I had managed to get back on the ship just before they were to take off again and the flight attendant looked extremely surprised to see me. I hadn't gone into detail about what had happened, but it was almost like she could see the hurt in me and knew that there was something going on in my mind that I didn't necessarily want to share.
"Yes," I said.
I had been resistant to sleeping through the five day journey on the way to the planet, not wanting to give up that much time or control, and wanting to use the time to start preparing my lesson plans. Now that I had no lessons to plan and wanted nothing more than to miss some of the time that was just tormenting me. Maybe when I woke up back at home, I would feel better. Though I was nervous, I figured nothing worse could happen to me while I slept for the next three days than was already happening to me.
Once I was ready, I settled into my pod, attached the straps that would hold me in place in the event of turbulence, and closed my eyes. I heard the flight attendant's voice telling me to relax and just let the process take effect. I had read through the brochure about the flight carefully so I knew the basic concept behind the sedating process. As a teacher, I am accustomed to taking information presented to me very seriously and accept facts as the truth that makes the world make sense. Repeating this concept through my mind and reviewing the steps of the process as they happened helped me to relax as I felt the seat beneath me soften to cradle my body more closely.
I opened my eyes and watched the glass portion of my pod darken gradually, creating a soothing feeling around me. Everything went absolutely silent for a moment as the pod closed itself off to prevent more sounds from coming through to me, and then a small speaker opened on the wall beside me to stream soft white noise into the space. It was one of those sounds that sounds obtrusive and almost uncomfortable at first, and then becomes such a comforting element of the environment you don't want it to go away.
After a few moments of the sound, I became aware of a faint, almost powdery scent. The fragrance increased and I started to feel deeply relaxed and sleepy. I let go of the tension and control within my body and my eyes drifted closed again. For a brief moment I could see Ero smiling at me behind my eyelids, and then everything went black.
When I woke again it was three days later and the ship was settling onto place on the landing platform in the university bay. Beneath me I felt my seat growing harder and the white noise gradually stopped as the automated system started easing me out of the sedated state. The pod's sound defenses ended and I could hear the loud scraping sound of the retractable metal ceiling of the landing bay sliding back into place above the ship.
The glass at the front of my pod became clear again and I heard the soft hiss and pop of the locks releasing. I released the straps over my chest and used one hand to push the lid of my pod out of the way. The light inside the chamber was blinding for a second, so I sat still until the effect dissipated and I was able to see again.
The flight attendant was standing beside my pod, smiling broadly and offering me a cup. I took it and swallowed the strong coffee it held, then handed it back to her.
"You look happy," I said groggily, pulling myself out of the pod.
"I love it when we get back home," she said brightly."
"You really should consider changing your job," I said, and then immediately felt bad for it.
She had opened up to me about how her grandmother felt about her traveling away from Earth and why she took the job. I sighed and gathered her in a hug.
"Thank you for helping me during my trip – both times."
I tried to laugh, but she continued to look at me with the sadness in her eyes.
"It was my pleasure," she said.
I walked through the ship to the exit door and picked up my luggage. It was just like when I arrived on Uoria, except that where there was so much hope and excitement when I arrived on that planet, there was only sadness and disappointment here. I felt like a failure and all I wanted to do was go home and start trying to put it all behind me. As soon as I got there, however, I found out that getting a few days of relaxation to myself before heading back to the university and hoping they would let me take over my usual classes again wasn't going to be nearly as easy as I had hoped it would be.
It seemed like it took hours to get from the landing platform through the university back to my house. All around me I could hear whispers speculating why I had made such a sudden return, changing what was anticipated to be nearly a seven month absence into one that lasted less than eleven days. The people who were brave, or discourteous depending on the perception, enough to actually stop and talk to me about the situation shared the gossip of the department.
Wild rumors and explanations ranged from I was too scared to even get out of the ship in the first place, to I had gotten to Uoria only to find it a desolate wasteland destroyed by some recent war that Earth had not been informed of, to my personal favorite which was that there had actually never been an opening for a professor in the exchange program but that was used as a cover-up because I was pregnant by the department head and needed to disappear until the baby was born, but it turned out to be a false alarm which is why I had suddenly came back. No one seemed interested in my explanation that I simply decided that the experience wasn't for me and wanted to come home. Apparently that wasn't salacious enough.
Of course, I wasn't about to give them the honest, and legitimately salacious, explanation.
I finally made it home in the middle of the evening when the sun had already gone most of the way down and the first thing I noticed was that my living room light was on. I had all of the lights throughout the house on a timer to turn on and off throughout the day so it looked like I was home to anyone who didn't know for sure that I wasn't, but this was one of the times when it should have been off and my bedroom light should have been on.
I approached the back door carefully, putting myself on the opposite side of the house from the light, and eased inside. Traveling with any form of personal defense tool wasn't exactly my style, but I knew that the dictionary in my bag would pack a hell of a wallop and that once they were disoriented, I was pretty capable of taking someone down if necessary. I reached for the dictionary as I walked toward the living room, moving toward the sound of the television and faint munching.
"What are you doing back so soon?"
A sudden, familiar voice startled me and I nearly dropped everything I was carrying. A figure appeared in the doorway to the living room carrying a bowl of popcorn and looking at me like I should have expected her to be there.
"Samira!" I gasped, tossing my bag onto the kitchen table as she turned on the light with the switch on the wall beside her, "You scared the hell out of me. What are you doing here?"
I looked back up at her wide brown eyes and saw a flicker of hurt move across them. Looking closer at her face I realized she didn't look nearly as casual and relaxed as I thought she had. Instead, she looked drawn and there appeared to be streaks of tears down her cheeks. The bowl she gripped was still overflowing with popcorn, but there wasn't a lingering smell of fresh popcorn in the air, meaning she had probably made it long before now but just hadn't eaten it.
"You said I could come here whenever I needed a place to go," she said, her voice cracking slightly with emotion.
At just 18, my favorite student was still so young, but her genius well out-weighed her years. In that moment, though, she just looked like a terrified little girl. I crossed the room to her and gathered her into my arms. She shook against my chest, crying.
"Of course you can. You can always be here. I'm sorry if I snapped at you. I was just surprised."
"You surprised me, too. I didn't think you were going to be back anytime soon. I just didn't have anywhere else to go and so I thought I would stay here for a few days until I could figure things out."
Samira was nearly as tall as me, but her curviness came across as more soft and feminine than just sturdy. As I draped my arm around her and led her into the living room to sit on the sofa, however, she felt small and fragile.
"What happened?"
She looked up at me with tear-filled eyes and I knew exactly what had happened. I had been teaching Samira since she had entered the university at the age of 15, a stunningly remarkable student that had brilliance I had never seen, but just needed to learn to rein it in. Since then I had gradually worked past a strong shell to get to know her and learn about her painful childhood and continued horrific relationship with her stepfather. She was stuck in a tormented world of having a mind that far exceeded the intelligence, logic, and abilities of any of the adults in her life, but an age that made it so that she had no escape. Efforts to protect her from various teachers and neighbors, including me, went completely unheard, and she was constantly forced to stay in a place of darkness and trauma.
Now she was finally 18 and was not just allowed to leave, it seemed she had been forced to, given one less horrible session with her stepfather and then turned out onto the street where she would be forced to fend for herself. I had told her two years before that she was always welcome at my house and given her a key. It seemed she finally had the chance, and the courage, to do it.