My Town Exiles One Family Every Year To Stay “Perfect.” My Father Just Got A Promotion, And Now We Are Standing At The Border With Nothing. But Someone Is Waiting For Us In The Dark.
A Place to Call Home
Eli’s car pulled up in front of a mobile home that looked newer than the house we’d just lost. He got out and waited for us, and slowly, my father turned off the engine. We all just sat there for a minute, nobody moving.
“Come on,” Eli called, walking up to the van. “Let me show you your new place.”
We climbed out and followed him up three steps to the front door. He unlocked it and gestured for us to go inside. The mobile home was furnished: a couch and chairs in the living room, a table with four chairs in the kitchen area, curtains on the windows, dishes in the cabinets. The fridge was stocked with food—actual groceries like milk and eggs and bread and lunch meat.
The closets had clothes hanging in them, different sizes for all of us. The bathroom had towels and soap and shampoo. Someone had made up the beds with clean sheets.
My mother walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, then just stood there looking at all the food inside. Her shoulders started shaking, and she made this sound like something broke inside her chest. But this crying was different from the crying in the van. She turned around and looked at Eli with tears running down her face.
“Why are you helping us? You don’t even know us.”
Eli smiled, and it was the first genuine smile I’d seen in what felt like years.
“Because people helped us when we got exiled. And before that, people helped them. That’s how this works. We take care of each other because nobody else will.”
My father walked over to the couch and sat down heavily, still not saying a word. He put his face in his hands, and his whole body went rigid like he was trying to hold himself together through pure force. I stood in the middle of the living room with my hands in my pockets, feeling like I’d walked into some alternate reality where things actually made sense.
“Get some rest tonight,” Eli said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll bring my son Rodrigo over to meet you. He’s about your age. He can show you around, introduce you to the other kids. You’re not the only teenagers here who’ve been through this.”
Processing the Trauma
After Eli left, we just stood there in the mobile home, not knowing what to do with ourselves. Mom started unpacking the garbage bags of clothes, hanging things in closets like we were going to stay here. Like this was real. Dad stayed on the couch staring at nothing.
I went into what was apparently my bedroom and lay down on the bed. The sheets smelled like laundry detergent. The pillow was soft. Through the thin walls, I could hear my mother crying again in her room, these quiet sobs that went on and on. My father’s silence felt even worse somehow. At least when Mom cried, I knew she was still feeling things. Dad had just shut down completely, like someone flipped a switch and turned off everything that made him who he was.
I stared at the ceiling and thought about my best friend waving from his family’s van 8 years ago. I’d been 13 and so scared that I ducked below my window instead of waving back. That memory had been eating at me for years, but tonight it felt even heavier. I’d been a coward then, when it cost me nothing to be brave. Just one wave goodbye to show him I still cared, but I’d hidden instead.
Now I was lying in a strange bed in a strange town, exiled just like he’d been, and I still didn’t know if I could be brave when it actually mattered. The shame of that moment crashed over me again and again. I was 17 now, but I felt like that scared 13-year-old kid hiding below the window.
What if I was still that same coward? What if exile didn’t change anything about who I really was? I lay there listening to my mother cry and my father’s terrible silence, and I wondered if any of us would ever be okay again.
