The name on her passport read "Rey Skywalker".
She thumbed through it, all waxed paper and American iconography, and she thought that it was quite silly that it belonged to a girl born and raised in England.
Luke had asked her if she wanted to keep her old surname – the name of a lonely orphan girl, she thought. But she is not an orphan anymore and besides, she told Luke, it was not her family name to begin with. She had no family.
And yet, while she accepted the fact that she was no longer an orphan, while she happily rejected the only surname she'd ever known, it felt just plain weird attaching a new name to her face. She could not help it. The passport in her hand did not belong to her. Rey Skywalker was an imaginary person.
"Skywalker" conjured up images of Luke, the distant man from the distant land of America who everyone said would be her new father. "Skywalker" was a word on too many formal papers that were a little rushed in the end (as Luke preferred she settled Arizona before the fall, before high school). "Skywalker" had a beard and a kind smile and was maybe half a century in years. He was Skywalker and all the named entailed, paperwork and all.
She was not.
For one, she was a fourteen-year-old girl. To be a Skywalker was to be him, and to be thoroughly associated with him. But of course, she soon remembered, he was your father now.
And she wondered, beginning to fidget the faux leather airplane seat, what would Rey Skywalker be like? Would she have American friends in the American town of Jakku who will go to American public school wit her? What would she paint her room? Would she thrive in the heat that she heard about, the heat the plagues states like Arizona?
Rey Skywalker knew these things.
The imposter on the airplane did not.
She felt like the barest impression of a person, fading in and out of various identities and realities. There was a Rey back in England who she knew so well but was more than happy to leave behind. There was another Rey – Rey Skywalker – waiting in Jakku, Arizona, all mysterious and full of surprises.
Here on this plane, she was desperately trying to make the transition so she would not be a total stranger to this new girl when it landed.
Luke – her father – noticed her fingers rubbing the spine of the passport in anxiety. "Do you want me to told that while we're flying?" he offered gently.
She jerked her head up before shaking it from side to side. "No thanks," she managed to say, although the small booklet felt weighted in her hands, like an object stolen from another person.
Still, Luke put a hand on her shoulder – he was fatherly like that; another reason why she was okay with being adopted by him.
"It's okay to be nervous about leaving England," he said.
Nervous? Was she really nervous? There was something being kneaded in the pit of her stomach, but it was not nervousness, at least she did not tell herself that it was.
"What about you?" she blurted out. "What about when you left Tatooine for Coruscant?"
Luke smiled sadly – a well-worn expression all too familiar whenever he talked about his past (and suddenly Rey felt quite guilty for bringing up the subject). "I was nervous. Quite. I was practically an orphan too, you know."
She nodded her head. She knew the vaguest things about his background from the too-rushed papers, but he had once elaborated in a letter that he was not raised by his birth parents. Not exactly the same situation as her, but she appreciated the way he tried to soften her experiences with comparisons to his own. "I know."
"And then, shortly before I left for college, they died." He did not turn his head, and the direct confrontation made her feel even worse. "I had to go to Coruscant alone."
She inhaled the cold, contained air deeply and was suddenly grateful for Luke's close proximity. It made her feel safe. She also felt entirely more guilty for mentioning Coruscant in the first place. She did not know exactly what happened in Coruscant, but she knew that Luke would rather let the topic quietly fade away.
He had gone so far to blur his past that he moved to Jakku "middle-of-nowhere", Arizona and adopted a random English girl.
Somehow, Luke's actions felt like an act of rebellion against something that he probably would not ever get around to telling her. Or, she pondered, an act of redemption.
She tried to comfort Luke by putting a small hand on his arm. "At least I won't be going to Jakku alone."
He smiled through that graying beard of his. "No. No, you won't."
He said this, and she felt like a daughter. Luke was fatherly – that was just a fact. From the kind eyes to the mop of once-golden hair and the way he listened to others with genuine compassion, she had a hard time picturing Luke as a youth, as anyone other than a man who was such a father. But she as a daughter? As a daughter, the whole implication that she had a family spanning beyond herself, and the whole idea of it was vaguely surreal.
But this is your reality now, she told herself. You are someone's child.
And between father and daughter was the ever-present mystery that was Rey Skywalker. But as the airplane flew closer and closer to a new continent, Rey Skywalker was starting to fill the faint outline of an identity and become less of a stranger.
The girl on the airplane had Rey Skywalker's passport in her hand. And she was anxious to return it to its rightful owner when she landed, this foreign American girl who would be waiting for her at the airport like an old friend.