Star ran through the brief list of names one last time, and knew as she checked the last one off in her mind, that the time had come for her to leave. Her life in this place was over, and the frightening expanses of a continent's width stretched out before her. "California," she said the word to herself; the cloying sweet stench of disease mingled in her mouth with the salty tang of an ocean breeze and she wanted to retch.
She was leaving home.
Her skirt swept cotton-feathery against her legs as she turned and left what had been her private sanctuary since mere days after her birth. The heavy air of eighteen years flowed out after her, through the heavy wooden door which she left standing open. Everything she would take with her fit in a backpack slung low over one denim-vested shoulder and a satchel which hung pendulously from the other. And, if she hurried, she would not have to face her mother.
Standing still for a moment by the front door of the brownstone in which she had lived all her life, she realised she was terrified. She was an hour away from leaving New York, her home, and her family forever. That very day she would board a train to the west coast, to spend whatever was left of her life in exile. In her bag was a letter from her mother which had been written and delivered days ago; a gushing, insincere scrap of lies composed to make them both feel better. In her hands were the keys she would leave with her cousin at his job, since he would need them now. And in her blood the unstoppable virus was writing the record of her death.
She would wonder for a long while whether, had she not paused, she might have hung her head and slunk unnoticed past the brightly coloured woman rushing helter-skelter down the block. But she had hesitated, and so she never had a chance. The woman swept right up to her, clucking and shrieking like a mad hen, and instantly seized a flap of Star's thin cotton top between thumb and forefinger.
"This?" She squawked, outraged. "You go cross-country on a train with dozens and dozens of strangers and you were your underclothes?" Star jerked backward, away from her mother, and those lacquered nails tore a tiny strip of cloth away.
"Look, look at this! It's all full of holes, Santa Maria, how did I end up with a girl like this? A-" Star could not stand there any longer, she could not hear this one more time; she should not have to. She thrust her mother aside, wondering, in some distant corner of her mind how she could bring herself to touch her own mother with such violence. Shoving off with her back foot like a sprinter, she raced away from the door frame, and the angry shrieking.
She did not break down and cry, she did not pause for more than a brief moment, and she did not look back. The door shut behind her, as final as the slam of a coffin lid.