Free Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia

they’d just come to life and said something wildly offensive. She and Simon had sprung for a cell phone for me for Christmas, and she nodded toward my night stand, where it sat hooked to an electric socket, charging.
    “You can call whenever you want. It’s free,” she said. “Not free but, you know, included in the plan.” They’d paid for limitless minutes for calls between my number and theirs but had refused to set up a text plan.
    December was the month of Byzantine Ceiling Blue, sowhile I was surprised by the gift and happy to finally have a phone of my own, the cell was the kind of shiny blue that made you see spots if you looked at it too long in the sunlight. I would have liked a black or a red one better, but I didn’t complain.
    She was in the room then, and she sat on my bed, hovering while I pulled on my black Converse, left foot, then right. She tried not to look at the backpack and the bus ticket resting on top. “I was seventeen when I left for San Francisco, too,” she said, and I nodded because I’d branded every clip of info I knew about her past into my brain like a scar, like a tattoo.
    Stella left my grandmother for California the year my grandfather died, and she departed Pennsylvania after his funeral and never looked back. That’s how I imagined it, at least. She said she filled one red suitcase and left her mother behind because she believed grieving alone would make them more strong and independent. When I asked my grandmother about it as a child, she never called Stella selfish or neglectful, words I thought of later when I pictured my grandmother newly widowed and on her own. Instead she told me that, just as she imagined I would be when I was older, my mother was a woman who always followed her instincts.
    “She’s a wanderer,” she told me, “a restless explorer. Your mother is who she is. I could never ask her to change.” But that was back when we still lived close by, back before it became clear Stella’s wanderlust would not dissipate just because she had a child, a fact that became a source of tension between my mother and my grandmother in later years.
    Stella fidgeted and smoothed out the wrinkles in my bedspread while I pulled on my hooded sweatshirt. “The thing is . . . ,” she started, and I glanced at her, waiting while shelooked for words. “It’s just that there’s a risk every time you leave home.”
    I put my hands in my pockets, eyes to the floor as I waited for the moment to pass. I figured she thought I was repeating her mistakes, but I thought I was changing them, attempting to reorganize her past into compartments I could manage and investigate. I believed finding my father would help me understand Stella and the choices she had made for us and would help me discover what kind of person I wanted to become. Maybe she understood why I needed to go or maybe she didn’t. I can’t say for sure what she felt, because I never asked her. It was easier that way.
    But she kept talking. “There’s a risk of never seeing things exactly as you did before. And a risk of not going back, of forgetting what you left behind,” she said, and I nodded, wondering if we were running late and if we’d get to the bus station in time to get good seats. I didn’t want to get stuck in the back near the bathroom. “There’s the risk of forgetting who you are and who you are not,” she said, but then she must have recognized my distractedness, because she didn’t say anything else after that. She stood up, shrugged, and almost reached for me, a slight lurch forward, but then she stopped herself and turned away, leaving me as she moved down the hall.
    She and Simon drove Emmy and me to Wheeling, West Virginia, to catch our bus that night. Emmy had overpacked, so we took Simon’s Tacoma, and Pace sat curled on top of our luggage in the back. The drive was easy and fast up Highway 79, and when we arrived, Simon unloaded our suitcases, and I gave Stella a copy of our