Left Behind Countless Times, This Time, I’m Leaving Them Chapter 08

Left Behind Countless Times, This Time, I’m Leaving Them Chapter 08

There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone.

“When I was eight, the whole family went to a theme park. You locked me inside the house all day.”

“On Thanksgiving when I was fourteen, you bought new clothes only for my sisters, then blamed me for

embarrassing you because I wore an old coat.”

“When you were sixteen at Lake Chelan, you went back to the city early. You locked the doors, cut the power, and left me upstairs in that stifling heat.”

“If the neighbor hadn’t heard the glass break, I might’ve died there.”

Paige jumped in to defend herself.

“Those were all accidents! Why do you keep dragging up the past?”

“What about this time?”

My voice stayed calm.

“I reminded you to buy six plane tickets. But the flight manifest at Seattle airport still listed only five names.”

“In Chicago, you left me behind at every single tourist spot. On the way back, you checked out before dawn

and left me alone at the hotel.”

“Was that an accident too?”

“Do you really have to keep track of every little thing?” she snapped, embarrassed and furious.

“Families slip up sometimes. It’s normal. You’ve always been so petty!”

“Slip up.” I echoed it quietly.

In her eyes, nearly starving, overheating, or being stranded in a strange city were all just minor slip-ups.

“If nothing about me is worth remembering, then from now on, just keep forgetting I exist, like you always

have.”

“Vesper, don’t you dare hang up on me-”

I hit End.

The room fell quiet again.

A few seconds later, my phone buzzed nonstop.

Dawn sent me a long string of messages.

[Mom’s heart is acting up because of you. She’s in the ER.]

[Send money home right now, or we’ll make sure everyone at your school knows you turned your back on your family!]

I read the messages and blocked her.

Then came Solara, Luna, and Logan.

Every number, social media account, and email address got blocked, one after another.

I took out my old SIM card, snapped it in half, and threw it in the trash.

The tiny sound was like a door finally closing on the past eighteen years.

I stopped keeping up with the Taylors.

Classes at the University of Chicago were intense.

Along with calculus, mechanics, quantum physics, and intro astronomy, I had to learn programming and statistics to handle huge amounts of telescope data.

I spent three weeks reorganizing years of stellar brightness records. Then I applied to join the winter observing program.

During one group meeting, a senior researcher got stuck on a complicated model of how a star’s brightness changes.

I picked up a whiteboard marker and pointed out three problems.

“First, it doesn’t correct for the differences in the telescopes’ filters.”

“Second, it’s mixing up the star’s own activity with signs of a planet passing in front of it.”

“Third, these regular dips in brightness are small, but they keep showing up at the same time gaps…”

I rewrote the equations and designed a step-by-step screening method.

The meeting room went quiet for a few seconds.

Professor Smith was the first to clap.

“Vesper, you were born to study the light everyone else misses.”

I was officially moved onto the core data team.

I also made real friends on campus for the first time.

Emma majored in mechanical engineering and was great at fine-tuning telescope equipment.

Noah studied computer science and handled data simulations.

We could argue until midnight over the source of an error. When one of us stayed up too late, the others.

quietly took over the work.

They remembered I took my coffee black. They never dismissed my opinions because I came from an

ordinary family.

On my eighteenth birthday, they brought a small cake with candles into the observation room.

“Vesper, make a wish.”

I looked at the candlelight and suddenly realized I didn’t need to beg anyone for love anymore.

I had my own room, my research, my friends, and my future.

After we cut the cake, we went to the lake for a stargazing event.

The sky was unusually clear that night. Saturn’s rings looked like a thin, sharp band of light through the

telescope.

When Orion rose in the east, I thought about that lonely Thanksgiving when I was fourteen.

The stars hadn’t changed.

But the girl looking up at them was no longer the child who’d been locked out.

Before the semester ended, I submitted my first research paper.

More and more research teams began to recognize the name Vesper.

They knew I was good at handling faint signals. They also knew I wasn’t just a student who buried herself in

calculations.

I could coordinate telescope time between different universities, make sure everyone got proper credit on papers, and point out mistakes in models even in front of senior professors.

With the college credits I’d earned before enrolling and classes I’d taken over three summers in a row, I finished my bachelor’s degree early.

Right before graduation, I was invited back to Seattle for the North American Young Astronomers Forum at

the University of Washington.