Page 1 of Leaving the Station

“You’re going all the way?”

“Excuse me?” I ask the man seated across the aisle from me.

He’s burly, with leathery white skin and sport sunglasses resting on the back of his head like some kind of off-brand Guy

Fieri.

“To Seattle?” He leans over and points to the ticket on my phone. I pull it away. “You’re going all the way out there?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Ah, a long-hauler.” He grins at this, and it’s a grotesque thing that makes him look less like Guy and more like Pennywise.

“I’m getting off at Chicago.”

I laugh, but it comes out forced, the way it always does when an adult man is talking to me and I don’t want him to be. I

turn and heave my suitcase onto the rack above my seat, hoping this will put an end to the conversation.

“What do you have in there, bricks?” he asks, not getting the message.

“Textbooks,” I mutter.

“Same difference.”

I rummage through my bag for the book I bought at the Hudson News in Penn Station. The cover is a sepia-toned image of a woman

facing backward as she runs through the war-torn streets of 1940s Berlin.

I don’t plan on reading it, but having a book in hand on the train is mysterious movie-extra behavior, and that’s the energy

I’m trying to bring to this cross-country journey.

I’m happy to fade into the background, to not be perceived except vaguely in people’s peripheral vision, filling out the scene.

I hold up the book and wave. “See you around.”

“You sure will.”

On that ominous note, I sling my backpack over my shoulder and head to the front of the car, pushing the button that opens

the air-lock door to the next one with a satisfying whoosh . There are more rows of coach seats with people milling about in the aisles, preparing for a long day on the train.

They whip out playing cards, chess sets, coloring books, crossword puzzles—idle things to occupy their hands. Some people

are on their phones, but most aren’t. Maybe it’s because train travel feels so fancy, so Victorian. No one would bat an eye

at a woman in a petticoat.

It’s the Monday before Thanksgiving, so the train’s completely full, but there isn’t the frantic atmosphere of an airport

during the holidays. The people on the train aren’t trying to get anywhere quickly—they’re just trying to get there.

“Excuse me,” I say brusquely to a woman who’s blocking my path forward, only to see that she’s carrying a baby so small that it must’ve been born on the train.

She gives me a dirty look but lets me pass, and I whisper, “Sorry,” no less than ten times.

“Gooood morning. This is your conductor speaking,” a voice booms from the loudspeaker. “We are at capacity. If there’s no

one sitting next to you now, there will be in a stop or two. Your backpack doesn’t need its own seat. I repeat, your backpack

doesn’t need—”

The loudspeaker crackles, and there’s a moment of dead air before a second voice comes on, cheerier than the last.

“Hellooooooo, folks, Snack Conductor Edward coming to you live from the café car. Come on down anytime, my lovely train people.

We’ve got coffee, candy, wine, beer, and so much more. Next stop, snacks!”

The loudspeaker cuts out again and the first voice comes back on. “No, actually, the next stop is Croton-Harmon.”

The conductor reminds us again that riders will be boarding the train at each stop. After a minute of this, his voice fades

into the background and everyone resumes what they were doing: puzzles, sleeping, breastfeeding, etc.

The sun hadn’t risen when we left Penn Station, and it’s only now cresting the horizon. It’s going to be another hazy late-fall

morning, cloudy and gray.

I rarely saw this time of day at school. When I did, it was during the first few weeks of the semester, when I could bring myself to care about assignments enough to try to finish them at the last minute.

Being awake at this time on the train is different. Before boarding, I was so anxious that my whole body was shaking—which

isn’t unusual, though this specific instance may have been caused by chugging a giant train-station iced coffee on an empty

stomach—but now that we’re on the move, I feel lighter.

Because I made it out.

College hasn’t exactly been “great.” I would struggle to characterize it as “fine.” “Steaming pile of dog shit” is about right,

though not entirely accurate, seeing as dog shit can be cleaned up.

No one on the train knows about my first months of college, though. They don’t know what I’ve done.

On the train, I’m not Zoe Tauber, fuckup to end all fuckups.

I’m just a passing nuisance who bumps into infants and makes unpleasant conversation with strangers.

I’m free.

Day Two of College

“Oh my god, he’s even creepier in person.”

“I thought we didn’t have a mascot.”

“His face makes me want to puke.”

Everyone clapped half-heartedly as our school’s mascot appeared out of nowhere. He was an ungodly, bearlike creature who looked

more like taxidermy that had escaped a natural history museum than a proper mascot.

He stumbled onstage and raised his hands like he was ready to party; no one else was.

I turned to the three people next to me, who I’d been seated with by virtue of our alphabetical adjacency.

“What happened to the costume? I remember the bear from the brochure being... cuter. At the very least his eyes were pointing

in the same direction.”

They all stared at me, and I was worried I’d said the wrong thing until they started laughing.

“You’re so right,” the person farthest from me said as they extended a hand. “I’m Rex, they/them, undeclared but thinking

of majoring in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or French.”

I held my hand out and we shook, which would’ve felt overly formal if Rex wasn’t wearing a blazer.

The three of them arrived at this event together, laughing and moving with ease as if they’d known each other all their lives.

Maybe the hours it had taken me to work up the courage to leave my dorm and come down to today’s orientation activities were

crucial friendship-making time that I would never get back.

Next to Rex was Autumn (“she/they, Architecture”), and Shelly (“he/him, Fiber Science”).

When it was my turn, I didn’t know what to say. They all seemed so sure of themselves, and I was not. Nearly all the introductions

I’d made since arriving the day before had involved pronouns and majors, and I didn’t feel confident in my choice of either.

“Zoe,” I told them finally while the haggard bear did a poorly choreographed dance to “Low” by Flo Rida . “She/her. Biology.”

They were all satisfied with that answer, so, for the time being, I was too.

The previous day, when my dad had left me on my own in my freshly unpacked dorm, I’d felt almost too free.

We’d just left a premed reception, where he was on his worst behavior.

“You should talk to the professors,” he’d told me through a mouthful of sharp cheddar. “The other kids will mingle among themselves,

and then you’ll have a leg up when it comes time for med school recs.”

My parents had always had high expectations for me, and those expectations increased tenfold when college was involved.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be premed or go to med school or be a doctor. I wanted those things desperately. Or maybe,

more accurately, I wanted to want them.

My brain naturally worked in the way someone’s needed to in order to be good at science. I didn’t have to try all that hard,

and for that, I was rewarded with constant positive external validation: high test scores, Science Olympiad trophies, acceptances

into my choices of premed programs.

But from the second I’d set foot on Cornell’s campus, the forward momentum that had propelled me from competition to competition,

test to test, application to application, had vanished.

I’d been planning my grand entrance into college life for a while. The academics didn’t matter, but the aesthetics did. Leaving

for Cornell meant I’d get a chance to present more masc, to figure out what being a lesbian meant to me, when it had previously been put on the back burner.

I was across the country from home; there was anonymity here. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was wearing a dress

that day—a cute one and a go-to of mine in high school. It didn’t even feel wrong; it was stretchy and comfortable, perfectly

molded to my body.

So maybe it was fate that I was seated next to these three queer people and not some random premeds with something to prove.

It was the universe telling me that I could do what I wanted to do, wear what I wanted to wear. That the plans I had weren’t

for nothing.

When the mascot finished dancing and the dean finished speaking, everyone funneled out into the lobby for “light refreshments.”

“Wanna go to a diner instead?” Rex asked. “I have a car.”

I nodded a bit too aggressively.

The four of us piled into Rex’s ancient Toyota Corolla and drove across town to a run-down Greek diner. We took videos of

each other trying to fit as many fries as possible in our mouths. Autumn won with thirty and insisted she could’ve kept going

if we hadn’t made her laugh.

I was amazed and proud of myself for how quickly I had found a group of friends. I imagined a future with them in it: living

together post-college, going to each other’s weddings in ten years.

I may have been a tad overeager.

Monday, 7:15 a.m., Approaching Croton-Harmon, NY

Most people have settled into the ride by now.

This leg of the journey runs along the Hudson, whose waters are dully reflecting the cloudy sky.

I grab a seat in a booth in the nearly empty café car and turn to face the river, open my book to a random page where the main character is fighting her primal lust for a soldier, and promptly ignore it.

It’s the first calm moment I’ve had since I bought my ticket. Other than walking (which I considered), the train is the slowest

way to get back to the West Coast for Thanksgiving break. That’s why I chose it.

I’ll go all the way across this terrible country, from sea to shining sea, by rail. I could’ve left from the Syracuse stop,

which is much closer to Ithaca, but I figured if I was going to be on the train for days anyway, I might as well be completist

about it, so I took the bus down from Cornell in the middle of the night.

The longest train ride I’ve been on before was from Seattle to Portland, which is just over three hours. All I knew about

this route when I booked the ticket was that I couldn’t be in Ithaca for one second longer, but I also didn’t want to be in

Seattle right away. I needed a liminal space to think through the life choices that brought me here.

Now I’ve bought myself four days of time, which isn’t much, but it’s enough to try to figure out what I’m going to do once

I get home.

The journey will be so slow that I’ll barely make it home for Thanksgiving dinner, which is great because then I won’t need to fight with my parents about how it’s a holiday celebrating genocide or how I’ll never live up to their expectations and we can all avoid each other until we descend to the kitchen for cold, greasy leftovers on Friday morning.

Not only that, but the Amtrak website warned that, for the most part, there’s very little cell service.

That was what really sealed the deal.

I stare out the window again. That’s all there is to do, all that’s expected of me.

It’s almost pleasant, until my phone lights up on my lap.

I swipe the notification away before I can read who it’s from, then turn my phone off for good measure. I don’t want to know

what anyone is trying to say to me.

What I want is to be an entirely different person, one who made at least one correct choice at some point in the past. But

even on the train, I’m still myself. I’m the one person I can never escape.

A small child scoots into the booth across from me. I wave and smile. She stares.

She’s long and gangly, though I can tell she’s younger than she looks. When I was a little kid people thought I was years

older than I was because of my height. It’s her face that gives it away, the same way mine did. She has round cheeks that

aren’t stretched out like the rest of her.

She’s silent for a long time, staring. It’s unnerving.

Finally, she speaks: “Did you know that former President Richard M. Nixon created Amtrak?”