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was being a five-hour airplane flight away from home. Western Washington, a mere three hours’ car ride away, might have been enough of a buffer for Merc and Claudius. But me, the last in the line to escape? Mom couldn’t even bear to have me mention college, always changing the subject so fast I felt guilty for even bringing it up. That three-hour car ride was near enough for four years of unplanned drop-in visits — and where Mom went, Dad was sure to hover. I’d remain cooped inside Dad’s boundary lines.
    Dad returned to his magazine, ignoring me when I left the kitchen. The last thing I saw was Mom, sliding the batch of cheddar cheese and bacon scones into the oven that no one but her would eat.
    However much I wanted to slam my bedroom door, that would have accomplished nothing except Dad taking it out somehow, some way, on Mom. So I contented myself with kicking my backpack into a corner. I was about to flop onto my bed with my admissions letter, but really, what was the point? I tossed it, unread, on my desk and picked up my phone where I had left it charging.
    Impulsively, I punched in Erik’s number, knowing that he was still in bed, fighting off another morning.
    “Hey,” he said groggily. “God, what time is it?”
    “Early.” I could picture him rolling over to his side, squinting at the alarm clock since he hadn’t thought to look at the cell phone for the time before he answered the call.
    “So . . . what’s up?”
    I blurted, “I got into college . . . Williams . . . and my dad won’t pay for it. He opened my envelope, can you believe it?”
    “Where’s Williams?”
    “Massachusetts.”
    “Well, why’d you want to go all the way there?”
    In a way, Erik was no different from Dad, both not wanting me to escape Colville, even if the reasons were different. I knew it was a mistake to have called him, but before I could make my excuses, Erik made his: “Hey, I gotta hop in the shower. See you at school.” And then without waiting for me to say goodbye, he hung up.
    Feeling stupid for even calling, I lowered myself to the floor to begin my first set of sit-ups, vigilant for any fighting downstairs. I didn’t dare turn on any music. I crunched up in the silence, lifting both my chest and butt.
    Going to a private liberal arts college far from home had only been a dream — even from the start when Mrs. Frankel pushed the Williams application packet into my hands. I mean, just where was I going to get a quarter of a million dollars to pay for four years of tuition? Dad made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid. (I had checked before I wrote a single word of the essay, and I still applied.) After the last couple of years at Nest & Egg, I’d pulled in a grand total of ten thousand dollars. That wouldn’t pay for a single quarter at Williams. My abs protested. Not another sit-up.
    Breathing in deeply, I forced myself to continue. The trick is to tell yourself that you’ll do just one more. One crunch up. An achingly slow release back to the floor. Now, just one more. Each sit-up brought me eye level with Merc’s old maps. This bedroom used to be his. The few times Merc had been home since moving out ten years ago, he always asked me when I was going to take his maps down, put up my own artwork. But I couldn’t. I might as well go without makeup in public. That’s how exposed I’d feel having my collages displayed in my own bedroom.
    I finished my first set of a hundred sit-ups, paused, drumming my fingers on my taut stomach. The one modern map on the wall — twelve years out of date now according to the copyright — still looked like the punk rock porcupine I saw forming as a little girl when Merc pushed in its colorful quills, one pin for each place he planned to visit. Unlike his cartographic namesake, Gerardus Mercatur, Merc wasn’t just laying down lines for lands that had already been discovered, transferring a globe into a flat map. He was seeing the world. It