The Grinch X OC: A Human Visitor

Chapter 6: Working Through It

"Promise me you'll be careful. You promise me."

"Please, mom. Don't make this harder than it has to be. I'm the one leaving!" The brunette settled her suitcase more comfortably beside her. "Don't rile me up." Her tone turned cold, trying to cover her rising emotions with stubbornness, but the girl's mother knew her firstborn well. She grabbed her daughter's hands and held tight like she suddenly changed her mind about the entire trip. Her aged eyes were sad and watering while her husband stood idly by, waiting his turn to speak to his daughter one last time in person before he let her go. His own eyes brimmed with tears, too - tears he'd always blame on the dust in the air.

The girl's little sister was there as well, not quite sure what to make of the send-off. She held something in her hands: a drawing, just for her big sis - one of mom, dad, and her, on a tiny, tiny, blue and green planet far off in a distance of black colored pencil space, waving to their family member who returned the gesture from the moon.

The younger girl thought about all the chores she'd have to make up for her sister's absence. All the annoying lectures about science and dating she'd get to escape. All the family dinners with just three members. All the backflips on the trampoline she wouldn't get to show her. All the dance shows she wouldn't be able to come to.

It hurt to let her big sister go.

The family wound up crying that day, hugging and kissing until others began to stare. The ride from home to the college was three hours away, and the newly accepted student promised she'd visit every month or so. However, the fact that a new chapter in her life was opening - the chapter of true adulthood - didn't help anyone accept that their little girl, their big sister, was growing up and leaving the nest.

The sun beat down on the campus, and its people, causing them to squint through the harsh lighting, and, to the brunette, gripping her luggage handles' with sweaty palms and tugging them to the front doors of a new world, it all felt like a dream.

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The first thing Brittany felt was the weight of many fabric layers covering her body, almost pushing her form into her bed. Odd. She only used one blanket to sleep.

Turning her head to the side, she noted that the air felt off, too. The atmosphere in her dorm room was never this thin or chilly. It was a pleasant feeling border-lining on discomfort. Maybe her roommate cranked the air conditioning to overdrive during the night, and also remodeled the ceiling to be five hundred feet higher than it should be. Everything just felt more stretched out. Lighter, bigger.

So, what was going on?

As she moved her head back upright, Brittany's brain finally came to, and she immediately put it to work in retracing her steps from the day before. But, for some reason, she couldn't come up with anything. All was blank except for the memory of her dream. Therefore, that had to be the reason why she felt a lone tear slip steadily down her cheek, uncomfortably down the underside of her ear, and soak into the pillow. Her neck stiffened then, trying not to move so she couldn't feel the wet spot.

Why would I dream about that? Brittany thought. Well, of course, she was in college at the moment, in her dorm room, so very far away from what she still considered her rightful home. It was probably just that subconscious form of homesickness knocking on her door again.

And homesickness she felt when honey brown eyes cracked open to, in horror, not see the pale cream ceiling of her dorm room, but a rocky, cave-like one, dotted with stalactites and illuminated by soft hues of green and blue.