I didn’t know what to say in response to them, and I believe that they must have known that, or else they wouldn’t have gone through the effort of shaking their heads in a manner that implied that the conversation was done, that implied that they were done arguing with me—not that there had been much of an argument in the first place. All that had happened, was that I had been on the defensive, while they had attacked me in a manner that I had hoped that they wouldn’t, especially considering the fact that they had treated me much better upon arrival than my father had.
But it turned out that I was wrong. No one here was perfectly accepting of my departure, of my absence, and especially not of the time period that I had been gone, that I had chosen to abandon them for. I was only now star
