I realized with jolting reality that the world was not, in fact, revolving around me and my teenage delusions when Jeremy dropped me off at my house one day after school. There it was, standing malevolently from where it had been rooted into the green of my lawn, its white, wooden arm bearing the venomous news.
I gasped as if I’d been slapped brutally across the face.
“What?” Jeremy asked. “Nikki, what’s wrong?”
I lifted a weak finger and pointed at the For-Sale sign. So it was real this time.
I looked miserably at him. “I have to go,” I said, shakily climbing out of his car.
“Alright,” he agreed. The concern was thick in his voice as he asked me to call him later.
I nodded and shut the door. As he pulled out of the driveway I walked slowly up the walkway toward my house, glaring at the sign with pure hatred, as if it alone were responsible for what was going to happen to me.
Even then I did not entirely believe that my father was going to go through with such a severe uprooting. I refused to panic when the movers came one Monday morning and began to put our lives into boxes, labeling each with a general description of its contents. “Nicole’s Room Misc.,” read one box. I actually laughed months later in Santiago when I opened that box, which contained my garbage can with the garbage still in it.
When it finally got to the point that our home had become simply a house, I began to worry, but only slightly. “Something is going to happen,” I insisted stubbornly, desperate to convince myself if no one else. “God won’t let Daddy move us to Chile. Something is going to keep us here.”
(we ate at different times).
After deciding finally that God was taking too long to intervene, I committed to making something happen on my own. I worked out living arrangements with Marin’s mother. I swore up and down that I would get a job to support myself. Each day, as if a sales executive pitching to a client, I presented a different proposal to my father.
“Just let me finish eleventh grade,” I pleaded. “I’ll move down there and meet you when the summer comes. Just please let me finish my junior year.”
But he had shaken his head sternly, his own stubbornness matching mine. “No. We are a family. We go as a family. End of discussion.”
The frustration began to pour from my eyes in wet droplets. If sobs were tangible objects I would have hurled mine at his face.
I began to do anything I possibly could to make him realize he was ruining my life. I pushed further away from him in a childish attempt to make him feel guilty. One of his golden rules was to eat breakfast at the start of each day. As if to punish him, I began refusing the meal. I failed my Chemistry class on purpose, praying with each act of destruction that he would begin to see the severity of the move’s effect on me.
As the date of my impending doom neared, my friends began to take action. Jeremy threw the For-Sale sign into the canal behind our house. Brianne, a former Wild Cat, actually yelled at my father in a tearful fit and begged him to let me stay.
“She’s going to be fine,” my father had replied calmly.
“But I need her here,” Brianne had sobbed. She told me later that he had just shrugged. Now I wonder, what did she expect him to say?
“Something is going to happen,” I promised.
But nothing did. On Sunday, February 23, 1997, we left just as planned, without any obligations, ties or unfinished business. Even the For-Sale sign had been fished begrudgingly out of the canal and re-positioned in the yard.
My father had rented a limousine to take us to Miami International Airport. To my dismay, Marin wasn’t able to see us off at the airport. As I was hugging her good-bye in my driveway, he placed his hand on my shoulder. “It’s time to go.”
“Don’t touch me,” I growled. I vowed then that I would never speak to him again.
My bereavement was real as I stepped through those metal detectors at the airport. I’ve lost my life, I thought. This was the final separation; only ticketed passengers were permitted beyond that point, and all I had to look forward to now was the path to Chile that lay before me. I will never forget turning back one last time and seeing my closest friends standing in one, supportive huddle, the boys solemn and the girls crying openly. It was almost as if they were leaning one on another in a delicate pattern, and if a single person stepped away they would all come crashing to the floor.
I blew them a kiss and my hand shook violently as the tears dripped freely down my face and off my chin. My father had decided to send us to Santiago ahead of him. Today I thank God it had just been me, Monica and Mommy on the flight. I don’t know what I would have said to him had he been there.
Mommy kept yelling at me to please hurry, that our flight was being called and we weren’t even at the gate yet, but I ignored her. Would it be such a bad thing if we missed our flight? I began walking slower and prayed with all I had within me for God to send American Airlines flight 911 off without us.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Our departure time came and went, taking my mother, my sister and me to my father’s native country. For eight hours we flew, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern. I kicked and screamed the whole way there.
Read how this origin story ends in A Phoenix’s Spirit Animal Is the Butterfly: Part 3.