⭐️ This was The_Bookshop fave for the "Lost & Found" prompt ⭐️

Arthur had a plan, even for the simple task of packing his suitcase. Alice never planned anything, but the improvised and unconvincing advice she floated from the doorway while he packed matched his rhythm. She speculated on possible disasters; he neatly rolled and stowed his jeans. She mused on avoiding strangers; he folded shirts precisely in their corner. She rambled about personal hygiene; he packed socks, boxers, comb and toothbrush. And as she unexpectedly suggested the importance of calling home, he chose three favorite books to snuggle on top (with a fraction of his savings tucked into their pages). He checked his watch, and satisfied at finding himself ahead of schedule, he turned a quizzical look on her.

"So what's with the Mom routine?" he asked. His friends' mothers, surely, had said all this and more a thousand times (and with more conviction). But in the sum of his eighteen years, not once had Alice said anything of the sort before, though he might have said the like to her fairly often. Technically, beyond biology, he wasn't actually sure he could call her mother, because she never played that part. She was more a vaguely-maternal-companion, he thought, but as that was too unwieldy a moniker for common usage, by tacit agreement he called her "Alice," if he called her anything at all.

"This is harder than I thought it would be," she said, slipping a slightly shaky hand into his and squeezing. It was the most emotion he'd ever seen her display, and he was suddenly nervous that she was about to throw him off schedule.

He gave a very small squeeze back. "You'll be fine. You always are."

"I know that," she said, withdrawing her hand with a smile. "Though I'm not always sure you do."

Arthur glanced at his watch again. He would've taken the suitcase, carried it out the door, down the steps and off to the station, but she stood, hesitating, in his way. Her fingers traced the delicately monogrammed "A.N." centered on its top edge.

He resisted the urge to sigh loudly. Mentally, he'd already headed out to the station and boarded the bus. In his head he was already managing the details of moving into his dorm, scheduling his classes and starting the work-study program he'd lined up. Reeling all of that back to navigate the murky mysteries of the woman before him right here, right now, required Herculean effort. Watching her calloused hands caressing the case he ventured, "I really appreciate your loaning me your suitcase. I'll send it back to you as soon as I'm settled -- in case you want to travel, or something."

"No," she said. "It's not mine."

"What do you mean? Of course it's yours. A.N. -- Alice Newman," he said.

She shrugged. "Well," she said, followed by an over-long pause. "That could stand for anyone, really."

Arthur blinked. Her small words seemed insufficient to carry the weight of their collective meaning. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out of it as he waited for her to continue, to explain, to clarify. He'd rarely looked directly into her eyes, so he had no real frame of reference for judging their expression. But she seemed to look through him, beyond him, into a past she only vaguely remembered and had never shared.

"When I was your age," she began, "after I argued with my family, and with your father, about my pregnancy... I just left."

"But you said they were dead..." Arthur interrupted.

"They are to me." She shrugged again. "They laid out the choice: your death literally, or mine figuratively. It wasn't difficult to decide," she said, dismissing minor details with a wave of her hand.

Preempting another interruption, she rushed on, "Anyway, when my plane landed, I was standing at the baggage claim, waiting, and my case never came round. Lost in the shuffle of my random departure, I guess. You probably can't imagine the strangeness of watching all those people collecting their orderly lives encased in their orderly luggage. Or the desperation of hoping an impersonal, automatic belt won't stop before you can collect your own. But the crowd and the baggage both gradually disappeared, until the belt was empty and still."

She took a deep breath. "I felt, well -- too many things to talk about now. But mostly that it would've been such a bad omen to start with nothing. Then I realized I was probably better off without it, that it was better to leave all things past exactly that - in the past.

"As I turned to leave, this suitcase was sitting there on the floor behind me -- and not another person in sight for fifty yards in any direction. I waited first, ten or twenty minutes. But nobody came to retrieve it, and it had no luggage tag, no name. So I took it with me."

Her focus had narrowed back to him, examining his face, gauging his reaction. If he'd been raised by regular parents, Arthur might have been shocked by her theft or her bizarre revelations. Instead, he grinned a little. "You chose me over everyone and everything you knew?" he asked.

But Alice shook her head and laughed. "How did I ever end up with such a sweet kid? You always think I'm so much better than I actually am, Arthur. I chose me. I wandered around for a couple of months in another woman's clothes, reading another woman's books, spending some of another woman's money, and thinking about how the ability to see the choices in front of you is more important than which choice you make. Then I stopped wandering and I changed my name: new name, new start, new family, new life."

For lack of a better response, Arthur nodded. There was a lot there to process, sure, but none of it seemed imminently important. "And so," he asked slowly, "why is it you're telling me this now?"

The face Alice made accused him of being intentionally obtuse, but her voice was patient. "Because you needed to know it and I never figured out how to tell it before now. And because I'm flippant and you're responsible. But you're not responsible for me, Arthur - I don't need you to be, but somehow I've made you think I do."

"Okay," he answered, feeling more confused than ever. "Listen, I've got to go." He picked up the suitcase with one hand, resting his other on her shoulder. "But I'll call you this weekend and we'll talk some more," he said.

"Sure," said Alice, watching him walk out the door. "Have fun."

While Arthur waited at the bus station he stared at the suitcase and wondered if he should be angry. In all those years of silence about her past he'd seen her as the fragile survivor of some mysterious dark tragedies, and of himself as her protector. Now after everything she'd said, she seemed more like Laura Dekker, or Jeanne Baret or Aloha Wanderwell, always setting off on some grand adventure. He'd just been her loyal and vaguely annoying sidekick. She was a crazy, lonely, defiant teenager in a hostile world, who remorselessly stole other people's luggage. And he was... what?

His back hurt, and he wondered if it was from the uncomfortable plastic bus-station chair, or from the enormous weight of his world crushing down on him. The plans, the study, the money, the already interminable and invariable road that lay before him... or on top of him. He watched the people coming and going. He watched the taxis and the buses. He watched the indefatigable clock marking endless minutes in its endless circuits.

Everything comfortable and familiar, everything that defined him, was encased in a dull gray-blue case he'd thought was hers. He could see her reasoning now. He understood what she'd recognized, and wanted - in her inscrutable way - to fix. He pulled out his pen and notebook, because now he could see -- he needed a new plan. After a few minutes, he got up, stretching the kinks out of his shoulders.

Arthur squinted against a bright sky and a crisp breeze as he left the station. He scanned the lot for his bus and walked toward it. But he didn't get on. When he reached the corner he turned west, following the sun. As he walked he pictured the suitcase still sitting in the bus station, and he imagined where it might go next.