Chapter One
# Chapter One: Departure Gate
Mia Alvarez sat in the departure lounge at LAX with a one-way ticket to Lisbon and a backpack that weighed more than her dog. Her mother had cried. Her father had given her pepper spray and a list of embassy phone numbers. Her academic advisor had called it "a statistically inadvisable delay in credential acquisition," which was exactly the kind of sentence that had made her want to leave in the first place.
She was nineteen. She had a savings account with four thousand dollars, a high school diploma, and absolutely no plan beyond "get on the plane." Everyone she knew was starting college in September. Everyone she knew had five-year plans and LinkedIn profiles and clear, sensible trajectories. Mia had a journal with the words "figure it out" written on the first page and nothing on any of the others.
The gate agent called her row. Mia stood up, shouldered her ridiculous backpack, and walked down the jetway into the rest of her life. She did not look back, mostly because the backpack made turning around physically difficult.