Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

The next morning, I sat in the back seat of the car with my bag on my lap and my face turned toward the window, watching the city blur past. The bruises on my cheek had darkened overnight, shifting from purple to a greenish-yellow that Mina had described as "looking like a very angry banana." The scrape had scabbed over. My ribs still ached when I breathed too deeply.

I felt, in a word, terrible.

And yet.

And yet I was not in class. I was not staring at supply curves. I was not pretending to understand concepts that had been invented by humans who had clearly had too much time on their hands and not enough sense to use it wisely.

I was, instead, being driven to a hospital where a man who looked like my professor would shine lights in my eyes and ask me questions, I could answer without thinking, and then I would go home and lie in my bed and do nothing.

It was, I reflected, the best day I had had since waking up in this world.

Mum was in the passenger seat, her phone in her hand, scrolling through something that made her sigh occasionally. Dad was driving, his eyes on the road, his hands at ten and two in a way that suggested he had been taught to drive by someone who took driving very seriously.

The car stopped at a red light.

"Dad," I said.

"Yes?"

I tried to speak. The words were there, somewhere, but they were tangled in something I didn't have a name for. Something that felt like pride. Something that felt like fear. Something that felt like the slow, terrifying process of becoming someone new.

"Dad," I said again.

He turned in his seat to look at me. His face was open. Waiting. The face of a man who had been waiting for his daughter to speak for a very long time and had learned to be patient.

"I need—" I stopped. Swallowed. "I think I need extra classes."

The silence that followed was profound.

Mum's phone stopped scrolling. Dad's hands tightened on the steering wheel. The light turned green, and the car behind us honked, and Dad did not move.

"Extra classes," Mum said slowly. Her voice was strange. Strained.

"For my subjects," I said, and the words came faster now, tumbling out like they had been waiting for this moment. "Economics. Sociology. The other ones. I don't understand them. I sit in the lectures and I try to follow, but the words don't—they don't stay. They swim. And the numbers—" I made a frustrated gesture with my hand. "—they're not like celestial numbers. They don't behave. They shift and change and do things numbers shouldn't do, and I can't—I can't keep up. I need help. I need someone to explain it to me like I'm—" I stopped. The word was there, waiting. I didn't want to say it. But it was the truth. And the truth, I was learning, was easier to carry when you let it out. "Like I'm a child. Who doesn't know anything. Because I don't. I don't know anything about any of it, and I'm going to fail, and if I fail, I lose the scholarship, and if I lose the scholarship, my life is over, and—"

"Sera."

Mum's voice cut through my spiral. I looked at her. Her face was wet. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, silent and steady, like she had been holding them back for a very long time and they had finally decided they weren't going to wait anymore.

"You're crying," I said.

"I'm not crying," she said, even as more tears fell. "I'm—these are—they're—"

"Emotional tears," Dad supplied. He was not crying. He was definitely not crying. His eyes were just... bright. From the sun. Which was not very bright at all, given that we were currently sitting in the middle of an intersection while cars honked behind us.

"I'm not crying," Mum repeated. "I'm just—Sera asked for help. Sera never asks for help. Sera would rather set herself on fire than ask for help. And she asked. She asked."

"I didn't set myself on fire," I said.

"That's not the point."

"It seems like a relevant point. Fire is very painful. I would not choose it over asking for help. Probably." I paused. "Depending on the help required."

Mum let out a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. "You asked for help. You talked nicely. You didn't call anyone a peasant. You were—" She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "—reasonable."

"I am always reasonable."

"No, you're not!" Mum and Dad disagree in union.

"I am sometimes reasonable."

"You're never reasonable. You're Sera. You climb out windows and go to concerts and get caught in explosions and call your mother a peasant and then you ask for extra classes because you want to keep your scholarship and you do it nicely and I don't—I can't—" Mum dissolved into tears.

Dad reached across and patted her arm without taking his eyes off the road. "She's happy," he explained to me. "This is what happy looks like on her."

"This looks like distress," I observed.

"That's her happy face. You get used to it."

The car behind us honked again, longer this time. Dad finally put his foot on the accelerator, and we lurched forward into the intersection, leaving behind the honking cars and the streaming tears and the strange, warm feeling that had settled into my chest.

I had asked for help.

I had asked for help, and nothing terrible had happened. No one had laughed. No one had called me weak. No one had used it against me.

Mum had cried. Dad had smiled. And I had felt, for the first time since I fell from the heavens, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.