Molly Harding's Short Stories: A Long Way Home

Molly Harding is an eighteen year old girl currently living in Memphis, Tennessee. She lives in a two story house in Germantown with her parents and her younger brother, Cooper. Molly is going to college overseas in the summer and has yet to apply for a passport and visa. On top of that, her class is going to Florida for their senior trip next week and she has to read some maps and brochures of local attractions before leaving on Monday.

First, Molly must get her parents to sign the travel release form to go to on the trip to Tallahassee. After receiving the slip at school on Thursday, she forgot to have her parents sign it and bring it back on Friday. It’s now Saturday night and she definitely can’t go on the trip if her form isn’t in by Monday morning. As Molly was thinking about this, she ran downstairs

to get her parents to sign the permission slip. Her parents carefully read through the form and signed all the necessary blank spaces needing their signature and ticked all the required boxes such as: “No, my child does not have any allergies”.

Now that Molly has the form all ready to be turned in she will have to email it to the high school secretary. Before anything, she scans the slip on the printer and exports it to her computer. Without delay, she goes on the school website to get the secretary’s email. She clicks on “About”, then “Faculty”, then “Contact Us” and goes through the long reference list of the teachers emails. She scrolls down the list passing quite a few Johnson’s until she got to Jones and found “Mrs Jones, Judy (High School Secretary)”. Molly had always liked Mrs Jones so she felt bad for forgetting to get the form into school earlier. She apologised for the late turn in and attached the completed form to her outgoing email. Swoosh.

Since Molly and her classmates were going to be leaving the day after tomorrow, all that was left for Molly to do was get informed on where they were going.

She pulled out some slightly crumpled brochures from her school bag, which she had picked up the day before, on her way home at the travel store. “Tallahassee in a Week” and “50 Things to do in Florida” read the bold prints of informative texts. She read through the pamphlets and the attached maps and proceeded to highlight some of the places she hoped she’d get to visit, or at least pass by, one being the Florida State University where her best friend Vicky would be attending.

As Monday morning rolled along, Molly gathered all her stuff at the door and yelled for her parents to hurry or she’d be late to catch the bus at school. With all her things stacked in the trunk of the car, her dad could hardly see past her purple suitcase in the rearview mirror, yet that didn't stop him from driving. When Molly and her family pulled up to the parking lot, it was packed with other seniors and their families, they had to park at the back near the entrance gate which was farther away from the bus she needed to go

on.

After all her bags were unloaded, she pulled out the bus map that she’d printed off of Google Drive and followed the directions to her class bus 12-B. When she got there, her advisor checked her in and pointed Molly in the direction of Vicky, which she knew she’d be looking for. Before taking off towards Vicky, Molly turned and kissed her parents goodbye, “love you guys, and I’ll see you when I get back” she said as she finally hugged her brother Cooper. Her family waved her off as she ran to Vicky and greeted her with a bubbly smile, “this is going to be the best trip ever”!