The list was taped to the inside of my closet door, and by six in the morning on the last Saturday in June I had crossed off everything on it except one line.
I had written that list in March, the night the email came, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop hot against my shins and my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
I wrote it in green ink because green was the color of the fellowship logo, a little stylized finch on a little stylized island, and because I was seventeen and still believed that if you did a thing carefully enough, in the right color, it would come true.
Over three months the list had gotten longer and messier. Things had been added in pencil, in blue pen, once in eyeliner when I couldn't find a pen at eleven at night and had suddenly remembered that I needed a dry bag for my phone. Things had been crossed off with straight lines, then with satisfied scribbles, then, toward the end, with a single fat X that I made with my whole arm.
Hiking boots, broken in. X.
Two pairs quick-dry pants. X.
Field notebook, waterproof, the good kind. X.
Reef-safe sunscreen, the kind Dr. Brindle said, not the kind Mom wants to buy at Costco. X.
Binoculars (borrow from Mr. Thackeray, PROMISE to return). X.
Headlamp. X. Spare batteries. X. Seasickness bands. X, with a little drawing of a sad face next to it, because the crossing from San Cristóbal to Española was supposed to be rough and I had never been on a boat bigger than a rowboat on Candlewood Lake.
At the bottom, in the green ink from the first night, in letters I had made bigger and more careful than all the rest, was the line I had not crossed off.
Passport.
I stood in front of the closet door in my socks and looked at it for a while. The house was quiet in the way our house was only quiet early on Saturdays, the refrigerator humming, a bird I couldn't see working through the same three notes over and over in the maple outside my window. A Carolina wren. I knew it without looking. I had known it since I was nine, since the spring Mom bought me a used field guide at the library sale on Main Street and sat with me on the back steps, and every time something sang she would say, in Spanish, "Who is that? Who's talking?" and I would flip through the pages trying to match the sound to the picture until I got it right.