"Krista. When did this come."
Nobody answered.
"Krista Ann."
"June," my sister said.
"June," my mother said. She said it like she was writing it down. "And where have you been going. Every morning. At ten after seven. With your backpack and your thermos and your bus pass."
Krista came down off the stairs. She came down the last four steps slowly, holding the railing, and she stood at the bottom with her wet hands at her sides, my paste still under her fingernails, in her Northlake sweatshirt that was too big for her now, with the white lighthouse on the front of it. She looked at the back of our mother's head. Then she looked at me. And it was the strangest look, because it wasn't angry, and it wasn't sorry. It was almost relieved. Like someone who has been holding a heavy box up over their head for a very long time and has finally, finally been allowed to put it down, even if it's put down on their own foot.
"Campus," she said. "I've been going to campus."
She told it standing at the bottom of the stairs. My mother never got up off the floor the whole time, and I never sat down, and so the three of us were at three different heights, like people on a staircase in a painting, and nobody moved.
She'd been fine in the fall. That was the first thing she said, like it was important that we know. Her first semester she'd been fine. A 3.4. Anatomy was easy because anatomy was just memorizing, and she could memorize anything. The trouble started in the spring with General Chemistry Two, which was the class everybody in pre-nursing had to pass with a C or better, and which met in Hammond Hall in a lecture room that held three hundred people and had no windows.