There is this thing we do, me and CC, and it is seeing someone to the airport and waving them off before they fly to the other side of the world. “Don’t be sad, CC,” I said as I zipped up the last zip Friday afternoon, “this is our lives,” but the truth is that the dependability of the exercise doesn’t take away that unsettled, queasy feeling in your gut. The clock was ticking its way slowly but surely to two-thirty. There is little so miserable as waiting to leave.

Our first last hurrah was feasting it up at Tomodachi the night before with Deborah and Lloyd, where we collected so many green and blue and maroon plates off the sushi train we didn’t even have room for the syrup-drizzled strawberry mochi dessert (blue plate with gold flowers). Our second last hurrah was french toast breakfast the morning of the leaving with our cousin Sam, and then waiting too long for the bus home creaking its way round the bend. Our third last hurrah, and I know this doesn’t first appear to be a hurrah at all, was the late McDonald’s lunch at the airport. “A Filet-O-Fish, please,” I said to the empty-eyed countergirl, and she said, “What?” “Fill-let,” CC muttered in my ear from behind me. “In Australia you pronounce the t.”

I ignored the lurch in my stomach and headed, waving madly, into customs and immigration. In my carry-on I had a small box of gingerbread figures. “I’m going to make gingerbread bears for Olive!” Maeve had announced, and CC had brought out the cookie cutters and rolled out the dough while the kid pranced about in a pink apron. She’d decorated five gingerbread men before losing interest in us, then CC and I had sprinkled, M&M’ed and silver-balled the remaining seventy or eighty of the little suckers.

The twenty-something hours of flying were yet to come, as was the special-ordered Hindu meal served to me in 34G while I sat surrounded by a family of Indians, but for now I turned around and waved, I waved while I walked towards the passport queue, I stood on my toes and I waved till my CC disappeared behind the curve.