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 In "A Late-Night Visit" The father feels “slightly out of place, like someone who’d stepped out of a family photo and into a campus hallway.” This simile establishes the narrator’s split identity: part of a family unit, part of an independent college life.

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A Late-Night Visit

I was halfway through a statistics problem set, numbers swimming on the page, pencil hovering uselessly above the graph, when a quiet knock rattled my dorm door. Ten o’clock—too late for deliveries, too early for the night guard’s rounds. I wasn’t in the mood for company.

When I opened it, there stood my dad: wind-tousled hair, travel-creased jacket, and that familiar grin.

“Surprise,” he said. “I was in town and … I missed you.”

For a second I just blinked. He looked both perfectly ordinary and slightly out of place, like someone who’d stepped out of a family photo and into a campus hallway.

“You came all this way just to knock?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Figured the window was a risk.”

I laughed despite myself and let him in. He scanned the room as if each detail might explain my whole life—posters curling at the corners, the leaning stack of textbooks, the mug with three pens and one half-dead plant.

“So this is headquarters,” he said. “Tell me everything. Classes? Friends? Are you eating anything green?”

Questions tumbled out faster than I could answer. We sat cross-legged on the carpet, talking about professors, music, the coffee shop that made the best cinnamon latte—and how my econ professor still used an overhead projector like it was 1992, fumbling with clear plastic sheets while the class groaned. His eyes kept lighting up like I was telling him secrets from a faraway planet.

By the time I glanced at the clock it was a few minutes past eleven. “Uh, Dad … the front doors are locked now. Curfew. Only the night guard can buzz you out.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Curfew, huh? Guess I’ll stay here, then.”

“There’s only one bed,” I warned.

“Not a problem,” he said, mouth quirking. “Peaceful soldier, remember?”

I tossed him the extra blanket. He stretched out without complaint, a big silhouette against the narrow mattress. The radiator hummed. Outside, the campus settled into its winter hush.

I lay awake for a while, listening to his steady breathing. Just an hour ago I’d felt buried under numbers and obligations, half-convinced I was drowning on my own. But now—now it was as if he’d stepped back into the picture beside me, reminding me that I hadn’t really vanished from home. And home hadn’t vanished from me.