Chapter 32

Chapter Thirty Two

MARA

Graduation was a Saturday in May that arrived with perfect weather, which felt almost unfair in its precision, like the universe had checked the occasion and decided to cooperate.

The sky was the specific blue that San Francisco offered maybe thirty days a year, high and clear and without the usual marine layer that softened everything. The ceremony was held on the football field, which meant I walked across the same turf I'd watched from the fence on a cold November afternoon, and I thought about that as I took my seat in the alphabetical rows of my graduating class.

Delgado was near the front.

I found my mother in the stands before I sat down. She was already there, early the way she was always early to things that mattered, in the good blazer she'd bought two years ago and saved for important occasions. She had her phone out and she was taking photos before the ceremony even started, which meant I was being photographed sitting down in cap and gown looking for my mother in the crowd, which was not the dignified record I would have chosen but was somehow exactly right.

Jess was two seats down. She turned and raised her eyebrows at me and I raised mine back.

Cole was four rows behind. Renner. The Rs were back there. I had not turned around to find him but I was aware of exactly where he was, which was its own kind of information about the year.

The principal spoke. Two student speakers, one of whom was good and one of whom ran four minutes long. The sun moved across the field and the folding chairs made their discomfort known and I sat through all of it with my hands in my lap and felt the weight and the lightness of it in equal measure.

When they called my name I walked across the stage and shook the principal's hand and took my diploma and looked out at the stands where my mother was standing, which she wasn't supposed to be doing, nobody else was standing, but she was standing and her phone was up and she was not managing anything back at all.

I smiled at her from the stage.

She had earned that moment as much as I had.

After the ceremony the field became the organized chaos that follows every graduation, the caps and gowns and families converging and the same four phrases said approximately eight hundred times. I found my mother in the crowd and she held me for a long moment before pulling back to look at my face with the expression she reserved for the things she'd worked hardest for.

"There," she said. Just that.

There.

Jess found me next. We stood together in the middle of the chaos and took the photo her mother requested and then stood there without needing to say much, which was the friendship we'd built, the one that didn't require volume.

Cole appeared through the crowd with his cap off and his gown open over his clothes and his mother beside him, and Elena Reyes made a beeline for my mother with the energy of two women who had been waiting for this specific convergence, and they embraced like people who'd known each other for years rather than months.

Cole stopped in front of me.

He looked at me in my cap and gown and I looked at him in his and there was a whole conversation in that, everything the year had been, compressed into the look.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"We graduated."

"We did."

"You did it first technically. Delgado beats Renner alphabetically."

"I have beaten you at most things alphabetically and otherwise."

He smiled. The full one. He reached out and straightened my cap which had gone slightly crooked, the way he fixed things without being asked, and I held still and let him.

"Proud of you," he said quietly.

"Proud of you too."

He pulled me in and I went, cap and gown and all, and we stood in the middle of the graduating class of Westbrook High while our mothers talked nearby and Jess took a photo she didn't ask permission for and the May sun did its perfect thing overhead.

Later, after the photos and the families and the two separate celebration lunches that somehow merged into one because our mothers had decided this without consulting either of us, we ended up at the overlook near the park. Just us. The same spot as the December night when we'd talked about Sacramento and distance, except now the city below was lit by afternoon sun instead of evening dark and everything had a different quality to it.

We sat on the hood of his car the way we had never actually done before but felt like something this occasion required. The bay was flat and silver. The bridge stood where it always stood.

"Say something true," I said.

It was something we'd started doing, I didn't remember when. Just a way of cutting through when things needed cutting through.

He thought about it. "I don't want summer to end," he said. "And I also can't wait for what comes after it. Both things exactly equally."

I looked at the water. "Me too. That's exactly it."

"Your turn."

I thought about it seriously, the way the game required. "I'm not scared of New York anymore. I'm still nervous. But the scared part is gone."

He looked at me. "When did that happen."

"Somewhere between October and now." I looked back at him. "You did that. Not on purpose. Just by—" I stopped. "By making me feel like I was worth the space I took up."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You always were."

"I know that better now."

He took my hand on the hood of the car and we sat with the city below us and summer ahead of us and September somewhere past that, real and coming.

We had time.

Not unlimited. Not uncomplicated.

But time.

And we both knew, without saying it, that we were going to use every hour of it right.