Page 6 of What You Left Me

Phew.

Everyone holds a different letter.M-C-F-Y-L-!My aunts look at each other and switch spots.M-C-F-L-Y-!My sister puts down her letter and holds up her phone. The version of “Fly Like An Eagle” they use in the movieSpace Jamstarts playing, and I’ll be damned if that song doesn’t make me believe I can. I run in slow motion toward my diploma, airplane wings on and a dramatic spin here and there, just like the singer Seal would want.

Damn. Guess Taggart is right. Iama bird.

GG stands at the steps, waiting to cross after me. As I spin, I catch her cupping her mouth, a smile showing at the corners.

Success.

• • •

Martin McGee surely went out how he went in, a funny dude skating by on wild antics, always going over the top for the joke, never passing up an opportunity to make an impression. He shoots me a wink. I can’t help but laugh. This boy. He really does seem so good. Can it be true? Do they exist?

Against my better judgment, the corners of my mouth stay pulled upward. Nothing will get my face to calm down, not scolding or biting my cheek or the thought of algebraic equations.

“Petra Margaret McGowan.”

That sobers me right up.

I step up the stairs. An almost serene silence accompanies me, allowing me to hear every meaningless thank-you from the faculty members as we shake hands. The last one gives me my empty diploma holder. Everything I’ve ever worked for, my entire life really, is now represented by one missing eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of cardstock. It’s all been for the very piece of paper I don’t yet have. The anchor in my stomach scrapes along my intestines as it sinks deeper. I’d be stuck standing in the middle of the stage for the rest of my life if not for the simple, powerful fact that no other graduate knows this black folder is empty. To them, I am just a girl in the middle of the class. I smile and smile and smile and smile until I’m down the steps on the other side of the stage.

I’d always pictured this whole thing ending here, as if I could throw my cap in the air and head straight to a painful family dinner at Olive Garden. But it isn’t over when I walk across the stage. It’s over when all 868 students walk across the stage. I’m merely the halfway point. So back into the line I go, en route to my assigned seat, my leaden legs propelled forward by the promise of seeing Martin again. He’s there, cheesing like someone’s let him in on the best, most exciting secret known to man.

“Petra, Petra, Petra,” he says when I walk down. “Petra riding the Metra. You betcha, Petra.”

“So you know my name now,” I say with an eye roll, mostly because making any kind of real eye contact with him seems deadlier than the boredom afflicting every student within a fifty-mile radius of this football field.

“Not just your first name. I know yourwholename.” He taps the boy in front of him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, man, I just wanted you to know that this girl here is my best friend, Petra Margaret McGowan. Petty Margs, I call her. I know you heard our singing earlier. I think our music’s so good we just might start a band with that name.”

“Dude, get over yourself,” the boy says as he shrugs off Martin’s touch.

Martin tosses a half grin my way. “This guy clearly doesn’t know classic rock like we do, Petty Margs.”

“I can’t with you.”

“No one can.”

We’re waiting for the rest of our row to graduate so we can walk back to our seats in, quote, “uniform fashion.” With every name called, I remind myself to breathe. I’m supposed to be sulking. This is supposed to be torture. But it isn’t. No matter what I do, I can’t shake the Martin McGee I’m wearing all over my mood.

• • •

I’m supposed to be bored. This is supposed to be torture. But it isn’t. There’s a Petra Margaret McGowan–size light shining on me, and it’s brighter than anything the sun is trying to make happen up in the sky right now.

Wow. I can be cheesy.

Whatever. I own it.

It’s so strange though because I can’t even remember the last time I felt this charged up. Maybe when I tried to get Holly Paulson to go to the seventh-grade dance with me. My sister Katie and I stayed up all night making a shoe box diorama of Holly and I holding each other on the dance floor. I had to carry it with me the entire school day because the only class I had with Holly was my last one. By the time it rolled around, she’d already heard about the box from everybody else, so there was all this expectation, and when we finally saw each other, neither of us really knew how to go about it all. I ended up saying nothing and just handing her the diorama as if that was enough. She looked at me like I’d shown up to school in just my underwear, because the project featured Popsicle stick people with our school pictures pasted onto their heads.

It’s like that—like I’m holding an obvious question but unsure how to really ask it. My words are glue, stuck inside my mouth.

Oh, and Holly said no, by the way. So there’s that too.

• • •

Somehow, Martin and I get stuck in a silence so weighted it lassoes around my throat. Something between us got lost up on the stage. Or maybe found. It’s hard to tell with all the loaded silence blocking my peripherals. I study the intricate details of my yellow robe, distracting myself by imagining what it might be to finally, maybe, let myself like a boy again. Why are ceremonies practically designed for this kind of introspection? It’s as unavoidable as the brightness all around me.

Ryan Hales emerges, like a light that’s been turned on in the attic of my mind. The squareness of his face, so symmetrical that you could slice him down the middle and come up with mirror images. He’s rubbing his hands on his jeans, asking me on a date in front of my locker. His hands stop when I say yes. He’s kicking the rocks outside of the tennis courts, waiting to give me a ride home, stopping when I walk up. Tossing my homework out the window when I tell him I have too much, stopping when I panic.