Once and for All(16)
“Are you sure you don’t want us to hang out for a few minutes?” Jilly asked me as she pulled into the lot of my mom’s office, where I’d left my car parked earlier. “All I have left to do is to pick up Crawford’s new glasses and then grab him from Tae Kwon Do.”
“Another pair of glasses?” I asked.
She glanced at the twins in the rearview, each looking out a separate window, sitting close to each other. “The kid got suspended this time. We’ll see if it makes a difference.”
Although I found Crawford’s monotone and awkwardness appealing, it made him a huge target for the bullies at his school. Martial arts had made him strong, but not made much of a difference in the lunch line, at least not yet. In the meantime, the Bakers spent a lot on replacement eyewear.
“I’m fine, you should go,” I told her. “I’ll see you at the amphitheater.”
“Here’s hoping Steve passes out and doesn’t make it.”
“Fingers crossed.”
She laughed, and I did too, if only to convince her I was, in fact, okay. With her Baker and me Barrett, we’d spent our lives in this small town with Steve Baroff wedged between us for every alphabetical occasion, except when he was too stoned to show up for school. We’d long hoped this would happen for graduation, if only for the continuity of us being on the stage at the same time. Making memories, indeed.
As she drove off, already cranking the radio, I started toward my mom’s office. Natalie Barrett Weddings was located in the center of a modern office building with a dentist’s office on one side, a high-end stationery store called RSVP on the other. Entirely too much of my paycheck had gone to the latter due to my weakness for cards, writing paper, and, especially, blank books. Life seemed so much more manageable when you could write it down neatly on paper, which was probably exactly why I could only do it for a day or two, and hadn’t even tried in the last year. When I looked through those old barely begun journals now, the events on the pages seemed too small to even fill the lines, that inconsequential. Thinking this, I had a flash of the salesgirl and her computer, and felt a chill come over me. I pulled open the door to my mom’s office, where the A/C was always blasting and I wouldn’t notice my own drop in temperature.
William saw me, though, immediately getting up from his seat at the conference table across from Bee and coming over. “I had a news alert on my phone,” he said in a low voice. Distantly, I heard my mom, also at the table, saying something about head counts. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said automatically. “Go back to your meeting. I just came to drop off the tickets.”
He nodded, but still waited a beat, as if I might change my mind, before returning to the group. Meanwhile, I slipped into the back office, where I reached into my pocket, pulling out the two passes I’d picked up for the ceremony. You were allowed up to six, but it wasn’t like I needed any more. I slid them into my mom’s purse, which was sitting on her side of the big desk they shared, then went back out into the main room.
“. . . were supposed to meet me a half hour ago,” Bee was saying to her brother Ambrose, who had joined the group in my brief absence. Dressed in jeans, a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt, and tennis shoes, he looked freshly showered, as if just beginning his day at this late hour. Maybe this was why his sister, usually so pleasant, seemed annoyed. “It’s no wonder you can’t get a job if you’re incapable of getting places on time.”
“My watch is broken,” he said. “And then I had to get here, so . . .”
Bee’s cheeks were flushed. “You have a phone, Ambrose. And there are clocks!”
An awkward silence settled over the room, during which he spotted me and smiled, waving energetically, as if we were longtime friends finally reunited. His complete lack of caring for the trouble he’d caused would have been impressive if it didn’t seem so demented. I was still deciding how to react when my mom said, “So, Louna. How does it feel to be almost free from the compulsory education system?”
Now everyone looked at me. Even when I wasn’t working, I was working. “I won’t believe it until I flip my tassel,” I replied.
“Louna’s graduating tonight,” William explained to Bee. “High school.”
“Really?” She smiled at me. Beside her, Ambrose noticed William’s fancy stainless-steel tape dispenser—we were both suckers for office supplies—and pulled it toward him. “Congratulations!” Bee said. “What a milestone. I remember every minute of my commencement.”
“Me, too,” Ambrose said. I noticed that his hair, although damp, was in full effect, that one curl pushed away from his face but about to tumble down again.
“You didn’t graduate,” his sister pointed out. To us she added, “It was one of those leave-quietly-and-we-won’t-expel-you kind of situations. Classic Ambrose.”
“I was talking about yours,” he said, pushing the button on the dispenser. It whirred, spitting out a single piece of tape. “And it was never proven that I brought the cow in, if you’ll recall.”
My mother raised that one eyebrow. “Cow?”
“So what are you doing next year, Louna?” Bee said quickly, turning her attention back to me. Whatever had happened with farm animals, she didn’t want to dwell on it.