Graduation Day (Part 2)

 

POV: Chase Sterling

---

The ceremony is already in full swing by the time I find my seat, and the applause is the kind that fills a space so completely you stop hearing it as individual sound and it becomes something more like weather. I sit down between two people I've known for three years and will probably never see again, and I stare straight ahead, and I keep my hand flat against my thigh so I stop reaching for the ring box in my pocket.

She's up there.

Of course she is. Vivian Ashford is always exactly where the light is brightest. She's standing at the edge of the stage with the other honor students, perfectly composed, her dark hair pinned back, her gown pressed like she ironed it herself at six this morning, which she absolutely did. She's looking out over the audience with that expression she has, the one that reads as serene confidence to everyone in this auditorium and reads to me, after three years, as the very specific kind of calm that means she's already won and she knows it.

I look at my hands.

The program says she's delivering the valedictory address. Of course it does. Vivian wanted this since the first week of freshman year. I know because she told me, once, in the dark, in that unguarded sixty-second window after, when she sometimes said things she'd never say in daylight. I'm going to stand on that stage, she'd said, and every person in that room is going to know exactly who I am.

I'd thought she was talking about ambition.

I turn the program over in my hands and don't read it.

---

When they call her name the applause is immediate and genuine, and she walks to the podium like she was built for it, which maybe she was. She adjusts the microphone with two fingers. She looks out over the auditorium. Cameras go off in a scattered, bright constellation, and she doesn't flinch or squint, she just absorbs it, like someone who has been practicing for exactly this kind of light her entire life.

"Four years ago," she begins, and her voice through the speakers is clear and unhurried and exactly right, "I walked onto this campus with one intention. Not to fit in. Not to find myself. Not to make memories." She pauses, just long enough. "To win."

Laughter. Affectionate, charmed laughter, because Vivian Ashford says it and it sounds like confidence instead of what it actually is.

I know what it actually is.

"The people in this room who know me," she continues, and her eyes move across the audience in that practiced way, the way that makes every person feel individually seen, "know that I don't believe in tying yourself to anything that can't carry its own weight. Not an idea. Not a plan." Another pause. A small smile at the corner of her mouth. "Not a person."

The applause that follows is warm and approving.

I feel it land somewhere behind my sternum like a door slamming.

Not a person.

She's not looking at me. She doesn't need to. The words do the work just fine on their own, which is very Vivian, which is the thing I somehow loved about her for three entire years without ever understanding what I was actually dealing with.

I stand up.

---

I don't have a plan. That's the honest truth. I've been sitting in this seat for twelve minutes with the ring box in my pocket and three years of mornings in my chest and something behind my eyes that went dark and quiet in a dormitory hallway, and when I stand up I don't have a destination, I just have the absolute physical inability to remain seated while Vivian Ashford tells four hundred people that attaching yourself to anything that can't carry its own weight is a moral failure.

I walk toward the stage.

Someone grabs my arm, a faculty member I don't know, and I look at him in a way that makes him let go, and I keep walking.

There are steps on the left side. I take them.

---

Sienna Rhodes is standing just offstage with a cluster of other honor students, holding her program with both hands, watching Vivian at the podium with an expression of polite attention. She's tall, with warm brown skin and natural hair pinned back under her cap, and she has the kind of face that looks like it's always slightly braced for something it hasn't been told about yet. I've seen her around for three years. We've had exactly two conversations. She's smart, quiet, and, crucially, she is standing close enough to the stage that she'll be visible from the audience.

I know what I'm doing is a terrible idea.

I know it the same way you know a fire is hot, as an abstract factual awareness that exists completely separately from the part of you that is already moving toward it.

She sees me coming and her brow creases slightly. "Chase? What are you"

"I need a favor," I say. It comes out low and level, which surprises me.

"You need a" She stops. She looks at my face, and something shifts in her expression, something quick and almost involuntary, like she's reading something I didn't say. "Are you okay?"

"No," I say, which is the most honest thing I've said all morning.

She opens her mouth again and I cup her face in my hands and I kiss her.

---

She goes very still for exactly one second, and in that second I am aware of several things simultaneously: the warmth of her face under my palms, the startled sound she makes against my mouth, and the exact moment that Vivian's speech stops.

The silence that follows is enormous.

And then the auditorium does not go quiet. It does the opposite. It erupts.

Sienna pulls back first, her hands coming up to my chest, her eyes wide and dark and stunned. I turn to look at the auditorium and I can see the whole room from here, four hundred faces in various states of shock and delight and confusion, cameras going off like a second round of applause, a faculty member already moving toward the stage with the expression of someone who has been called upon to manage a situation they did not train for.

And Vivian.

Vivian is still standing at the podium with both hands on the edges of it, and her face is doing something I have never seen it do before in three years. It's not anger. It's not the controlled neutrality. It's something underneath all of that, something she hasn't had time to cover yet, and it is the first genuinely unguarded thing I have seen on her face since seven-fifteen this morning.

For three seconds I hold her gaze from across the stage.

Then I look away first, which I've never done before, and somehow that feels like the most significant thing that's happened all day.

---

"What was that?" Sienna says behind me, her voice barely above a whisper.

I turn back to her. She's pressed one hand over her mouth and she's staring at me with an expression that would be funny under different circumstances. Her program is on the floor. She doesn't seem to have noticed.

"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it. "That wasn't about you."

"I know it wasn't about me," she says, with a startled, slightly disbelieving laugh that tells me she's handling this better than most people would. "That was very obviously about the valedictorian who is currently staring at the back of your head."

I don't turn around.

Sienna watches me for a moment with that expression she had before, the braced one, the one that looks like she's listening to something just outside the range of normal hearing. Then she blinks and something crosses her face that I don't have a name for.

"Chase," she says, and her voice has changed slightly, something careful in it now.

"I really am sorry," I say again. "You didn't deserve that."

She shakes her head slowly, like she's trying to clear it, and opens her mouth to say something else.

And then she stops.

Her face goes pale under her warm brown skin, a rapid, visible draining, and her hand comes back up to her mouth and this time it isn't shock. Her eyes go somewhere I can't follow. Somewhere that isn't backstage at a graduation ceremony. Somewhere far away and cold and terrible.

"Sienna."

She doesn't answer.

Her other hand finds the wall beside her and presses flat against it, steadying herself, and her eyes are open but she isn't seeing me or the stage or any of this, she's seeing something else entirely, something that has made the color leave her face like a tide going out.

"Hey." I step toward her. "Hey, are you"

She makes a small, sharp sound, barely a sound at all, and then her legs go and I catch her by the arms before she goes down completely, and she grabs onto my jacket with both fists and stares at me with eyes that are just barely coming back from wherever they went.

"Blood," she says, barely a whisper. "Broken glass."

She blinks. The color hasn't come back yet.

Behind us, the auditorium is still buzzing with the spectacular wreckage of Vivian Ashford's perfect morning.