Chapter 9: The Summer Between

Graduation was the third Saturday in May, in the gymnasium, with the bleachers folded out and four hundred and twelve seniors in folding chairs on the floor where, sixteen weeks earlier, four hundred of them had watched my sister convulse in my boyfriend’s arms.

I thought about that all through the processional. I could not help it. Same room. Same crowd, nearly. The school had spent the spring metabolizing us — the seizure, then the scandal of the arrangement, then the boredom that mercifully follows all scandals — and now the same four hundred people sat in rows in their gowns, and somewhere among them was the boy who had called Brent a legend until Brent had a quiet word with him, and somewhere were the girls whose conversations still adjusted their volume, and none of it mattered anymore, because we were all sixty minutes from never seeing most of each other again.

Nazari, Parisa.

She crossed the stage the way she crossed every stage — composed, unhurried — and I want to tell you the gymnasium held some special breath for her, but the truth is better than that: it didn’t. She was just a name in the N’s. The room that had made her a spectacle in January had, by May, lost interest, and she walked across it as exactly nobody’s cautionary tale, took her diploma, shook the principal’s hand, and found us in the crowd on her way down the stairs.

Brent was on his feet in the S section, applauding with his arms over his head, conspicuous as a lighthouse. My father, in the stands, stood too. My mother had been crying since the orchestra tuned.

Nazari, Yasmin. I walked it with my chin up and my tassel already swinging loose.

And then, forty names later: Saunders, Brent — and two black-haired girls in the N section made an unreasonable amount of noise, and did not care, and the school that had spent a spring deciding what we were watched the three of us be it, openly, one last time, and then released us all into the rest of our lives.

The summer organized itself around two facts: money and August.

Brent went full-time at the hardware store — his third of the security deposit was already paid, the check had beaten my father’s thirty days by twenty-six, but rent was coming and he intended to arrive at it with a cushion. Parisa and I split a summer between the public library, where she ruled the reshelving cart like a small kingdom, and the medical billing office where my father had arranged me a temp position that taught me more about the American healthcare system than my first year of college ever would.

And in the evenings, at our kitchen table, Brent did his assignment.

My father had handed him Parisa’s medical transition in that office in May, and I will tell you honestly that some part of me had bristled — it was mine, I had run it since December, I knew the refill schedule the way I knew my own birthday. I had assumed I would be consulted constantly.

I was consulted exactly twice.