If he were here, I bet he would’ve found a silver marker and wrote something on his hat in the middle of the ceremony, just to piss off Mrs. Lane. He would’ve launched a beach ball into the crowd like Nick and Evan did at their graduation. Think more, Annie.
This gym has a lot of memories. I first met Kyle here when I smashed him in the head with a volleyball. Thinking about it now makes me laugh, and since I’m struggling not to cry, it comes out as a snort.
“You okay?” Leslie Warren asks. I’m with other people whose last names begin with W. We had French together.
“Just thinking about how much has happened in this gym in the last four years.”
She grins. “Remember during the first football pep rally this year, how the senior guys played tug-of-war against the guy teachers?”
“That was hilarious,” I reply with a laugh. The senior boys had been strutting around for days boasting how they were gonna kick some teacher ass, but then they got owned by the teachers. The guys toppled to the floor like bowling pins.
Our ceremony begins with lots of raucous cheering and clapping, and a rumor goes around that crazy Zack Burns is completely naked under his robe. That makes me laugh and cringe.
The evening grows more somber during the speeches. During his valedictory address, Mark MacCullum says, “Kyle Crocker was friends with everybody. He always wandered around the cafeteria, talking people up and eating food right off their trays. He also was a pen thief.”
Murmured laughter brushes through the crowd. It doesn’t really matter what Mark’s saying, because everyone is remembering their own Kyle stories. I glance down the aisle to where Kyle’s best friend, Seth, is crying.
Even the people who didn’t know him are silently weeping. Maybe not for him specifically, but for what Kyle lost: the chance to have experiences, good and bad and crazy and life changing. They feel sorry his mother and father lost their son. And maybe they start thinking of losing their own parents or children or brothers and sisters and how that feels like darkness, a hole that can never be filled. And if they’ve never lost somebody, what will it feel like when they do? When you finally watch your loved one being lowered into the ground, away from you forever. Before October, I couldn’t have fathomed it.
I felt immortal.
Guilt builds up under my skin, because Kyle’s the one who lost out on not being here at graduation. Never getting married or having kids. Never buying a house out on Normandy Lake, where he could live on a sailboat on weekends, doing nothing but swimming and snuggling up with me under sunsets. He’s the one I should feel sorry for. But I feel bad for me too. Because I can’t enjoy my future knowing he’s missing out.
•••
Later that night, I curl up in bed with my phone. I should be getting to sleep considering I have a ten-mile run/walk tomorrow. Matt told me I could skip the run and make it up with him on Sunday since I graduated today. But I told him it was no big deal. It’s not like I’m going on the senior cruise.
The entire class is out on the General Jackson Riverboat on the Cumberland tonight. I went back and forth on whether to buy a ticket, and ultimately I didn’t. In twenty years, will I look back on this night and wish I’d gone? There’s nothing on that boat for me. Sure, I could pose for pictures with Vanessa and Savannah, but then they’d go dance with their boyfriends and I’d be left alone. Kelsey would ignore me…and guys would ask me to dance, and they wouldn’t be Kyle. The entire time I’d be thinking: I’m here, and he’s not.
My mind flashes to junior prom when Kyle and I left an hour early, before Mom would get off work at the Quick Pick. We rushed back to my place and made love, then wrapped ourselves up in my bed sheets. We sat Indian style and talked about the road trip to Myrtle Beach we would take that summer. And I kept thinking, He is all I could ever want. He’s the guy for me. He’s my fate.
But when Kyle laid it out for me and asked me to marry him, I—we screwed everything up. Why couldn’t he have waited until after graduation to ask? Or after I graduated college?
If he’d just respected my wishes about college, he’d still be here.
I pull Instagram up on my phone and watch pictures from the cruise pop up. Cute, colorful dresses and dark suits fill my screen: a selfie of Vanessa Green and Rory Whitfield leaning against the boat’s railing; a photo of Savannah Barrow and Jack Goodwin kissing in the middle of the dance floor.
I wipe away the tears threatening to roll down my cheeks. Feel a sudden urge to go grab some beers and drink my loneliness away. I’d do anything to make my mind go blank. I stuff my phone under my pillow. Grab the photo of me and Kyle from my bedside table and turn it face down.