I couldn’t believe what Cole was doing. This was the same guy who promised he could solve my problems. He swore to me that he knew the way. He was the one who made me this way. And now he gets to act all rehabilitated? He gets to wash his hands of Nikki, of Allegra, and pretend like those sins are mine alone? He gets to leave me here in the darkness? No way.
Suddenly, I couldn’t move.
The Big Mack was squatting on me. Brian had me pinned, all his weight on top of my body. I couldn’t budge. I could barely think. I tore an arm free and elbowed him—whabam—right in the face.
“Ow!” Brian yelled, burying his nose in his hands.
“Monster,” Cole said, barrel-rolling out of my reach.
“It hurts,” Brian said, blubbering at the top of his lungs.
“How dare you,” Cole spat, a man possessed. He knelt above me. I couldn’t get up. Brian was still on top of me, still crushing my spine. I caught sight of Cole. I couldn’t believe what he was doing to me, how swiftly he had betrayed me. He stared me down, not blinking at all. Without warning, he drew his hand back and slapped me, down and across the face. With just one move, without a second thought, Cole finished our friendship, with everything he had.
Cole helped Brian to his feet. He collected the memory card. He checked to make sure Big Mack was okay.
And they left me. As I lay there, my head whirring, my face throbbing, the two of them walked away. Cole put his arm around his new best friend’s back.
Before he left, though, he turned around. He said one final thing to me. A series of words I couldn’t possibly forget.
“You fucking loser. Why did I even bother with you?”
• • •
Twenty minutes later, I pressed the doorbell.
Allie opened it on the first ring. She was wearing a red hoodie with STANFORD across the chest. Her hair looked different from normal. It was more up than I’ve ever seen it, pulled back and shimmery. She looked really great.
“Wiley?” she said, her hands on her hips. “My goodness, what an unanticipated and yet not altogether unpleasant surprise. You know—”
I stuck my hand up quick.
Like any good musician, she went quiet immediately.
I coughed to clear my throat. “You’ve made all the right choices,” I said. “Congratulations on your success.”
Without adding another word, and before she could say any of her own, I walked away. I went back through her mother’s garden, right onto the sidewalk, down my front pathway, and into my house, where my whole life awaits me.
19. ALLEGRA REY
We milled about the softball field, like wildlife around a watering hole, waiting to graduate. Much like on the savannah, it was sweltering in the hour leading up to the ceremony, easily ninety-five degrees, plus even stickier inside our church clothes and polyester gowns. Also maintaining the circle of lifeness of it all were the creatures themselves, the soon-to-be-graduates, so reductively animalistic in the predictability of their rituals.
There were the big cats, the prides of lionesses and coalitions of cheetahs, checking their phones for gossip on prey and promising to hunt together all summer and into college. There was the crash of rhinos, smashing into each other for sport and boasting about the size of their horns. There was the cackle of hyenas, snickering at the other beasts from their Hacky-Sack circle and scavenging on whatever munchies someone happened to leave behind. And of course, there were those without groups, there were the free birds like me, who mostly try to stay above the fray, who look forward to migrating hundreds and hundreds of miles away as soon as all this is over.
As the sun blazed on, and as diploma time drew near, I watched and waited, and there were but two animals that I could not for the life of me locate.
One was Wiley, my erstwhile friend, the erratic baboon. I haven’t seen him much at all lately, save for this past week, when he came to my front door and cryptically fled just as quickly. I did hear from a frustrated Ms. Fawcett that he hasn’t earned enough credits to graduate, which explained why he wasn’t out on the field, sweating through his cap and gown like the rest of us. Still, I hoped he’d at least be in attendance at the ceremony, watching from the bleachers or something. Obviously it’s been tough between the two of us these past several months, but one weird year shouldn’t define the rest of our lives. I miss that boy. I wanted him to hear my speech.
Just as I finished having that thought, I saw him.
Not Wiley.
The other lost animal.
Horton the elephant.
Brian wasn’t wearing a mortarboard. He doesn’t get to graduate either, not after he missed the better part of the whole fall semester. Still, he was out on the field, and he seemed jubilant to be playing with his old friends, who appeared to have rediscovered him just in time for today. There he was, choreographing a multistep handshake with DeSean. There he was, accepting a noogie from Tua and giving a wet willie to Scrotes. There he was, flirting with Nikki and Mona, like this was nine months ago, like he was the Big Mack on campus all over again.
I haven’t talked to Brian but for a few fleeting moments on prom night, and before then, not since the night in his bedroom. It’s the complete inverse of my situation with Wiley. With Wiley, I felt betrayed, but now that I’m on the brink of leaving forever, I’d love to get back in touch, as long as he can muster the maturity. Alas, I can’t seem to find him anywhere. Whereas with Brian, he and I had a phenomenal year. I mean in so many ways I think it was the best year I’ve ever had—
Which is why I can’t bear to face him again.
Which is why I retreated from the sun-beaten graduates and into the shadows.
Brian has his other friends now. I don’t think he needs me anymore. I had to get away. I had to be alone. I’m not trying to betray him.
I just had to practice my speech.
• • •
“Fellow Bulldogs,” I said minutes later, up at the podium, all eyes on me.
“I stand before you, in keeping with tradition, as your valedictorian and commencement speaker. Now, I’m not sure what exactly entitles me to be up here. Presumably the logic goes that if I was able to amass a 4.8 GPA, more than one thousand community service hours, and a ‘Most Likely to Study Through the Birth of Her Own Child’ senior superlative, then so too must I be able to impart some sagacious advice as we convene on this field in the final moments of our collective adolescence.
“And yet . . . am I so qualified to be giving advice? After all, look at the decisions I’ve made over the past year:
“I turned my back on my neighbor. I let my relationship with my lifetime best friend go dormant, to the degree where I don’t know if I will ever get to speak to him again.”
I glanced up from the lectern and into the stands, in the vain hope of spotting Wiley. But there were too many people. The glare was too bright. There was no sign of him anywhere.
“Following this, I made a new closest friend, a new companion, but I left him in the lurch as well, right at the moment when he needed me most.”
I caught a peek at Brian, sitting on the sideline in a place of honor with his parents. He looked bored, expressionless. He had zero notion that he’d just been referenced.
“And now I am on the brink of straying from my family. I am going to leave them for intellectual paradise. I am about to abandon them for good—which I know is the right thing to do—but still, it feels unfair; it will always feel so selfish and beyond wrong.”
I knew precisely where my family was sitting, but I couldn’t bear to lay eyes on them, not unless I wanted to be wiping mascara off my cheeks through the remainder of my speech.
“I have made these choices. I do not take pride in any of them. And, dwelling on these dubious decisions, I can honestly say that I’m sorry, but I have no idea why I deserve to be up here. I refuse to believe that you all should listen to a word I say.
“And yet . . .” I lifted my hands from the podium. I raised my voice. I looke
d out at the graduates. They needed to hear this.
“What if the most selfish thing of all is my assumption that these choices are mine alone to make?
“When it comes to forecasting our futures, we get caught up in this familiar debate: destiny or decision? Fate or free will? It’s the oldest question in the world, not to mention the least answerable. Life feels like a series of independent choices with rational outcomes, right until the moment when everything goes wrong, when suddenly it becomes so tempting to believe the exact opposite, that life is nothing more than a relentless barrage of arbitrary punishments and unearned rewards.
“But, graduates, I stand before you today, as your valedictorian, to tell you that this debate, irresistible as it is, is made-up. It’s thoroughly fictional. There is no fate. There is no free will. There is no ‘deserve.’ There is no ‘unfair.’ To quote the Book of Jeremiah, and a cannibalistic robot girl from a novel I once read, ‘Our lives are not our own.’
“We do not live in our own, separate, completely isolated bubbles. Of course we do not. We are here together. We are interconnected, all of us. We are tied together, to our family members, to our friends, to the random kid in econ to whom we’ve never once spoken.
“Each and every choice we make exists not in its own universe, but as the end result of all others that have been made before. And no matter which course we take in a given moment, we cannot help but be at the mercy of those other decisions, all of which have led to this point.
“I am going to college not just because I want to, but because my parents couldn’t. I am leaving my new friend behind, but who is to say if we ever would have become close if not for a random, tragic accident, one that happened on this very field. I played a role in letting things slip with my neighbor, but there were so many other factors too, far beyond my control.
“This truth is overwhelming. It’s terrifying, to realize how powerless each of us is in the grand scheme of things. It so easy to gaze up at a colossal skyscraper, or at billions of stars in the midnight sky, and to feel impossibly intimidated, to know you are so, so small.
“But it’s empowering, too! It’s exhilarating! Just because our lives are not our own does not mean we sit here and do nothing. We cannot stay sitting on our hands, taking life on the chin, waiting to expire. Screw that. We get to be here. We get to be heroes. We get to bear witness to the awesome and perplexing ways of the world. We get to play a part in this madness, an integral role, and that shouldn’t be paralyzing, because it’s freaking freeing!
“We may be pawns within our own lives, but when it comes to shaping the paths of those around us, we are grandmasters. We are each other’s green lights. We are the speed bumps, the detours, the stop signs, the fast lanes. We are gravity. We are godlike.
“So what does this require of us? This realization that every choice we make will have a profound impact on everyone we will someday encounter? How do we account for the part we play in this butterfly effect, this chain reaction? What are we supposed to do now?
“Not much, really. We just have to stay the course. Try to be good people. That’s really it. Not every kind deed will be reciprocated. Not every cruel act will be punished. But that’s not the point. The idea is to follow the golden rule, to perform the occasional mitzvah, to maintain a steady karma, and to do all this, well, just because. Do what you think is right, even if your own future remains in doubt. You don’t get to know why. You just have to keep on trying.
“Imagine yourself as the middle man on a Grease Pole team. There is someone beneath you, whose shoulders you are teetering on and whom you must put all of your trust into, but at the same time, there is someone else too, that guy on top, and his entire fate is in your hands.
“So, fellow Bulldogs, even though you’ve worked unbelievably hard to get to today, try to forget about yourself. Remember those beneath you. Remember those you must hold up. And remember that all of those people, and not you, never ever you, determine whether you fall to your doom or reach the very top. Remember that, graduates. Remember that always.
“It might make all the difference.
“Thank you.”
• • •
I searched for my family. I scanned the thousands of spectators cascading down the bleachers and onto the field. I saw the mothers placing leis around their daughters’ necks. I watched the fathers blasting foghorns in their sons’ ears. In that moment, I didn’t feel I deserved to be among them. I realize this runs counter to the speech I had just delivered, in which I endeavored to eliminate the concept of “deserve” entirely. But still. I watched all of my classmates, none of whom could accurately be described as my friends, and I felt guilty. If life is a Grease Pole, then I can’t help but feel as if I stomped on all of their backs in order to make my ascent.
Right then, without warning, my body got crushed. I was seized from behind—whoomp!—and squeezed like a tube of toothpaste. The boy I’d been avoiding for weeks was suddenly here, and naturally he was wrapping me in the Guinness Book of World Records’s most suffocating hug.
“Allie!” he breathed into my ear. “I missed you!”
“Hi, Brian,” I said, extracting myself from his boa constrictor grip.
“Great speech,” he said.
“Thanks.”
His smile was wide. His forehead was glistening. His eyes were far too trusting.
I shifted back and forth.
“Look,” I said, feeling nauseous, feeling ashamed, feeling filled to the brim with pity, feeling supremely condescending, trying to formulate any words to say, simply convinced I needed to apologize, utterly positive I was about to throw up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know, I didn’t mean to abandon you. I didn’t—”
Brian didn’t seem to comprehend. “What?” he said.
“I—I’m leaving you. I chose myself. I—”
Brian scratched the top of his head. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I don’t care.”
Just then, he looked past me. He peered over my shoulder. He saw something. His eyes lit up.
“ABUELA!” he cried.
“Mr. Rey!” he shouted.
“Mrs. Rey!” he hollered.
“Alejandro!”
“Augusto!”
“GUYS!!!!!”
Brian bounded past me to meet my family. They clapped and cheered like he had just graduated magna cum laude. My mom placed a lei around his neck as though he were her son. Abuela plied him with as many Goldfish crackers as he wanted. My dad took pictures of him with me, dozens and dozens of them. My brothers insisted on a game of impromptu two-hand touch, scrambling onto the Big Mack’s body, screeching in ecstasy as they dragged him to the ground.
I stood and watched them, my family and my friend. All the people I will be leaving behind next year. All of these vital parts of my being.
My loves are in good hands. They are. Of course they are. Of course they are.
I’ve done what I can.
20. COLE MARTIN-HAMMER
Fellow Bulldogs . . .”
I sat there, up onstage, in the salutatorian spot. Random vice principals and school board members were seated to my left and right, fanning themselves like racist jury members in a Southern courtroom. A sea of my former victims lay out in front of me, sweating like ball sacks and dreaming of Disneyland. Somewhere in the stands were my parents, waving a blue and gold sign that read, PROUD OF OUR BOY.
“I stand before you, in keeping with tradition, as your valedictorian and commencement speaker. . . .”
Ooh, shocker. Allegra was using the opening paragraphs of her speech to remind us of her lofty scholastic achievements and the selfless volunteer work she did with deaf tsunami victim street babies.
I know, I know, that’s gratuitous. I need to remember what my pops said. I’m supposed to be nice now. But come on, I’m allowed to hold on to this one grudge if I say I am.
“And yet . . . am I so qualified to be giving advice . . . ?
“I turned
my back on my neighbor. I let my relationship with my lifetime best friend go dormant, to the degree where I don’t know if I will ever get to speak to him again.”
Damn. A Wiley mention. First one of those we’ve gotten from her since maybe the Ming dynasty. When she said it, I scanned the crowd for him, almost as a reflex. I couldn’t find him, but it was hard to see from the stage.
“I’m sorry, but I have no idea why I deserve to be up here. I refuse to believe that you all should listen to a word I say. . . .”
Ha. Crocodile tears. Like I’m supposed to believe a smidge of that nonsense. Everyone knows what you’re about to do there, girl. You pretend to apologize, and you project mad humility, but then you pivot and you talk about how secretly you were right all along and how everyone needs to follow your genius Stanford example.
“Life feels like a series of independent choices with rational outcomes, right until the moment when everything goes wrong, when suddenly it becomes so tempting to believe the exact opposite, that life is nothing more than a relentless barrage of arbitrary punishments and unearned rewards.”
You know, that’s actually Wiley’s problem. He’s got this idea, this fixation, that certain things are supposed to happen for him. Whether it’s moving up north with Allegra, making a pass at Nikki, going all out on the revenge plot with me, he recklessly puts it all on the line for these other people, and when it inevitably doesn’t pan out, he just falls so far.
“Each and every choice we make exists not in its own universe, but as the end result of all others that have been made before. . . . I played a role in letting things slip with my neighbor, but there were so many other factors too, far beyond my control. . . .”
Where was Wiley, anyway? I wanted to make sure he heard this speech. I wanted to find him after the ceremony, so I could make up for the camera incident, for how I treated him that day. I had to apologize for how I’ve used and abused him. I needed to convince him that none of it was his fault, that I’m dealing with tons of other stuff. Of course he’s not a bad person. He’s my best buddy, for crying out loud.
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