The Graduation (6 page)

The ceremony began shortly afterward. The huge audience had been seated when the chatty senior class marched in and took their seats. Mr. Smith, Tabb’s elderly principal, was the first speaker. Dressed in the same blue robe as the rest of them, he thanked the many parents, relatives, and friends for coming, and then proceeded to praise the group of graduates as the most dynamic in his long academic career. Jessica found his choice of the word “dynamic” appropriately vague. Hitler had been dynamic. Of course, she realized, it had not been a bad year for everyone.

The diplomas were to be presented alphabetically; for that reason, the seating followed roughly that or-der. But Jessica Hart had switched with someone so she could sit next to Polly McCoy rather than Larry Harry. Larry not only had a weird name, he also had such consistently bad breath that Sara once remarked that if at the end of his life he donated his body to medical science, he would probably be found posthumously guilty of involuntary manslaughter when the medical students cut open his cadaver and choked to death.

Jessica also wanted to be with her old friend at this special time. Polly had suffered far more than any of them, and Jessica had courageously helped her the last few months by avoiding her. Not entirely, naturally; they continued to talk at lunch and stuff. But they no longer hung out as real friends do. The reason was simple. They were both down, and Jessica had discovered that the truism that the depressed seek out the company of other depressed people to be entirely false. Being around Polly only made her feel worse.

Yet seeing Maria again made Jessica want to atone for her cowardly approach to the situation. Sitting to the far right of the stage, in the back row—twenty rows behind Maria’s front-row wheelchair—Jessica leaned over to Polly as Mr. Smith completed his talk.

“He’s such a nice man,” she said.

“He must be to have put up with Sara all year,” Polly said.

“Who’s that he’s introducing?”

“A car-company executive. He’s here to inspire us to go out into the big wide world and get rich.” Polly winced slightly, took off her cap, and put her hand to her temple. “I’m already rich.”

“Do you have a headache?”

“Yeah.”

Jessica wiped the sweat from her brow. “It’s this sun.”

“It’s sunny every day.” Polly searched the stands.

“Looking for somebody?”

“No, nobody.”

The guest speaker did turn out to be a strong believer in capitalism. His name was James Vern and ten years ago he had swiped—his actual phrase was “drew from the research of”—an invention that improved the efficiency of transmissions in large trucks, and parlayed it into millions. He laughed when he recounted the lies he had told to get financing for his company. Jessica wondered if he knew what a jerk he was. He talked for forty-five long minutes.

Sara came next. People giggled as she made her way to the microphone. Jessica tossed around in her head the idea of singing “Hey Jude.”

“Thank you, Mr. Vern, for your enlightening words,” Sara said, the tiniest hint of tension in her voice as she adjusted the mike down to her height. “The world of modern business really sounds like a jungle. But I suppose even a snake needs a place to live.”

The audience chuckled uneasily. The senior class cheered appreciatively. Sara smiled and went on more confidently, not using any notes. Jessica noticed for the first time that the top of the podium had been removed. As Sara had mentioned, there was no place to put papers.

“I have written several speeches this last week,” Sara said. “I have one on this country’s need to remain competitive in the world marketplace. I put a lot of time into it. Then I thought, haven’t we been number one long enough? Shouldn’t we give someone else a chance? I decided it was all a question of whether we want to be greedy or cool about it. I also had this speech on
our
future. It is my understanding that ASB presidents across the country talk about this subject graduation day. I really got into the idea myself—for a while. Then I realized that the best minds on Wall Street can’t tell if the Dow Jones average is going to go up or down a couple of lousy points tomorrow, never mind where it’s going to be ten years from now. The earth could get smashed by a huge meteorite this instant and vaporize us all, and then what would we do? Why worry about it? Why talk about it? I’m certainly not going to. Then, finally, I had this speech on the problems facing the youth of America: overindulgence in alcohol, lack of ambition, sexual promiscuity. But I had to ask myself, Are these things really that bad? Think about it for a second.” Sara turned to the class and raised her voice. “Do we really want to give them up?”

The class let out a resounding
no
! Then it burst out altogether. The audience—full of real-life parents—didn’t know what to think. In the end, though, the crowd joined those on the field, and applauded Sara. She loved it.

“You know what I finally decided?” she said. “Not even to give a speech. Let’s get this thing over with as quick as possible and get to the party.” She cleared her throat and glanced to the side as the class clapped and hooted. “With that in mind, please welcome our senior faculty adviser, the wonderful Mr. Bark!”

Their political science teacher, wearing a blue graduation gown and a dyed fringe of hair that was supposed to take ten years off his age, strode confidently to the microphone. Sara remained on the stage. Jessica leaned forward in anticipation.

“Mr. Bark and I have had our disagreements this year,” Sara said pleasantly as the teacher stood nearby. “But I like to think our trials have brought us closer together. I think, especially in the last month, I have finally begun to understand his commitment to social causes, particularly his concern over the arms race.”

Mr. Bark leaned forward and spoke into the mike. “I am happy to hear that, Sara. It means a great deal to me.”

“I wanted to show you how much it means to me,” Sara said, nudging herself back behind the mike. “I bought you a present, a very special present.” She gestured to someone on the left side of the stage. Jessica was surprised when Russ Desmond—Sara had not said a word about the progress of
the
relationship since she had picked him up at the bus station, and Jessica had been hesitant to ask—stood up and strode onto the stage, a small white package in his hands. He gave it to Sara, then hastily retreated. Sara presented it to Mr. Bark.

“Open it.” she said.

Mr. Bark beamed. “This is so thoughtful of you, Sara.” He began to peel away the paper. “I wonder what it could be.” The crowd murmured expectantly. It took a minute to get through all the wrapping, and when he had, he was left holding what appeared to be—from Jessica’s admittedly poor vantage point—a black rectangular stone. “Sara?” he said, uncertain.

“It’s a paperweight,” Sara explained.

“Oh.” He grinned as he weighed it in his palm. “It feels like it should be able to handle the job. Thank you.”

“Thank
you
, Mr. Bark.” Sara muttered the next line under her breath as she turned away, but the mike caught it. “It’s a uranium paperweight.”

It was perfect. He obviously had a long speech prepared. Undoubtedly it was to be every bit as long as Mr. Vern’s. He would talk about how much he had loved working with the kids this year, how sad he was to see them all leave, but how happy he was to know they were going on to bigger and greater things. Then he would bring up the nukes, the goddamn nukes that could destroy all of them at the push of a button.

Yet he had a uranium paperweight in his hand, and although he probably understood intellectually that the level of radiation it was emitting was extremely small—probably one thousandth or one millionth of what he would absorb if he had a chest X-ray—he would not be able to stop thinking about it. Jessica watched as he began to speak and then glanced down at the thing in his hand and fidgeted. There was no place to put it, except on the ground. And he couldn’t do that. No, that would be rude. He clearly didn’t want to be rude.

“I am very happy to be here this afternoon with all you fine people,” he began uneasily. “It is always an honor for me when I am given a chance to speak to—fine people.”

He paused and glanced again at the paperweight. For a moment, it appeared that he might actually drop it. Jessica could practically read his mind. He was thinking of gamma rays, beta rays, and those always terrible cosmic rays—all those mean nasty things he read about every night in his literature about the mean nasty military industrialists.

“It’s always a sad day, graduation day,” he mum-bled. “And a happy day.”

His voice faltered. He moved the paperweight from his right hand to his left, then moved it back. He was probably imagining the different rays penetrating his flesh, Jessica thought, mutating the DNA in his cells, setting him up for a hideous case of cancer five years down the line. His fear practically screamed out at the crowd.

This rock is killing me!

He couldn’t take it anymore. He took a step away, realized what he was doing, and then leaned back and spoke hastily into the mike. “And all I’d like to say is, good luck, good luck to all of you kids. Thank you.”

He left the stage in a hurry, pausing at his seat only long enough to get rid of Sara’s present, then strode toward the end of the folding chairs and off the football field. The audience watched quietly, reacting little. The class members whispered among themselves, relieved to have been spared another speech. Sara returned to the microphone.

“Our next speaker is the rarest of people,” Sara said seriously. “He is the smartest individual I have ever met, and the nicest. He is Michael Olson, our class valedictorian.”

“You should have gone out with him instead of Bill,” Polly whispered as Michael stood up and walked to the microphone. The welcoming applause was the loudest of the afternoon.

“I know.” Jessica sighed. “Do you think it’s too late?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Sara, for the kind introduction,” Michael said, standing perfectly straight, his hands clasped in front of his gown below his waist, not as relaxed as he could have been but nevertheless in control of the situation. “And thank you, ladies and gentlemen and fellow classmates, for inviting me to speak on this occasion. Like Sara, I will try to keep my talk brief. I, too, have written and discarded several speeches in the last couple of hours. None of the topics I chose seemed right. I suppose that is the problem with selecting any topic. It can only be about one thing, while our lives are about so many things. I finally decided I would simply talk about what is important to me as I prepare to graduate from high school.”

He glanced down at a small white card he held in his hand, and Jessica looked down at her shiny white high heels, and the grass beneath them. She was sitting on the forty-yard line, directly above the hash mark. She remembered the first Tabb High football game she had attended, how the team had tried for a first down on this part of the field and failed. Bill had fumbled the ball. She had a picture of the fumble in her files at home. She smiled at the memory, especially at how Michael had inadvertently helped her take the picture when he was demonstrating to her how to fit the telephoto lens onto her camera.

But that had been a long time ago.

Polly’s right. It’s too late.

“In a way I’m five months late with my speech,” Michael went on. “I left school in January, and today is my first day back. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve been rather busy, working and stuff. But I’ve often looked back and thought about what I learned at Tabb. The obvious thing that comes to mind is all the science and math and history I absorbed. The teachers here are really great, some of the best, and now. I think, would be a good time to thank them for their patience and dedication. They always praised me and gave me confidence. But maybe they did too good a job. One Of the problems with people thinking you’re smart is that you eventually begin to believe it. I remember all the times in class—how restless I would be for the teacher to get on with the lesson. I’ve grasped the concept, I used to think, why haven’t the rest of the kids’? What I didn’t realize then is that learning something doesn’t just mean figuring it out. It’s also the pleasure you get from the knowledge. I didn’t appreciate that the teacher would sometimes dwell on a particular subject because he or she loved it. I got mostly A’s but now I wish I’d had more fun doing it. I hope this is one lesson I won’t forget.”

Michael paused and looked over the audience. When he spoke next, it was in a lower voice, and Jessica found herself leaning forward, afraid she might miss something.

She knew he was going to bring up Alice.

“But there is something else high school taught me,” he said. “Something I did not know until I was no longer here on a daily basis. Like everybody, I suppose, I knew certain people at school that I didn’t really like. They bugged me for one reason or another, and I used to think I’d be glad when I didn’t have to see them anymore. Then again, I had friends I loved to be around, people that made it easy for me to get up in the morning and drive here. But the strange thing I’ve discovered since I’ve been gone is that I miss both groups of people. And I like to think I’ve been missed by both groups. I like to think we’re all good friends. Maybe I’ve learned the importance of friendship. Mr. Bark was right—today is a happy day, but it’s also sad. We’ll all promise to keep in touch, but realistically, many of us will never see one another again. Today is supposed to be the day we grow up, yet in a way, it’s a shame any of us have to. Your high-school friends—I think they’re your best friends.”

Your final friends.

Jessica didn’t know why she thought that. There was life after high school. There would be other boys besides Michael. There was only one problem. She didn’t want any other boy.

Michael coughed once and looked down. “In closing I would like to pay tribute to the memory of a very special friend who had her life taken suddenly from her. If possible, I would like her remembered with a minute of silence. Her name was Alice McCoy. She would have graduated in a couple of years.”