I took a breath and said, “I should have gotten peanut butter cup.”
“Ha!” he said, shaking his head, and resumed eating. “Oh! You know what?”
“What?”
“This just reminded me—there’s this ice cream parlor in Brooklyn, I can’t remember what it’s called, but they have the best milk shakes. Like maybe even better than here. I’ll have to take you there.”
I swallowed another gulp. “Take me there?” My heart started beating hard. Even harder than it already was, which was very hard.
“Yeah, this fall,” he said, and gradually, my pulse slowed. Relief melted from the top of my head to my toes. This fall. As in, we would be together then. Together enough to go to an ice cream parlor. Suddenly, I got very hungry.
“Thatta girl,” he said, watching me dig in with my own spoon.
I swallowed a mouthful of milk shake, and didn’t try to hide my smile.
“What?” he asked, smiling with me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just happy.”
I HAD TO WIPE THE SWEAT OFF MY PALMS ON MY DRESS SO I COULD TYPE
I’m hiding from everyone in the girls’ locker room. My graduation gown keeps dragging on the floor so it’s hanging on the hook on the door.
After Mom and Dad and the kids dropped me at the gym entrance to park the car, I thought I had forgot everything until I pushed out the first words to myself in a whisper, “Oliver Goldsmith once said…” and the rest would come. I kept repeating it, Oliver Goldsmith once said, Oliver Goldsmith once said, as if every time I said it I had been drowning and came up for air.
As all the teachers and administrators grouped together at the front, I saw Mrs. Townsend, her black poof of hair rising above the others.
“Hey, Mrs. T,” I said, and she turned around.
“Sammie,” she said slowly with a soft smile, and pulled me into a hug. She smelled like so many different products mixed together, lotion and shampoo and perfume, but in a good way, in a way that fit.
“Thank you for everything,” I said, and choked back the tears I had been holding in all day.
“You’re going to be great,” Mrs. T said.
Then I couldn’t help it, the tears came for real, because of how many times she had said that to me over the last four years, before my first week in AP classes, before my first tournament, before the beginning of my senior year, before the disease came along and tried to mess up everything, and after. I knew this would probably be the last time she’d ever say something like that. Before she moved on to say her good-byes to someone else, I touched her arm.
She turned back to me.
“Will you introduce me out there? I mean, the speech?”
“Oh!” she said, considering.
“I know Principal Rothchild is supposed to do it, but it would mean a lot… you know… because you’re the only one who knows how big…” I swallowed back more tears. “How big a deal it is for me to do this.”
Mrs. T smiled again, determined. She nodded. “Of course I will,” she said. “I’ll go chat with Mr. R.”
Now the gym is standing room only, and everyone’s voices are swirling around in one big roar.
I should probably go. They are lining us up out there by last name. I’ll be between William Madison and Lynn Nguyen. Everyone is taking photos of themselves, and here I am, typing on a toilet. If I fail, let it be known that I was here, in a bathroom stall, going over the speech one more time. I tried.
It’s funny that I’m thinking about Coop again, but I can’t get what he said the other day in the hallway out of my head: “Sometimes it’s just about timing.”
Speak of the devil, someone just peeked his head in here and yelled, “Samantha Agatha McCoy! You better get your butt out here!”
Yeah, that had to be Coop.
Here goes nothing.
YOU CAN TAKE IT FROM HERE
For a minute, everything about Nationals seemed to repeat itself in a terrifying display of one-upmanship. Nationals: The Sequel. Nationals 2: The Return of Dementia. Rows and rows of fluorescent gym lights replaced the stage lights, and the audience multiplied from a few disinterested high schoolers and their families into a country of faces, my classmates into huddled blue boulders, punctuated by the flashes of hundreds of cameras, all silent and waiting.
I was in the wings.
Mrs. Townsend walked across the stage, her heels echoing, and took her place behind the podium, a scholarly maroon ribbon now around her shoulders.
“Ladies, gentlemen, families, graduating class,” she said, and she paused for the screams and whoops of the seniors. “Your valedictorian, Samantha McCoy.”
I walked—no, skated—no, floated. To steady myself, I put my elbows on the podium, and clasped my hands.