Chapter 36
Sasha
I’m late.
Twenty-six hours of travel — Omsk to Moscow, Moscow to JFK, JFK to Logan, Logan to Hartley in a cab that smelled like stale coffee and pine air freshener — and I’m late to the one thing Aaron asked me to show up for.
The outdoor ceremony is already in progress when I slip through the back gate.
Rows of white folding chairs across the central quad, hundreds of people in the May sun, a stage draped in blue and white.
Someone at a podium is talking about excellence and the future and the journey ahead.
I don’t care. I’m searching the stage for him.
My legs are stiff. I’m wearing the same jeans I put on in Omsk yesterday morning — or two mornings ago, I’ve lost track of which day it is — and a wrinkled button-down I found at the bottom of my bag. I look like I crawled out of a luggage carousel, which is basically accurate.
There. Second row on the platform. Cap and gown, the blue honor cord around his neck. His hands are in his lap and even from here I can see his knee bouncing with nerves.
I don’t know why I’m on edge, too. I’m not the one giving a speech.
I find an empty seat near the back. The row is mostly parents — a woman with a massive sun hat, a man checking his phone, a serious couple sitting stiff and upright two seats to my left with matching posture and tense shoulders.
The woman has auburn hair going gray, a nice dress, a tissue already balled in her hand.
The man beside her is muscular, square-jawed, the kind of tan that says he’s worked outdoors his whole life.
Aaron’s parents.
I recognize Colleen from Aaron’s phone screen — the one time he accidentally swiped to his photos while showing me a meme and I saw the Sunday dinner pics before he yanked the phone away. Andrew I’ve never seen, but the resemblance is obvious. Aaron has his jaw. His shoulders.
I squeeze past the end of their row to get to my seat. My bag catches the woman’s shoulder.
“Sorry —”
She looks up. And stops.
She’s staring at me now. Like she knows something.
I stare back. I can’t help it.
This is the woman Aaron is so terrified of that he’s been hiding who he is for years. She looks like a normal mom. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. Camera ready to document her son’s big moment.
You don’t deserve a son like Aaron, I think, eyes still on her.
“Excuse me,” his mother says. Almost a whisper. Then she turns back around.
And him. Andrew. The father. Arms crossed, jaw set. Nice suit Aaron probably paid for, one way or another. He hasn’t seen me.
What a hypocrite. I can’t help but think it. I’m filled with spite at the sight of them.
Mr. Kelly would have plenty of nasty things to say if he knew his son was sleeping with his co-captain, I’m sure. But Aaron’s father had no trouble cashing the checks Aaron sent home to cover the bills from his cancer treatments and to keep his landscaping business thriving.
I sit down one row behind them, one seat to the right. My hands are unsteady and I don’t know why.
The dean finishes whatever she was saying.
Applause. Someone else takes the stage — a professor, I think, making a joke about how this graduating class consumed more dining hall candy to power their studies than any in university history.
Polite laughter. A girl two rows ahead takes a selfie with her family.
A toddler in someone’s lap starts fussing.
I am so tired my bones ache. My eyes feel like sandpaper.
I haven’t slept since Moscow, and before that I barely slept in Omsk.
My head throbs from the jet lag, making everything slightly unreal — the too-green grass, the too-blue sky, the sun that’s warm on my shoulders in a way that Omsk in April never was.
But I’m here. I promised him I would be.
“And now,” the dean says, returning to the podium, “it is my great pleasure to introduce this year’s valedictorian.
A student who has maintained an exceptional GPA while co-captaining our men’s hockey team.
Who transferred to Ashford University under difficult family circumstances and never once let those circumstances become excuses — Aaron Kelly. ”
Colleen Kelly makes a sound. A tiny intake of breath, her hand going to her husband’s arm. Andrew straightens in his chair. Proud. Both of them radiating it.
Aaron stands. Crosses the stage. He’s holding index cards, and when he reaches the podium and sets them down, I see his hand shake. Just for a second. Then he grips the sides of the podium and looks out at the crowd.
“Thank you, Dean Warren.” Aaron’s voice is steady. It carries across the quad. “And thank you to the faculty, staff, families, and — yeah, everybody who made it possible for us to be here today.”
Light applause. He glances at his cards. Picks them up. Puts them back down.
“I had a speech written,” he says. “It was good. I spent three weeks on it. Talked about resilience, and how the challenges we’ve faced have prepared us for the future, and how our time at Ashford taught us who we really are.” He pauses. “It was a really solid speech. My mom proofread it.”
The crowd laughs.
“But I’m not going to give that speech.”
His voice drops. The easy charm is still there, but underneath it, I hear the edge. The same edge from the phone call. The same edge from that night in the hotel room in New York when he told me, for the first time, the thing he’d never said out loud.
I sit up straighter. My exhaustion is gone. Just — gone, like someone dumped ice water on the back of my neck. Every nerve I have is awake and pointed at that podium.
Aaron takes a breath. Sets the index cards facedown. Doesn’t look at them again.
“The speech I wrote was about who Ashford taught me to be,” Aaron says. “But the truth is, for most of my time here, Ashford didn’t teach me who I am. It gave me a place to hide.”
The crowd goes quiet. Not the polite quiet of a graduation audience waiting for the next applause line. Actual quiet. The toddler is still fussing somewhere, but everyone else has gone still.
“Most of you know me as a hockey player. Co-captain, number seventeen, the guy in the commercials for helmets and sports drinks.” He almost smiles.
“Some of you know me as the kid who transferred here because his dad got sick and needed help with the family business. Some of you know me as the premed student who lived in the library. And a lot of you know me as one half of the biggest rivalry in college hockey.”
My hands grip the sides of my folding chair.
“Aaron Kelly versus Sasha Vorontsovsky. Two co-captains who couldn’t stand each other.
Traded insults in the press, chirped each other on the ice, got into it at practice.
Half the campus had opinions about which one of us was worse.
” He pauses. “It made great TV. Our agent loved it. It helped pay off a lot of my student loan debt. I’m sure a bunch of you here are familiar with that worry. ”
Low laughter. Scattered.
“But it wasn’t real.”
Silence.
“The rivalry was never real. What was real — what’s been real since the first time I met him — is that I’m in love with him.”
A gasp. A murmur. A chair creaking as someone leans forward. In front of me, Colleen Kelly’s hand comes up to her mouth. Andrew shifts in his chair, looking around at the crowd as if gauging how everyone else is taking it.
I barely see any of it. My pulse is in my ears. My hands are numb. Aaron Kelly is standing at a podium in front of his entire university telling them he’s in love with me, and my body has forgotten how to process oxygen.
“I’m gay,” he says. Just like that. Flat, no drama.
Like he’s stating his jersey number. “I already told my family. And now I’m telling all of you.
I spent years pretending I wasn’t — pretending so hard I almost believed it.
Until I met someone who made that impossible.
And I’m telling all of you now because I’m done hiding. ”
The quad erupts in whispers. Not the polite murmuring from before — actual whispers, the urgent kind, the kind people can’t hold in. A hundred private conversations happening at once. Someone in the faculty section coughs. Somewhere behind me, a woman says something sharp to the person beside her.
Colleen Kelly reaches for Andrew’s hand. He takes it. They knew — they clearly already knew — but watching their son say it to a thousand strangers is something else entirely.
Aaron’s hands are white-knuckled on the podium. But his voice doesn’t shake.
“I spent my whole life trying to be the person everyone needed me to be. The good son. The team captain. The scholarship kid. The valedictorian. I gave up things — real, important things — because I thought that’s what love looked like.
Sacrifice. Silence. Making everyone else comfortable, even if it meant I couldn’t breathe. ”
Aaron.
My heart is hammering so hard the guy next to me can probably hear it.
In front of me, Colleen Kelly is crying again — overwhelmed, proud, maybe a little terrified for him. Andrew’s jaw is tight but his eyes are wet. One of the siblings — Caitlin maybe — leans forward and squeezes her mother’s shoulder.
I don’t look at them for long. I can’t. Because Aaron is looking at the crowd now, and his eyes are moving, searching, and I know who he’s looking for.
“Sasha Vorontsovsky came to this country with nothing,” Aaron says.
“No family support, no safety net, no guarantee that any of it would work out. And he never once apologized for who he is. And he’s never taken his eyes off the goal of being able to be his true self in front of the world.
” His voice catches. Just barely. “He showed me what it looks like to be brave enough to just — be yourself. Even when it costs you. Especially when it costs you.”
“Sasha, if you’re out there—” A breath. A half-laugh that sounds like it hurts. “I know you’re out there, because you promised. And you always keep your promises.”
My eyes are burning. My throat is closed. My hands are still gripping the chair so hard the metal edge is digging into my palms.
“I love you,” he says. Into the microphone.
In front of the dean and the faculty and every single person who paid tuition to this school and every parent and grandparent and sibling in the audience.
In front of his mother, who is crying, and his father, who hasn’t moved.
“I love you, and I’m sorry it took me so long to say it. ”
Noise. All at once. Some of it is cheering, actual cheering, students in the middle rows who are on their feet clapping.
Some of it is murmuring, uneasy, the parents and grandparents exchanging looks.
Someone behind me says oh my God in a tone I can’t read.
Somewhere far off, a guy yells KELLY! in the way teammates do after a goal, and I think it might be one of the Sentinels in the crowd.
Aaron isn’t finished.
“So that’s my real speech,” he says. “Not the one about resilience and the future and all the stuff we’re supposed to say. The real one is shorter: I’m gay, I’m in love with my co-captain, the rivalry was fake, and I’m done pretending.”
“And congratulations to my fellow graduates. I wish you all the best of luck in figuring out who you are and what you want for your life. Thank you.”
He steps back from the podium. The applause is strange — loud in patches, thin in others.
Some people are standing. Some people are not.
A cluster of students near the front are on their feet, clapping hard, one of them pumping a fist. A row of parents sits motionless, arms crossed, faces unreadable.
The dean steps forward with a face that says she’s going to need a very strong drink later and shakes Aaron’s hand with the mechanical precision of someone operating on autopilot.
I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing.
A girl in Aaron’s row on the stage grabs his arm as he passes and says something close to his ear.
He nods. She squeezes his arm. A professor shakes his hand.
Another one doesn’t. Aaron walks through all of it the way he walks off the ice after a loss — head up, jaw tight, one foot in front of the other.
In front of me, Andrew Kelly turns to his wife.
I hear his voice — low, rough, the words indistinct.
Colleen shakes her head. Caitlin is saying something to both of them, fast and urgent, her hand on her mother’s arm.
The younger sister — Mary — is staring at the stage with wide eyes and an expression that hasn’t decided what it is yet.
I should care about this. I should be worried about what they think, what they’ll say, how this will land when the ceremony is over and his parents have to reckon with what their son just did.
I can’t. Not right now. He told his parents. He actually told them, and then he told everyone. He said he loves me.
Because Aaron is walking off the stage, and he’s looking at me, and his face is — shocked, as if he can’t believe it himself.
Terrified and relieved and stripped of every layer of performance I’ve watched him wear for nearly two years.
His eyes are red. His jaw is still set tight.
And he’s looking at me like I’m the only person in a crowd of a thousand who matters.
I don’t wave. I don’t yell. I don’t do anything except stand here in my wrinkled travel clothes, unshowered, jet-lagged, with a dead phone and a suitcase I ditched at a cab stand in Hartley because I didn’t have time to drop it anywhere.
My face is wet. I didn’t notice when that started. I don’t wipe it.
I just let him see me. Seeing him.
Around me, the noise keeps going — the cheering and the murmuring and the toddler who has finally committed to a full meltdown and the shuffling of hundreds of people who just watched a valedictorian come out of the closet on live mic.
Aaron’s parents are still sitting. Still processing.
Not what he said — they already knew that.
But the fact that he just said it to everyone.
That’s their problem. Not mine. Not today.
Today, Aaron Kelly stood at a podium in front of everyone who’s ever expected anything from him, and he told the truth. Not the managed truth. Not the edited, people-pleaser, everyone-stays-comfortable truth. The real one.
He did that for himself. And he did it for me.
I’m smiling so hard my face hurts.
He just changed his whole life. And I got to watch.