Jackson #2
“We shared a dorm for one semester,” I remind him.
“One semester too many.” Derrick takes another drink. “Also, still came in your pants.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
Bennet is laughing hard enough now that he has to lean against the table, and I briefly consider whether graduating tonight means I can finally start surrounding myself with better people.
Probably not.
“I hate everyone in this room.”
“We love you, too. Your shot, Romeo.”
***
The coliseum is packed, every seat filled with families and friends who came to celebrate the graduates filing onto the floor below. The noise is a constant low hum of conversations, laughter, and the occasional shout when someone spots a familiar face in the crowd.
I take it all in and feel two things at once.
Pride and anger.
Pride, because two years ago, I had no business imagining I'd be sitting here.
I worked my ass off to get here. Every class, every exam, every miserable night running on caffeine and spite got me here.
In two years, I've built something for myself that nobody can take away from me.
When I walk across that stage tonight, they're going to hand me a piece of paper with my name on it that says I fucking did it.
I should be able to sit in that feeling.
Instead, the pride is tangled up with something a lot less flattering, and there's no one here whose opinion I need to worry about, so I let myself feel that too.
I'm fucking jealous.
Everywhere I look, people have someone. Parents are already on their feet in the stands, waving like their kid is the only person graduating tonight.
Friends are piling six-deep into pictures nobody will be able to identify themselves in ten years.
Somebody's little sister is hanging so far over the railing to scream a name that a security guard has started casually drifting in her direction.
Every single person in this arena seems to have someone waiting on the other side of this. A person who drove in. Who saved a seat. Who already picked the restaurant. Someone holding flowers, or balloons, or one of those ridiculous oversized cutouts of their face.
I don't.
I've got the walk across the stage and the walk back.
I never had siblings for the railing. Never had a brother who'd embarrass the shit out of me by screaming my name or a sister holding some stupid sign she spent three hours making.
My mother took her own life when I was a kid.
Even now, the words feel strange when I let myself think them that plainly because for years, I wasn't allowed to say them at all.
My father made sure of that. He told everyone she'd been mugged and killed, and that became the official story, as if grief alone wasn't enough. We needed a lie on top of it.
I don't know if he was ashamed of how she died or if he thought people would look at him differently.
Maybe he genuinely believed he was protecting me.
With Dad, I've learned that the difference between selfishness and love gets pretty fucking blurry once he's decided he knows what's best for everyone.
She left letters.
More than one.
I know that much.
Dad burned every page before I ever got to read them.
For my own good.
That's the phrase he reaches for whenever the good in question is entirely his own.
He decided I didn't need whatever my mother wanted to tell me before she died, and by the time I was old enough to understand exactly what he'd taken from me, there wasn't anything left to recover.
Ash.
That's what I inherited from my mother's last words.
So, I never got her goodbye. I got the void where the goodbye should've been and a permanent, low-grade wondering about whether my name was anywhere in the words she wrote.
The not knowing pisses me off.
I've imagined every version.
Maybe she told me she loved me. Maybe she apologized. Maybe she tried to explain something a kid couldn't possibly have understood, but the man I am now would give anything to read.
Sometimes I wonder if she blamed herself for leaving me. Sometimes I wonder if she blamed Dad.
And on the nights when my brain really wants to fuck with me, I wonder whether she mentioned me at all. That's the one I don't like admitting. That maybe there were pages and pages of whatever was hurting her badly enough to leave this world, and my name wasn't anywhere on them.
I could've survived almost anything she wrote.
I'm sorry.
I love you.
I couldn't stay.
Even anger. Even something unfair. At least it would've been hers.
Instead, my father decided uncertainty was kinder.
You'd think a man could make his peace with a question that has no answer. Mostly I have. It just picks days like this to come back around and knock.
“I can't believe we're actually about to graduate,” I say, looking over at Bennet. “Feels like something ends today, and tomorrow we're expected to wake up as actual adults, whether we're ready or not.”
He doesn't respond. His attention is fixed somewhere over my shoulder, eyes scanning the crowd.
I glare at him and smack the back of his head. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, asshole.” He punches me in the arm without looking away. “I'm trying to find my sister. She's supposed to help me with my tie.”
I look at the knot hanging crooked around his neck. It's fucking terrible.
“You can't tie a tie, Bennet?”
“Don't be a dick. My dad died before he got around to teaching me. It's just our thing. I never learned, and she likes doing it for me.”
Goddammit. I immediately feel like an asshole in that specific, stomach-dropping way that only comes from accidentally stepping on someone's dead parent.
“Sorry, man. I didn't think—”
“There she is.”
He's already moving before I can finish my apology, breaking into a jog through the crowd and waving one arm over his head like an idiot.
I watch him go, shaking my head.
Then he reaches her.
When Bennet turns back around with a woman tucked beneath his arm, the air leaves my body in one complete motion, and I don't get another breath.
The world doesn't stop. That would imply some dramatic pause, some cinematic moment where everything freezes around me while my brain catches up.
Oh, it’s so much fucking worse than that.
Everything keeps moving.
People keep talking. Graduates keep laughing and adjusting caps and gowns.
Somewhere behind me, a family is arguing about where they're supposed to meet after the ceremony.
The whole fucking thing keeps marching toward its start while Bennet walks toward me with the woman I've spent four days trying to find.
Rosepetal.
No, that’s not her. That’s just Rosalie.
His sister.
As they get closer, I blink twice, hoping for half a second that I'm not seeing what I'm seeing.
Maybe I've spent so much time thinking about her that I've finally lost my fucking mind and started putting her face on strangers.
It would honestly be preferable to the alternative currently walking toward me with Bennet's arm around her shoulders.
Then she sees me, and that hope dies immediately.
I watch the recognition spread across her face. Those pouty lips part slightly, her steps falter for barely half a second before she catches herself, and that piercing gray gaze locks onto mine.
I'd know those eyes anywhere.
I've seen them half-lidded above me, watched them narrow when she laughed, spent four fucking days remembering exactly how they looked when she came.
Fuck.
Fuck me.
It is her.
Bennet's fucking sister is my Rosepetal.
Why couldn't we be those college roommates?
Like, hey, man, here's my family. Take a look. A really close fucking look. Memorize some faces while you're at it. You never know when you might meet one of them in a hotel bar and end up fucking my sister in a HOTEL ROOM.
There should've been pictures. A Christmas card. A framed family portrait sitting on his desk. Fuck, I'd have accepted one of those stupid photo collages people make their freshman year and hang above their bed.