Page 13 of Wait for 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.