Chapter 1 — Everyone Except Me

Everyone at graduation had someone there for them.

Everyone except me.

I stood at the edge of the football field in a black gown that was slightly too big, watching four hundred families do the thing families do — the mothers with cameras held up over the crowd, the fathers with their hands cupped around their mouths shouting names, the little siblings waving hand-painted signs, the grandparents easing down into folding chairs with that careful slowness.

Every graduate out there was a knot at the center of a small cheering universe of people who loved them.

And I was standing at the rail by myself, holding my own program, watching all of it happen to everyone else.

My parents died last November.

A car accident, on an ordinary wet night, on a road they had driven a thousand times.

One phone call a little after midnight, and the entire shape of my life changed in the space of a sentence.

That was seven months before the morning I am telling you about — seven months that had felt, from the inside, like one single endless night I could not wake up from.

And now here I was at the far edge of the last big day of my childhood, watching other people’s parents cheer, understanding in my body for the first time, fully, that mine never would again.

I still cannot hear a phone ring late at night without something in my chest going cold and tight.

I don’t suppose I ever will.

That is the thing nobody warns you about a loss like that — how it rewires you, how it turns ordinary sounds into alarms, how a boy who used to sleep straight through anything becomes a boy who surfaces at every creak of the house, every buzz of a phone, every set of headlights sweeping across the bedroom ceiling.

Before that November I had been, I think, a fairly normal seventeen-year-old, careless in the good way that kids get to be careless, moving through my days with the unspoken assumption that the people I loved would simply always be there when I got home.

That assumption is a kind of wealth, though you never know it while you have it.

Mine was gone in the space of one sentence spoken by a stranger on a telephone, and it does not come back.

What replaces it is a permanent, low-grade watchfulness, a sense that the floor can drop out from under anything at any moment, which is true, and which most people are lucky enough never to have to know is true.