Chapter 1 — The Scream

The scream came before my name had finished echoing through the auditorium.

“She cheated her way through school!”

My sister, Stephanie, was on her feet in the third row, and she pitched it to carry, loud enough that two thousand people turned in their seats to look for the girl she was pointing at.

The girl was me.

I stopped.

For half a heartbeat, no longer, some old reflex froze me in place at the foot of the stage stairs, the way it had frozen me at a thousand dinner tables over the years.

And then I kept walking.

My heels clicked against the polished floor, steady, unhurried, while the whispers spread through the hall like sparks catching in dry grass.

Up on the stage, Dean Harrow went still beside the podium, uncertain.

And down in the third row, my mother raised a hand to cover her mouth — but I knew that gesture, I had spent twenty-two years learning to read it, and it was not shock.

My mother was covering her mouth because she was trying, and not entirely succeeding, not to smile.

Under my graduation gown, pressed flat against my ribs where no one could see it, was a sealed white envelope.

As I climbed the first stair, my fingers brushed against it, once, just to be sure it was still there.

It was.

Everything I needed was in that envelope.

I had only to walk to the podium and let someone open it.

I think about the two versions of myself who existed on those stairs — the one climbing them now, and the one who would have existed if that scream had come three months earlier — and I am struck by how little separated them, and how much.