“Excuse me for just one minute, everyone,” Jude said, stepping around the podium. Heads were turning, looking to their neighbors to see if they were just as confused. “No surprise I’m not here speaking as a valedictorian today, but I think all of you are surprised I’m graduating at all, so I’m interrupting this little borefest. Since we started the year with me ripping the mike out of Principal Rudolph’s hands, we might as well end it just the same.” A hushed round of laughter rippled through the graduates. “And I actually have something important to say, unlike the rest of these genius bastards down here in the front row.”
Everyone was either whispering to their neighbor, or trying to pull their mouth from the floor, or glaring at the stage like this was inexcusable. However, Lucy Larson was smiling. Seeing Jude up there in his cap and gown, about to graduate, moving on to some future that involved football warranted a smile. I was happy for his successes.
“This year wasn’t like any before it,” he began, looking out into the crowd. “I learned more about myself and life and even love than I have in the entire seventeen years before.”
A dozen heads turned and looked back at me when Jude said the “L” word. I wriggled down in my chair. I had no idea where Jude was going with this whole graduation, soul-bearing speech, but I knew it would mean embarrassment, in the best case scenario, for me.
“I learned I’m not the piece of shit everyone likes to believe I am. The piece of shit I believed I was,” he said as Principal Rudolph ran a hand over the sheen of sweat forming on his forehead. “Someone told me that again and again and again, and it took me the better part of the year, but I think I finally believe her.” His eyes flickered in my direction for the shortest second. “Because I don’t need to believe where I’ve been is where I’m headed. And I don’t need to believe that one tragedy can shape the future,” he paused, clearing his throat. “Only I can do that. I see that now.”
Another pause, and now the room was pin-drop quiet. “I also know that in the process of me learning this, the person who taught it to me lost her belief in me, and maybe even herself, and the whole damn world.” His fingers clenched around the microphone, no longer looking around the crowd—he was looking straight at me. “I could go to jail a million times and nothing would be worse than what I did to her. She taught me how to love—she even gave me chance after chance to show her that I was capable of it. And I failed her every time.” His face wrinkled into a partial wince, but he didn’t look away from me. “I love you, Lucy Larson. And I’m sorry I had to ruin everything we had to recognize that. And I get why I lost you and I’ll never get you back.”
My eyes closed; it was too much. The confession, the emotion behind the words, everyone in the auditorium looking at me, everything I was feeling.
“You saved me, Lucy, and I didn’t return the favor. And I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “I just wanted you to know.”
Opening my eyes, I made myself look at him as he backed away from the stage, handing the mike back to a red-faced Principal Rudolph. He was smiling at me, the one of Jude’s that was reserved for rare occasions, and I returned that smile.
In the midst of everything being very wrong, something right was pushing its way through. Something was rising up from the ashes.
Lifting his hand, he waved before turning and walking off the stage, leaving his past behind and getting after that bright future thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
My skin didn’t have a chance to brown before I was packing up and moving across the country. I’d passed the short weeks of summer dancing, reconnecting with my parents, and dancing some more. It was the kind of summer that could be considered close to perfect. Except for one thing.
Or, more like, one person.
Jude checked out of the boys’ home the morning after graduation and no one heard from him again. Of course more than a few rumors circulated, but after being a victim of the rumor circuit, I vowed I’d never give any credit to another. Some said he was at summer camp for some big NFL team as the biggest paid free agent in history. Some said he’d skipped the country after holding up a bank down south and shooting one of the tellers. And some said Jude had an utter and irreversible break with reality and threw himself off of Highman’s Bridge.
I liked to believe that, wherever he was, he was happy and, at last, at peace with himself and his past.
It was something I’d wished for myself after graduation and had made some progress towards. Happy was a stretch, but I leaned more towards the happy than the unhappy spectrum, and that was a victory. My past was still there, every morning and every night, ready to haunt me if I let it, but most days I didn’t let it. I remembered John for how he was meant to be remembered, not for how he’d died.
And as for saving the world, I hadn’t quite let that whole annoyingly altruistic idea go. At initiation, I’d signed up to be a dance teacher at a studio in the city where low income kiddos didn’t have to pay to learn dance. An alum had even set aside a fund so they didn’t have to buy their ballet shoes and tights. So I danced, and I taught, and I learned.
But something was still missing, or maybe I was missing something. Either way, a hole ached in me that I had to fight to get past every day. Most days I won that battle, engaging in classroom discussions, smiling at my new friends at the right moments, but other days the ache went too deep for me to keep up with the pace of life.