Page 41 of Roadrunner

Behind me, the club erupted. Whistles. Someone’s air horn, absurd and glorious in a gymnasium built for polite applause. Della’s voice cut above all of it, unmistakable, shouting my name like it was the only name in the room.

I laughed, in spite of myself, all the way back to my seat.

Afterward, Riley pulled me into him before I’d even fully cleared the crowd, his chin dropping to the top of my head the way it did when words felt insufficient to him. I let him hold me longer than I normally would have, right there in front of everyone, because for once I didn’t care who was watching.

“Proud of you,” he said in half a whisper.

I didn’t trust myself to answer. My throat was doing something inconvenient, and I was not going to cry in a cap and gown over people who hadn’t shown up to see it.

His father shook my hand next. Firm. Two pumps, the way men shook hands when they meant it and didn’t need to say anything else to prove it. “Your folks couldn’t make it?” he asked. There was no pity in it, just a question a man asks because he already suspects the answer and wants to give you room to say it plainly if you want to.

“No,” I said.

He nodded once. He didn’t ask why, and he didn’t offer some soft, useless comfort about it either. He just let the nod be enough.

Somehow it was.

Della wrapped both arms around me and squeezed until something in my back popped audibly. “Don’t you dare cry,” she said into my hair, which was always her first line of defense against her own.

“I’m not crying.”

“Good.” She squeezed harder, like that settled it. “Neither am I.”

We went to dinner after. The whole club, Riley’s parents, a handful of my classmates whose own families had already scattered to the airport or the highway. It was loud and crowded in the happy way a restaurant gets when nobody’s watching the clock. Someone ordered enough food for twice our number, and Riley’s father told a story I’d already heard twice before that made the whole table laugh anyway, because the version he told at a table full of people he loved was always a little better than the one he’d told before.

I sat there and watched all of it happen around me. The noise, the borrowed chairs dragged over from other tables, Della correcting someone’s grammar out of pure reflex. I understood, plainly, for maybe the first time all day, that this was a family. Not the one I’d been born into. A different one, built out of people who’d simply decided, at some point without asking my permission, that I belonged to them.

By ten o’clock most everyone had filtered out into the parking lot in twos and threes. Riley drove me home. We sat in the driveway afterward with the engine off for a few minutes, not talking, just letting the day settle around us the way days like that need to.

“Stay,” I said.

He looked over at me.

“Stay tonight,” I said, in case the first time hadn’t been clear enough.

He stayed.

Kissing, and touching, and celebrating, we stumbled into the apartment.

The gown went over a chair. The kutte went over the gown.

He shut the apartment door with his boot. He looked at me like I was the answer. “Come here.”

I did. The kiss had none of the mountain in it and all of the mountain in it. My back hit the wall. A frame knocked crooked and stayed that way.

“If you tell me to stop,” he warned. “I will throw you down the stairs.” He laughed into my throat. Then he didn’t laugh.

We didn’t make it to the bed on the first try.

The couch caught us. His belt. My dress shoved up.

Four years of knowing his mouth and I still went stupid when he put it on my neck. Graduation was still on my skin. The heat of the gym, Della shouting my name, a cap I had already lost. This was the part of the day I had been waiting for without letting myself name it.

I got his belt open with fingers that were not as steady as I wanted them to be. He made a sound that was almost a laugh and then wasn’t. His hands found the zipper of the dress like he had been thinking about that zipper since the parking lot.

“Look at me,” he said, half demanding. “I want to see your face.”

I did.