“Sure!” I chirp, though truthfully I have no idea where or when around might be. He’s headed to Marquette in the fall, I’ve deduced from the hoodie he started wearing to school after spring break, but other than that I don’t know anything about his future except for the fact that this is the point where it diverges from mine, two-roads-in-a-yellow-wood style. I was never brave enough to tell Clayton how I feel about him. I was never brave enough to talk to Clayton, period, and now it’s too late. “Um. Take care of yourself.”
“I will,” Clayton says, and there’s that smile again, quick and generous. It’s the smile of a person who has never obsessed over whether or not to go to a party. It’s the smile of a person who has never worried that possibly he did the first seventeen years of his life completely wrong. “Bye, Rach.”
“Yo, Clayton!” somebody hollers from across the auditorium; he’s gone before I can even register the nickname, or how easily it seemed to come out of his mouth. I don’t know how long I stand there before finally coming back to myself—making my way across the auditorium toward my family, glancing over my shoulder for one last look.
Back at home, I change out of my graduation robe and into leggings and a hoodie, scooping my hair into a topknot before thundering back down the stairs into the kitchen. “There’s our girl,” my stepdad says, looking up from the crossword in the daily local paper. He’s sitting at the table next to a pile of Walls family detritus: this week’s Meijer circular and a couple of abandoned water glasses and my financial aid packet from Northwestern, Jackson’s baseball glove balanced on top of a stack of overdue library books. “Here’s one for you. ‘Precollege, for short.’ Four letters, maybe starts with E.”
I pluck a grape from the slightly withered bunch on the counter, considering. “Elhi,” I finally say.
He whispers the word back to himself and writes it in. “Huh.”
“Hey, someone grab this, please.” Mom clambers through the back door, the screen door slamming behind her with a thwack. She drops a kiss on my forehead, then sets two massive, grease-spotted pizza boxes down on the counter. One of the perks of owning a fast-casual Italian restaurant: all the pizza we could ever want.
And also a bunch we don’t.
“I just keep replaying your speech in my head,” she tells me, peeling a plastic grocery bag off her wrist and pulling a package of Congrats, Grad! plates from its crinkly depths along with a matching set of napkins. “Seriously, Ma, have you ever heard a more brilliant graduation speech in your entire life?”
“Never,” Nonna chimes in from her spot on the flowered sofa in the living room, her tone brooking even fewer arguments than usual. “She was stunning.”
“We are so proud of you,” Mom continues, taking my face in both palms. Her hands are rough, with the ragged cuticles of a person who doesn’t have time or patience for things like manicures. Her forearms are speckled with burns from the oven at the restaurant. “I am so proud. So very, very proud.” Tears begin to prick at the corners of my eyes, and Mom’s quivering lip tells me she’s feeling the same.
“Uh-oh,” Nonna says, hauling herself up off the sofa with a quiet groan before encircling both of us in a hug. “Here come the waterworks.” She smells like juniper and talcum, familiar; as she wraps us up in her surprisingly strong arms, I can’t help but think about how, as hard as I’ve been working to get into college and out of here, I am going to be so, so sad to leave.
“All right, enough,” Mom says finally—the first to break away, blotting the corners of her eyes with one businesslike thumb. “Pizza’s getting cold.”
“Pizza’s already cold,” Jackson points out, scampering into the kitchen in his cargo shorts and tube socks, hair somehow sticking up in every direction even though I know for a fact Dad made him gel it down for the ceremony earlier. My brother is twelve, and he really excels at it. “That’s the sad truth of other people’s garbage pizza.”
“Easy, you,” Dad says, peeling the cellophane off the paper plates and dealing them like a deck of cards before lifting the lid on the pizza box, the smell of the garlic butter we brush on all our crusts filling the kitchen. This particular garbage pie is pepperoni, black olives, banana peppers, and…Ugh.
“Is that pineapple?” I can’t help but ask.
Mom shrugs. “Can’t let screwups go to waste, even on graduation day. You can just pick it off.”
False. Unlike some other toppings, pineapple has juice, and you cannot pick that off.
I briefly consider investigating the second box before deciding whatever is in there is probably worse than pineapple and settling on the slice that’s been least violated by hunks of brightly colored tropical fruit. I push a stack of vendor invoices out of the way and take a seat at the table as Nonna gets herself a can of lemon-lime seltzer from the fridge—the store brand, which she insists is her favorite—and sidles up next to me.
“So,” she says, “tell me again why you’re still here?”
I give her a weird look. “College doesn’t actually start until the fall, you realize.”
“Yes, thank you. I haven’t completely lost my faculties.” She thwaps me over the head with the pack of napkins before opening it and handing me one.
“ ‘The terrible and the great,’ ” Dad pipes up from across the table. “Five letters. Third letter is an a.” It’s not a question, but he’s waiting for an answer. The two of us have been doing the crossword together for as long as I can remember; it was one of the things we bonded over when he and my mom got married. When I’m quiet now, he looks up. “What. Don’t tell me you graduated six hours ago and you’ve already forgotten everything you learned.”
“Somehow, I think I missed Crosswords 101.” I pop a banana pepper into my mouth, thinking. “Tsars,” I announce once I’ve swallowed, grinning at him from across the table. “As in Ivan and Peter.”
Nonna blinks at me in confusion.
“Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great?” I say.
“See? She’s stunning.” Nonna kisses my forehead the same way Mom did a few minutes ago. “Who else needs pizza?” she asks before setting a plate in front of my dad, who’s still lost in his own intricately gridded world. He absently picks up the slice and takes a bite, crust first.
“So?” Nonna prods again, sitting down beside me with her own slice—the second box was sausage and mushroom, I realize now, which I would have figured out if I’d bothered to look for myself. “About that party.”
I shake my head. “You sound like Ruoxi.”