“What happened to you?” I asked Ellie. She’d been standing by herself in the school parking lot and once I parked, she came to my driver’s-side door the minute I got out of the car. She had things written up and down her forearms in black Sharpie marker. Her hair was wet with sweat, and there was some sort of debris in it.
“I don’t think I can stay,” she said, blinking a lot and looking mostly at the macadam under our feet in the school’s back parking lot.
I held my gown, sheathed in thin dry cleaner’s plastic, over my left arm, and I reached out to her with my right.
“This has been the most fucked-up day of my life,” she said.
“Are you okay? Did something happen?” I asked. She looked almost beat up.
“What’s that?” I asked, and pointed to her arms.
She ignored my question and said, “I saw so many things today, Glory. Weird things.”
“I know. I see it too, remember? It’s cool.”
“It’s not cool!” she yelled. “It’s not cool!”
“What did you see?”
“Everything. People having sex or people dying or people being born or… I don’t know. Weird things.”
“Like the future?”
“Yeah.”
“But you can’t see mine, right?”
She looked right into my eyes. “No.”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I walked.”
We lived over four miles away. “You walked?”
She put her arms out in a shrug. I could read what she’d written inside her left forearm. Free yourself. Have the courage.
“I don’t know what to do with this—this stuff I’m seeing. I’m not sure what any of it means.”
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“It means something. I know it.” She looked at the message written up her arms and I had this feeling like it wasn’t a message meant for her—that maybe it was a message meant for me.
“I have to go,” I said.
She nodded.
“Just don’t look at people. That’s the key. We’ll talk later,” I said.
She nodded again. Quickly. Like she was high or something.
She walked away through a sea of cars. I walked toward the gym.
Transmission from Jody Heckman, lead majorette and president of the student council: Her great-grandmother was assaulted by twelve soldiers in Nazi Germany. Her great-granddaughter will suffer the same fate in the Second US Civil War.
I looked away.
Second Civil War?
I slipped on my white gown and I secured my cap with two bobby pins that I got from the giant tub of bobby pins on the front table. Then I filed into my alphabetical place between Jason Oberholtzer and Ron Oliveli and stood there looking at the linoleum tiles in a weird sort of limbo.
I thought about Darla’s darkroom. I thought about the pictures I would develop and print that summer. I thought about the way everything has stages. My relationship with Dad. My relationship with Ellie. My relationship with this day: graduation day.
It was all like developing pictures: Developer, stop bath, fixer, rinse.
There are stages.
There is a moment in every photograph’s life when it has been exposed but not developed. The light from the enlarger has shone through the negative and made its impression on the paper, but without the magic of developer, the paper will stay white and no one will ever see what that impression is.
Standing in the cafeteria between Jason and Ron, I felt like that piece of paper. Exposed but not developed. Potential beneath the surface. Blank.
At the same time, I knew if I looked up and met eyes with any of my classmates, I would learn more about them than any of them would ever know about themselves. I both wanted to do it and didn’t want to do it. I thought about the possibility of a second civil war and decided to browse the graduation program instead.
It wasn’t until we started to walk toward the football stadium single file that I realized that most everyone is just like me—exposed but not developed. Secretive. Scared. I decided I should dunk the audience in psychic developer and see whatever the bat wanted me to see.
Transmission from Mrs. Lingle, the school secretary: Her father used to play tennis every day until he had to get his knee replaced and now he feels useless.
Transmission from Mr. Heck, the shop teacher: His granddaughter will play piano in Carnegie Hall. She will still feel like an utter failure, regardless.
Transmission from Dad, who stood at the stairs as we descended them toward the stage that was assembled in the grass of the football field: His grandfather used to call him Roy the Boy because he was the only boy out of twenty cousins. His mother often thought being the only boy made him spoiled, so she tried to withhold any outward signs of affection for as long as she could until she finally left and never came back.
Transmission from a random parent who snapped pictures from the sidelines: Her mother is dying in a nursing home across town. Her mother was a nurse who worked to heal patients from radiation poisoning in Japan in 1945 after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The bomb was named Little Boy.
I looked down.
All the way to the aisle, to my row, and then to my seat, I looked down.
Who would name a 9,700-pound bomb Little Boy, anyway?
The bat wanted me to ask that. It showed me what it wanted to show me. It showed me what it knew I wanted to see. Why did it want me to see so much pain? Why couldn’t I see anything warm and fuzzy and emotionally sweet? I wanted to see everything, now. I wanted to see everything.