“I don’t care what the school says, you don’t deserve to graduate.”
My mother shouted this through an upstairs bedroom window. I was outside, calling the good news up from the street: I would, in the end, be able to graduate.
I was floating, had just come from the Girls’ house, where Maritza had shared our news. She’d passed the math exam that had plagued her for years, and Mrs. Wylie had called me down after testing to say that Mrs. Rich, the PE teacher, had made an exception.
“She’s letting you pass,” the impish counselor reported, looking relieved to have one less student to sign up for summer school.
“Why?” I asked.
She shrugged, said I must have made a good case for myself, but I knew I hadn’t. I had apologized to Mrs. Rich for walking out of gym class and ruining her trust, but I had not asked her to change my grade, had spared us both the indignity of my begging.
But she’d changed the grade anyway, my counselor reported and suddenly everyone was happy, hugging me, saying they knew I could do it.
I stood under my mother’s window, waiting for her to say something else. It was hot, the sun beating down on me as I waited on the street.
“How’d you trick them into this?” was all she said, her voice sluggish, but clearly angry and disappointed that the school had been duped by the likes of me.
I just stood there, staring up at the window, unable to see her through the sun’s glare. I was amazed, almost flattered, by the power my mother thought I had over the school. It was true that I had messed up most of the year, but I had also worked—had walked to and from each and every night-school class.
But I had given up that year, and perhaps in doing so, I’d encouraged my mother to give up right along with me. Still her silence burned more than the late June sun.
Finally, she spoke again.
“It doesn’t matter what they say,” she said, “you don’t deserve to graduate, and I won’t have any part of it.”
By then, Stephanie was living a few towns away in a tiny apartment with Jimmy Sulli. The older kids were away, and the two younger girls didn’t understand what graduation meant, or how close I’d come to not making it.
There was no one to talk to.
My mother slammed the window, and I went in through the front door and let my boxed cap and gown fall to the floor. No tears came. I just lay in the darkened room and nurtured the part of me that believed my mother was right—that I didn’t deserve to graduate.
Except for the sound of children playing on the street, the house was quiet. Their laughter drifted in through open windows. My mother and I were rooms away from each other, doors closed, in separate cells, but somehow I had become a replica of her, lying in bed, flattened by the weight of the world.