I’m hiding from everyone in the girls’ locker room. My graduation gown keeps dragging on the floor so it’s hanging on the hook on the door.
After Mom and Dad and the kids dropped me at the gym entrance to park the car, I thought I had forgot everything until I pushed out the first words to myself in a whisper, “Oliver Goldsmith once said…” and the rest would come. I kept repeating it, Oliver Goldsmith once said, Oliver Goldsmith once said, as if every time I said it I had been drowning and came up for air.
As all the teachers and administrators grouped together at the front, I saw Mrs. Townsend, her black poof of hair rising above the others.
“Hey, Mrs. T,” I said, and she turned around.
“Sammie,” she said slowly with a soft smile, and pulled me into a hug. She smelled like so many different products mixed together, lotion and shampoo and perfume, but in a good way, in a way that fit.
“Thank you for everything,” I said, and choked back the tears I had been holding in all day.
“You’re going to be great,” Mrs. T said.
Then I couldn’t help it, the tears came for real, because of how many times she had said that to me over the last four years, before my first week in AP classes, before my first tournament, before the beginning of my senior year, before the disease came along and tried to mess up everything, and after. I knew this would probably be the last time she’d ever say something like that. Before she moved on to say her good-byes to someone else, I touched her arm.
She turned back to me.
“Will you introduce me out there? I mean, the speech?”
“Oh!” she said, considering.
“I know Principal Rothchild is supposed to do it, but it would mean a lot… you know… because you’re the only one who knows how big…” I swallowed back more tears. “How big a deal it is for me to do this.”
Mrs. T smiled again, determined. She nodded. “Of course I will,” she said. “I’ll go chat with Mr. R.”
Now the gym is standing room only, and everyone’s voices are swirling around in one big roar.
I should probably go. They are lining us up out there by last name. I’ll be between William Madison and Lynn Nguyen. Everyone is taking photos of themselves, and here I am, typing on a toilet. If I fail, let it be known that I was here, in a bathroom stall, going over the speech one more time. I tried.
It’s funny that I’m thinking about Coop again, but I can’t get what he said the other day in the hallway out of my head: “Sometimes it’s just about timing.”
Speak of the devil, someone just peeked his head in here and yelled, “Samantha Agatha McCoy! You better get your butt out here!”
Yeah, that had to be Coop.
Here goes nothing.