“How many people live in your town?”
“I have no idea.”
“Guess.”
“Twenty thousand?”
“Do you ever interact with people outside South Jersey? Have you for the last eighteen years?”
“Not really.”
“Take out your phone.”
I take out my phone.
June says, “Google world population clock and then click on the website.”
I do that and find a running count of all the people who have died and were born today. I can see that there are many more births than deaths, and so the world’s population is growing by the second.
“Why are you showing me this?” I say.
“What does that information tell you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think.”
“We’re fucked?”
“Why?”
“Global warming. At some point there will be more people than resources. We won’t be able to sustain—”
“Yes, all true. But let’s try to take an optimistic view of things today. How does it relate to your unpopularity?”
“There are more than seven billion people in the world, and so I am completely meaningless?”
June shakes her head. “No. There are seven billion people in the world, and you have only experienced twenty thousand at the most. And those twenty thousand were fairly homogenous. Your experiences with people have been largely dictated by your parents’ choices. The neighborhood in which they chose to purchase a house. Where they sent you to school. And maybe those choices weren’t the best for you. Maybe you don’t fit in where you are now. But you still managed to survive four years of high school and have a few meaningful experiences along the way. There are seven billion other people out there. Seven billion. Are you really pessimistic enough to believe that you wouldn’t get along with any of them?”
“But how do I move forward? I have no idea!”
“Sometimes you just have to pick a direction and make mistakes. Then you use what you learn from your failure to pick new, better directions so you can make more mistakes and keep learning.”
“So do you think I should go to college next year?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a chance to meet new people, if nothing else. Maybe you need to leave the first twenty thousand people behind.”
I hadn’t really thought about it like that. I knew I didn’t want to play soccer anymore. I no longer wanted to hang out with the people in my hometown, but I am interested in meeting new people who were also eager to have real, honest conversations.
June says, “You don’t have to have it all figured out now or ever. We’re all just bumbling through, really. But you’ll find something to be passionate about. You just need to leave high school and your town behind.”
“But how?”
“Why not pick something and give it a go? You’re lucky enough to have parents who can fund your next few years. You should probably take advantage of that in one way or another. It won’t be perfect, but it will be different. And different can be very good.”
I wonder whether it really can be that easy.
39
A Price to Pay for Pushing Beyond
And then somehow I’m at my high school graduation, waiting in the gym, wondering when this thing will start so it can end.
I feel too warm in my gown and hat, which is pinned to my hair.
Shannon, Riley, and Maggie are in the bleachers ignoring me again.
Ned and his boys won’t even make eye contact.
Neither will my old soccer teammates.
As I look around at my classmates, I wonder if Booker went to his high school graduation; I’m pretty sure Wrigley and Eddie Alva didn’t.
Everyone looks so happy and excited.
We line up and they play the song and we march in just like we practiced a million times, and I hate it all more than I even thought I would. But when I stand in front of my metal folding chair on the football field and look up into the stadium seats, I locate my parents, and both of them are wiping tears from their eyes. For a fraction of a second, I’m glad to give them this moment, even though it means absolutely nothing to me. Just as soon as they learned about the real Nanette, they adapted and tried to help me the best they could. And it brought them back together, too, which is so strange. Maybe I should have been honest with them earlier. But how was I to know that being honest would make our relationship so much better? Honesty doesn’t always produce such good results. And then I think about how I’ve never really been honest with my peers, either. I never really let them see the true, authentic Nanette O’Hare. Few people besides Alex and Oliver got to hang out with her. And maybe that was my big mistake.
Old men in suits say the same generic things they say every year, the choir sings “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, and then it’s time for the speeches delivered by the two students who had the highest grade point averages.
Salutatorian Janelle Priestly is introduced.
They announce that she is going to Princeton, and everyone except me claps as if Janelle Priestly has discovered how to turn dog shit into gold.
She stands and adjusts the microphone, which squeals when she touches it.
I’ve never before spoken with Janelle Priestly.
We’ve attended the same high school for four years now, and Janelle Priestly and I haven’t exchanged one single syllable.
“It’s a great honor to represent this beautiful, promising, and beloved class,” she begins, and then waves her hand over all of us like we’re a brand-new sports car she’s about to give away on some stupid game show.