Nathan, being a late transfer in, is way down the line from us, paired up with this Estonian exchange student who, I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know went to our school.
“I kept saying no,” Jared tells me, as “Pomp and Circumstance” starts to play over the football field where all our families are seated, waiting for us to arrive. “And I had intended to keep saying no.
They kept offering me stuff to make me change my mind, but I always turned them down.”
We’re in the first third of the line and so we start filing onto the football field behind the top students, including our valedictorian, a girl called Bethany who has to give a speech and looks like she can’t stop swallowing from nervousness.
“So what happened to change things?” I ask.
“The mountain lion,” Jared says, serious. “I couldn’t save her. I never want that to happen again. I said I’d consider doing it if they gave me full power to heal anyone I wanted to.”
“So that’s what you did to Finn?”
Jared nods, then looks me in the eye. “I was still thinking about it. It’s my whole life changed, after all, and I was going to see what you thought of this final offer. But by using it just now, I kind of accepted the deal anyway.”
We reach the back rows of seats, heading down the centre aisle. I see Mom and Meredith. I wave. I wave at Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen, too. I see Mr Shurin. He waves with an agonized expression on his face. I find myself waving back.
“What does this all mean?” I say. I’m already realizing, though. “You’re not coming to college with me, are you?”
“Wrong,” Jared says, then laughs at my expression. “That was my condition. I want to go to college.
I want to see what that’s like. But after that…”
“After that, you’re a full-time God.”
“Looks that way,” Jared says. “I’ll ascend after I get my degree.”
“A God with a degree in Mathematics?”
“A God of cats with a degree in Mathematics.” Jared shakes his head. “My usefulness will know no bounds.”
We head down our row after Henna and Mel, who have let us be, let us keep talking. We wait, standing, for everyone to arrive.
“Will we still be able to be friends?” I ask him.
He just looks at me.
The Frenchly Canadian voice of our Principal booms over the field, sounding as bored as ever.
“Graduates,” he says. “Take your seats, I suppose.”
You don’t need to hear the ceremony. God knows I don’t hear much of it. The Principal purposely gets a few English clichés wrong to raise some gentle laughter. (“It will be, as one says, up to you to take the cow by the bell.” See? Gentle.) Bethany gets through her speech without fainting. The jazz band plays a horn-heavy version of Bold freakin’ Sapphire.
I sit there, feeling like someone’s tipped me out of a helicopter into the middle of the ocean.
Jared. Gone. Four years from now, sure, but gone. He won’t even be on the planet somewhere like his absent mom. He’ll be in his realms. Literally unreachable.
“I hate it, too, Mikey,” he says to me while they start handing out diplomas. “Do you know how lonely Gods are?”
“Then why do it?”
“Because Finn would be dead if I didn’t.”
And what can I do but nod?
Before I know it, Mel’s name is called and she stands to go to the front. I rouse myself to cheer and then I really do cheer, because Mel made it. Hell, we all made it. At least this far. Mel was supposed to walk with Jared, so they call his name next and I cheer again even though it feels like my chest is going to explode. Henna moves over next to me and when they call her name, she hugs me, whispers in my ear, “I’m not going to Africa,” and heads up the aisle to get her diploma, smiling back at me.