I walked out in full dress uniform, and I found my father in the row he’d stolen from whoever I’d have chosen to sit in it. I watched him register my name. I watched him turn to my stepmother. I watched my stepsister lower the phone she’d been holding my invitation up on. I watched four years of a story they’d told themselves come apart in real time, with four hundred people as witnesses.
And then I gave my address, and I’ll tell you how it ended, because I’d written the ending in the rain, ninety seconds from getting on a bus home.
“I almost wasn’t here today,” I said, to a hall of officers and families and the man who’d put me backward into a railing that morning. “Someone told me this morning that I was one cadet out of four hundred, and nobody would notice whether I came or went.
