And underneath, because she was a person who thought about things like this:
(Willa — rhymes with pillow. Not Willow.)
And in the corner, a doodle of a very bad turtle. She drew that turtle on everything from about age nine. It was on the corner of every homework sheet in that house for eight years.
She filled that card out in May of 2016, sitting in a school gym, at seventeen, and handed it in, and eleven days later she was gone and nobody ever read it.
I have no memory of the next part. None.
People have told me things. Cal says I made a sound. Bonnie Krebs, who I have since forgiven and who cried on my porch, says I said “no” three times, which I do not remember at all.
What I know is that I came apart in a folding seat in the third row of the auditorium of a high school I had not walked into in ten years, holding a piece of card stock with a turtle on it.
And then Dr. Odom went back to the microphone.
He waited. The room had already started to change — that thing where a crowd realizes it has misread something and the sound drains out of it in a wave.
And he said:
“Before we continue. Ten years ago, in the spring of 2016, this school prepared a diploma for a member of the graduating class who did not live to receive it. It has been held in our records office since that time. At the request of her brother, and with the permission of her family, we are going to confer it tonight.”
Then he read her name.
“Willa June Tarrant.”
And he read it correctly, because Cal had given him the card in February and Dr. Odom had had it on his desk for three months.
There was a chair on the stage that I had assumed was for a speaker.
Nobody sat in it the whole night. That’s what it was for.
The row of mothers next to me went quiet one at a time. I could hear it happen. Bonnie first, then the next one, then the next one.
And then somebody stood up, somewhere at the back, and then it was everybody, and it took a long time, and I stayed in my seat because I could not have stood up if the building had been on fire.
Cal was still crouched in the aisle in front of me with one hand on my knee.
They put Willa’s diploma in my hands at the end of the row, after the recessional, out of a plain manila envelope that had been in a records room since June of 2016
