Cal wore it once and it is never going to be worn again, and it does not go in a box, and I have made my peace with the fact that I do not have to explain that arrangement to anybody.
The name card is in a frame on the wall by the stairs, next to the diploma.
The turtle is still terrible.
And here’s the thing I keep landing on, ten months later.
I begged that boy not to do it. For an hour, at two in the morning, in my kitchen, I told him every single reason it was a bad idea, and every single reason was correct.
They did laugh at him. He did lose his best friend for nine days. His father did refuse to come. It was, in every practical sense, exactly as bad as I said it would be.
And he did it anyway, and he never told me why, because if he’d told me about the diploma I would have said yes and he would have lost the only thing he actually wanted, which was for six hundred people to laugh at him first.
