What Jamie Said at Graduation
Jamie wasn’t graduating — that was next year. But they showed up for Priya’s graduation, which said everything.
Graduation || Priya || Friendship || Future
Priya graduated on a Saturday in June, which was a Jefferson ceremony on the football field with the specific quality of a school ceremony — formal enough to matter, slightly disorganized in the way of large events with many moving parts, the graduates in their caps and gowns looking both more and less like themselves simultaneously. I sat with Jamie and Zara in the family section, which required a mild negotiation with the seating coordinator, who was unmoved by our argument until I mentioned that Jamie was the top-ranked junior debater in the state of Oregon, which was irrelevant but effective. We sat. The sun was doing something excellent for once — properly warm, not Portland-warm — and the football field had the green-gold quality of early summer.
Priya’s name was called — Priya Ananya Sharma, her full name in the official record, which I had never heard said aloud in its full form — and she walked across the stage with the specific composure of someone who had been working toward this moment for four years and was receiving it with the full dignity it deserved, and then at the last second, when she took the diploma and turned to face the crowd for the photograph, she grinned. Not the composed Priya grin — the real one, the unguarded one, the one she had more access to now than she’d had in September, the Priya-and-Zara effect, the specific loosening of someone who had found people who could see them. I stood up from my seat before I’d decided to. I shouted her name. The seating coordinator looked at me. Several other families looked at me. Priya found me in the crowd from across the football field and pointed at me with the exact expression that said you are so embarrassing and I love you. Jamie laughed beside me. Zara grabbed my arm. I sat back down. “That was very undignified for the state debate champion,” Jamie said, in my ear. “Worth it,” I said. They put their head briefly on my shoulder, which was brief and small and entirely real.
After the ceremony we found Priya in the crowd — she had navigated to us with the efficient directness that was her mode in any crowd situation — and she hugged all three of us in sequence with the warmth of someone who had a lot to feel and was not suppressing any of it. Her parents were nearby, and her mother was crying with the specific intensity of a first-generation immigrant parent at their child’s graduation, which was its own category of beautiful. Zara held Priya’s hand through the family photographs and Priya let her, which was its own category of new and good. I stood at the edge of the football field in the June sun and watched my best friend graduate and thought about September, when she had sat across from me at the lunch table and said I’m gay at normal speaking volume, and about everything that had grown from that moment — not just for her but for me, the specific chain of brave things that her brave thing had started. The river. The coat. The room. “Hey,” Jamie said, beside me. “You okay?” I looked at them. At the face that was mine now — mine in the way that things become yours when you’ve earned the right to them. “Yes,” I said. “Better than okay.” They smiled. “Good,” they said. The sun stayed warm. Priya’s mother was still crying. The football field was full of the best kind of noise. Everything was, for this afternoon on this June Saturday, exactly right. I thought: this is what you get when you tell the truth. This is what was on the other side of the fear all along. This.