Two Roads from Here

by Teddy Steinkellner

  “But tonight . . .”

  “We were pregaming—me, him, a couple of his friends, and they asked about the hotel, and like, he just said it. He blurted out what I’d done with Liam. He said it to them, and they stared at me like it was so funny, and he called me ‘loose,’ and he called me ‘the Moaner’ to my face, and he called me . . . he called . . .”

  “What? What did he say?”

  Mona looked at me with her huge, hysterical eyes, and her scrunched-up nose, and her drunk, half-open mouth. She stared at me, scanned me, judged me, like despite all the stuff she was saying about herself, she knew she was still better than me. The girl looked positively hateful.

  “Cody called me . . . ,” Mona said. “The second-biggest slut at school. Behind only you.”

  That moment wanted to hit me so hard. It wanted to punch me and cut me and make me gag. That moment wanted to make me wail and scream and run on home and do horrible, unthinkable shit to myself. Right then, in that moment, the universe wanted me to die.

  But you know what?

  The universe can suck a fat one.

  I wanted to do something else.

  “Hey, lady,” I said. I was smiling. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Mona’s mouth was hanging open. Her eyes were puddles of goop. I wondered if I could even get her to stand up.

  “What?” she said. “What do you mean? Leave me alone.”

  I wrapped my fingers around her wrists. I squeezed them tight. “It’ll make you feel better. It’ll make me feel better.”

  “What do you want?”

  I leaned in closer, crazy close. My eyes were inches from hers. “Just promise,” I said, leaning all the way in, pressing my forehead up against hers, so close I was darn near kissing her mouth-to-mouth.

  Mona blinked. She closed her lips. She nodded. “Okay,” she said.

  As soon as she said it, my smile exploded. “All right, girl. Let’s dance.”

  There was real fast electronica playing, like a rave-type song, and once I felt that beat, I couldn’t sit still any longer. I wouldn’t let my homegirl sit, either. I stood her up, and two shakes later I was dancing right next to her, right in our own little corner of the room.

  She was barely moving at first. She was standing, bobbing her head and kind of dangling her arms, but it wasn’t enough for me.

  I showed her how it was done.

  I unzipped my sweatshirt and flung it off, into the corner of the room. I hurled my hair back and forth, side to side, all around. I jumped up and down like a kid on a hotel bed. I punched the air. I kicked it. I head-butted my cares away, and I was so off beat, I was such a terrible dancer, all my years of training were for shit. I grabbed Mona’s arm and pulled her with me. We jerked and twerked from the table to the center of the floor. I shook. She shimmied. We shouted as loud as we possibly could. I’m sure people were watching us, whispering to each other, maybe even recording us, but I didn’t look because I didn’t care, and Mona didn’t care because I didn’t care. We held out our hands. We locked fingers. We began spinning. We twirled together, in epically dizzying circles. We shrieked and cursed and spun, we spun, we spun. It was ridiculous how uncoordinated we were. It was hilarious how much better this was than sex. We spun and fell and stood up again, and we sweat and panted, and we spun until the floor emptied out, until prom night was through. And we left the dance together, and we stayed together, and we danced forever till the sun came up.

  I am a person. I am a wonderful person. My new friend Mona, she’s a wonderful person too. We are wonderful people, and we get to do the things that wonderful people do, which means that whenever we want to, whenever the fancy strikes us, we get to dance.

  * * *

  19. ALLEGRA REY

  * * *

  You nervous?”

  I shook my head. The tassel on my cap came loose and fell over the front brim. I shook my head again to make it go away. “Not nervous,” I said. “Just ready.”

  “Ready for your speech?” Wiley asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I think it goes beyond that. Of course I’ll stand at that podium, try to impart whatever wisdom I can. But truly, what I’m most excited for is what comes after my speech ends.”

  Wiley grinned. “Grad Nite?”

  “Naturally,” I said. “I can’t wait for tonight. Disneyland with you. The energy, the churros, the stolen moments when no one’s looking our way on a dark, quiet ride. But there are so many other things I can’t wait for too. This summer, and next year at DCCC, and fun times with my family, and wherever we end up transferring in two years, and . . . well, I guess just life. I’m ready for life, Wiley. I’m ready to spend it with you.”

  I clutched the front fabric of his robe and pulled him in for a tender kiss.

  “You know,” I added. “Perhaps ‘ready’ isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s more like . . . ‘impatient.’ ”

  Wiley blushed. I kissed him again, this time on the cheek.

  “I’m ready to hear your speech,” he said.

  “I wrote it for you,” I said.

  “Then I’m impatient to hear your speech,” he said.

  I kissed my hand and pressed it to the top of his mortarboard. “I sure do like you, Wiley Otis.”

  Not so many minutes later, I stood up from my seat, out on the raised stage, under the blazing sun. I stepped forward to the mic.

  “My fellow graduates . . . ,” I said. “Whose time is it?”

  None of the hundreds of seniors in front of me responded. None of the thousands of parents and supporters surrounding us in the football stadium made a single noise.

  “Let’s try that again,” I said. “Whose time is it?”

  Still no sound. Perhaps a cricket or two.

  “Our time,” I said. “It is ‘our time,’ as we have been exuberantly chanting at pep rallies and pole-scalings all year. But let me pose a question to you, dear graduates: What is the definition of this nebulous phrase? What, in fact, does ‘our time’ really mean?”

  I snuck a peek at the graduating class. Most of them were whispering in each other’s ears, or playing on their phones. There were even a few snorers. I kept going, though. I’d written this speech for them, and some of them especially. They were going to hear me, whether they listened or not.

  “To answer this pressing inquiry, I have decided to consult the very same people whom we seem to refer to any time we face a difficult problem in AP Literature. . . .

  “That would be old, dead white guys.”

  This got a couple of laughs, by which I mean two or three out of more than five hundred graduates. At least Wiley showed me some love. He overexaggerated a hearty guffaw and extended a big thumbs-up to the sky. That boy.

  “In one of my all-time favorite novels, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, the doomed protagonist Ahab soliloquizes, ‘The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!’

  “Essentially what the captain declares here is that the future is predetermined, or ironclad if you will, and that to change his fate would be impossible. Thus, he must face it head-on.”

  Anyone who’d tittered at my earlier joke was now stone silent again. I peeked at Wiley and even he was glassy-eyed. Still, I kept going.

  “Yet in our schooling this year, we have also encountered the contradictory worldview. In Mr. Pargo’s class, we analyzed the work of Robert Frost, who famously wrote, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.’ ”

  I glanced momentarily over my shoulder, where Cole was sitting onstage behind me, in the salutatorian’s spot. I can still remember his pessimistic interpretation of the Frost poem, back at the beginning of the year. I think about how this year has gone for him. I wonder if he now knows how wrong he was.

  “And I
can see we have some Seussical stars in our midst today, so surely you all know that Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was speaking to graduates everywhere in Oh, the Places You’ll Go! when he stated, ‘You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.’ ”

  Part of me wanted to look Brian’s way as I referenced Dr. Seuss, part of me wanted to see how Horton would react, but most of me refused. I had a glimmer of a chance with him once, it’s true, but that’s not my life anymore. I’ve picked someone else. I can’t go back.

  “These two men, Frost and Seuss, do not abide by the predetermined future mind-set. They refuse to believe that our choices are made for us. Rather, they contend that each time we face a fork in the road, we select which path to take, and thus we control the outcome. We are the masters of our own destinies.

  “So, my fellow graduates. We have our dueling perspectives. The Great White Whale versus the Cat in the Hat. God’s will versus free will. Now, let me get all dialectic for a minute and put the question to you all . . . fate versus choice . . .

  “Which of these views is right?”

  Not a single person in the entire stadium was remotely interested in what I had to say. The school administrators behind me fanned themselves with their programs, to keep from both heat and boredom. The graduates before me were zoning out in such large numbers that it felt like we were in a folk tale, the kind in which an entire village is placed underneath a witch’s sleeping curse. The silence in the arena completely and paradoxically drowned out my voice. Occasionally it was punctuated by the blasts of a couple of rogue foghorns. On the whole, I think the graduation attendees were more interested in what the foghorns had to say than they were in me.

  “I’m going to talk about myself for a moment.”

  Now, this rhetorical pivot didn’t exactly make everyone perk up with curiosity, but you know what? I didn’t care.

  “My mom became sick this year. Very sick. Cancer. Ovarian. Stage three. And thankfully she’s here to see me graduate today, but who knows if she’ll be at the next one.

  “This year I made the decision to be there for her, to stay with her, to devote everything I have to healing her, no matter what. Now, you may ask, was that really my choice, or was I preordained to take that route, due to circumstance or some higher power?”

  At last a handful of graduates looked up from their phones. The “c” word tends to do that to people.

  “This year I was also accepted to Stanford University, my longtime dream school. However, due to a variety of factors, I will not be attending next fall. Again, I ask: Is that the result of fate conspiring against me, or have I made my own proverbial bed?”

  Now nearly all eyes were on me, although probably less because of the captivating gravitas of my words and more because my oversharing was turning me into something of a traffic accident, a disaster on display.

  “Finally, on a much more affirming note, not so long ago I reconnected, and actually fell in love with, my best friend. And who knows what the future may hold for the two of us, but I intend to devote myself to him for as long as I have time left to love. So, once again, the question must be asked: Is that destiny, or is it my decision?”

  Everyone was watching me. Everyone was staring at me. Wiley’s cheeks were bright, bashful red. The foghorns were silent.

  “Now, this is an age-old debate, one that practically predates time itself. It is the central query that, deep down, informs every piece of literature, every work of philosophy, every scientific experiment, every religious text. And, to be perfectly honest, as far as questions go, it’s not exactly answerable.

  “There is ample evidence both ways. There is confirmation bias everywhere you look. Reasonable, even brilliant minds, disagree wildly. There is not, strictly speaking, a right answer.

  “But you know what? This is my speech. I am the valedictorian. This is my day. So here’s what I think. I think that if I get to pick between fate or free will, then the answer is easy. . . .

  “I choose having a choice.

  “I choose to stay home with my family, because my family needs me, and I need them just as much. I choose to spurn Stanford, because there’s more to life than on-paper accomplishments. I choose to love Wiley, because that’s what love is; it’s a choice, a mutual choice that benefits both parties.

  “So why would I ever let that doubt creep in? Why would I leave my future in the hands of some mystical, malevolent force that I don’t understand? Why should I constantly second-guess myself, perpetually regret the actions of my past, the things I should have done differently? Why should I live a life that is anything but my own?

  “We are eighteen years old. Our futures stretch in front of us with infinite possibilities. We cannot know what’s coming next. This, to put it mildly, is terrifying. We have no idea where any of our roads are going. Some will turn out to be dead ends. Others will become U-turns. Some will turn into one-way streets. Others, endless loops.

  “But you know what?

  “We are eighteen years old. Our futures stretch in front of us with infinite possibilities. We cannot know what’s coming next. And this, to put it honestly, is exhilarating.

  “This is it, graduates. This is our moment. Today is everything. The minute we turn our tassels, the split second we toss our caps into the air, we transform from high school students into adults, into full-fledged members of society. We begin the journey that will span the rest of our lives. So let us navigate that road cheerfully and compassionately, and above all, responsibly. Let us remember that we have brains in our heads and feet in our shoes. Let us never forget that we have exceptional, even divine power over our own choices. Let us glory in the fact that the future is ours.

  “And with that, my fellow Bulldogs . . .

  “I leave you with one final question . . .

  “WHOSE TIME IS IT?”

  “OUR TIME!”

  “WHOSE TIME IS IT??”

  “OUR TIME!!”

  “WHOSE TIME IS IT???!!!”

  “OUR TIME!!!!!!”

  • • •

  “That was incredible,” Wiley said, jogging up to me.

  The ceremony was over. The last bits of confetti were floating through the air. The field was littered with programs and mortarboards. That graduation song, the one about something unpredictable but having the time of your life, was blasting over the loudspeakers. Families were waddling out of their seats and down to the grass to take pictures with sweaty, exultant graduates.

  “Do you see my mom and everyone?” I said. “Are they coming this way?”

  “Oh,” Wiley said. “Uh, probably.”

  He rubbed his nose. He sniffled once, twice. “There’s actually, um, something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Really?” I said. “Right now?”

  “It’s important.”

  “But my family—”

  “You have to go to Stanford,” Wiley blurted.

  It came so suddenly, the catch in my throat.

  “What?”

  Wiley paused. He took a slow, deep breath. So did I.

  “I’ve wanted you,” he said. “For the past ten years. More than anything, I’ve wanted you. I’ve dreamed of you every day. And I’ve gotta be honest. I never really thought this time would come. The day when you’d want me, too.

  “But since you asked me to prom, since we got together, I’ve had this feeling like, I dunno . . . and especially today, just now, listening to your speech, I couldn’t get it out of my head, this nagging feeling, like . . .”

  “No,” I said. “Please don’t say it.”

  “Like I’m holding you back,” Wiley said. “Like I’ll always hold you back if you stay back here. And even once . . . even after, you know, stuff happens, you know, with your mom, I mean, I’ll continue to be your excuse, the one excuse that never goes away.

  “You have to go to Stanford. As soon as possible. I don’t know how you’ll manage it, but you have t
o. I’m making you. Go there now. Tell them your mom’s dying. Tell them it was your boyfriend’s last wish, right before he dumped you.”

  “You,” I said, “are being so condescending.”

  “I know,” Wiley said, covering his mouth, almost smirking. “That’s kind of your thing, huh? And in two minutes it can be your thing again. I promise.

  “But, Allie, you can’t patronize me by limiting your own potential, just because you think it’ll help me. I won’t let you. I’m okay on my own. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “Well, what if . . . ,” I tried. “What if you came up north? With me?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” he said. “And I wish it could work. But it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be fair. We’d just be tethering ourselves to the past. I want more for us.”

  “But,” I said. “But I love you—”

  Wiley shook his head.

  “I love you too,” he said, softly but firmly. “But I can’t be with you. That’s my decision. And as far as your college goes, I mean, you can make whatever choice you want, but like . . .”

  He took a step toward me. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Deep down, you know . . . you were always meant to do this.”

  With that, he opened his arms. I stepped into them, and he held me in the tightest, warmest hug. We didn’t say anything else, not for some time. The two of us simply stood there, among the thousands of revelers, under the broiling sun, waiting for his mom and my family, waiting for whatever comes next, waiting, wondering, waiting.

  Goodness.

  Didn’t see that one coming.

  * * *

  20. BRIAN MACK

  * * *

  It’s my last image of high school, my girl, confetti and balloons falling all around her, music and “woooos!” filling the air. Her eyes are closed. Her little fingers are clenched. She’s swaying, breathing, just being. She thinks no one is watching. She looks so huggable in her little yellow robe. She’s the cutest she’s ever been in her entire life.