When You Were Here

there were an answer, because I just don’t get why my mom could survive five years of remission and recurrence and come up eight weeks shy of the thing she held on for. But there’s no one here to ask. When my dad died, my mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault line in our life—and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I’m 0 for 2 and I don’t get any more pitches to swing at.
    And so it must be time for my friend Vicodin.
    I slip into the kitchen to take a pill, and when I return to the hall, Holland gestures to the front door. “My mom and dad are waiting outside,” she says. “We’d better go.”
    Then I’m piling into the car with them, driving to theplace I’ll never have to step foot in after today, and I’m marching with the rest of the class, I’m sitting down listening to the principal, then he’s calling me to the stage for the final time. My last assignment; then high school will be behind me and college in front. Just one summer in between.
    “Daniel Jon Kellerman, our valedictorian.”
    I walk to the podium, take out my index cards, and look at my classmates in the first several rows. We all look like otters, just a fat sea of otters, with blond hair or brown hair or red hair, with tanned skin or black skin or white skin. They’re not the ones I want to see. There’s only one person I want to see in the audience. I even begged my mom at one point to hold on. Begged her like a little kid would do. A couple months ago when it was clear she was nearing the end, I pleaded, “June’s not that far away. You can do it, Mom.”
    What a shit thing to do. What a shit thing to ask.
    I worked my ass off through high school. I had my nose in all the books; I was not going to let valedictorian slip from my grasp. She knew I had a good shot, knew I was in contention. My son, the valedictorian. I pictured her saying it today, bursting with pride, with joy. It was like this thing I could give her, a last gift to her. But she doesn’t even know I pulled it off because I got the news I was top of the class three days after she became ash. And I’m flesh, and I don’t want to be here on this stage. I want to lie down on a raft, close my eyes, and let the little white pill take me away, float me off into the happy land where I feel no pain. It’s kicking in, and so the words I’m saying, sounds and syllables aboutthis moment, about the future, don’t matter to me, and they don’t matter to all these people out here in the audience. My words don’t change how they see me.
    The orphan.
    The dad was killed in an accident six years ago.
    Then the mom died in April.
    Remember the sister? She’s gone now; she took off for China years ago. Does anyone even hear from her?
    They all think they know me. Because that’s all I am to them—that guy with the shitty luck.
    I glance down at my index cards and do the thing they most want me to do. Because I can be that guy now. I can be mercurial. I can be fickle. I can be the guy who gets away with anything, and for the first time in months—years—I am grateful I have carte blanche to say whatever I want.
    I stop reading. I rip the index cards in half and fling the severed blue remains up in the air.
    “Fuck high school. Fuck everyone. I’m outta here.”
    Let me tell you: You’ve never seen a standing ovation like that before.

Chapter Four
    My mom would have flipped out if she knew what I did. She would have gone ballistic and slapped me upside the head.
    Not literally. She never hit me, obviously. But she would have given me all kinds of stern looks and disappointed glares. I did not raise you to tell your peers to fuck off, Daniel Kellerman.
    She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible.
    “What’s wrong with it?” I asked her.
    “It’s not good enough yet. You have to try harder,” she said, her voice gentle. “You have to try hard at everything you do. That’s all I ask.”
    I rolled my eyes and revised it, and over time her approach wore off on me and I became like her too—wanting to do my best, expecting my best.
    That’s why I can’t face Kate. She knew my mom better than anyone, and Kate probably wants to wallop me right now. Because I did the absolute opposite of what my mom would have expected or wanted. I leave Terra Linda before Kate can find me. I