Back for the Summer

Backflash

Nicole was the first girl. 

Drowned, just like the others, but she seemed to be the one who suffered the least out of all of them. That, or she just fought less than the other girls. My mom always said that both options were equally viable. 

I was the one that found her face down in the bathtub,

Even though I didn't know it at the time, my childhood had ended in a split second. My world shifted from slightly boring, but safe and sound to a complete and utter nightmare overnight. Although I was fifteen, I was treated like a fragile five-year-old but at the same time had to deal with more police investigation and media harassment than most adults ever have to in a lifetime. 

Now I hardly thought about her. Not because I purposely forgot her, but time had finally taken its course and life had gone on. The memory of all the girls, especially Nicole's, had been separated by both time and distance since I had moved halfway across the country. Every once in awhile, though, my memory got jolted once again. I would see a girl passing by on the street that looked just like her or I spotted a pair of ridiculous leggings that reminded me of the ones that she used to wear. 

This time it was a Facebook memory. A picture of us and Kelli Wick, a girl in the grade ahead of us, playing in the high school band during graduation while we were freshmen. I was so caught off guard by the memory that I found myself staring at it splayed across my slightly cracked phone screen, not sure what to make of it. How eerie was it that this picture would show up just hours before I'm supposed to walk across the stage for my college graduation? 

"What are you looking at?" My mom asked, drawing me back to the present. 

"Sorry," I quickly apologized. "You know my generation and our phones." 

She smiled back knowingly from the front seat like she knew that there was more to the story, but she wasn't going to push it but she was there if I wanted to talk. That's one of the endearing qualities about my mom- she knows when to back off and when you might need a little push. As much as I tried to practice this same thing, I never quite got a hold of it- I either pushed too hard or not hard enough. Maybe it was just a trait that she hadn't passed along to me or maybe it came with experience and age. 

"It's not just your generation," she muttered. "I think your father would rather lose his hand than his phone. Even better- he would replace his hand with his phone." 

The San Francisco traffic was always bad, but add graduation into the mix and it was nearly gridlocked. We might need some divine intervention in order to find parking within even a mile of graduation. My dad jerked the car to the left as a scooter weaved between traffic and grumbled to himself about the 'goddamn traffic' in big cities. I reminded him that civilization and culture come at a cost. 

Speaking of phones, Grace had been glued to her's since she got here. But her generation (even though she and I were born 8 years apart, we were technically different generations- me at the tail end of the millennials and her solidly placed in Gen X) was good about multitasking so she wasn't really ignoring us so much as paying attention to more than us. I couldn't resist the urge to poke her, though, just so that she would look up at me. I hadn't seen her since our family trip to New York at Christmas and I swore she grew at least two inches. Now that I saw her and how much she had grown in just five months, I was finally starting to feel more confident in my decision to return home for the summer.

"What?" She asked, feigning irritation. 

"You're in one of the greatest cities in the world," I told her. "At least glance around for two seconds." 

She rolled her eyes. "You're starting to sound just like mom." 

At her age that was an insult. Now, while Grace didn't mean it as a compliment, it wasn't exactly an insult to me anymore. There were some things that I did or said that I know mom passed along to me that made me cringe, but there were other qualities that were starting to grow on me now that I wasn't a teenager. 

Now we were stopped in a spot where you could spot the Golden Gate Bridge gleaming from an unusually sunny day for what we so lovingly called Fog City, letting the iconic bridge live up to its name. 

I wasn't ready to leave.

~~~~~~*******~~~~~~

One of the tough things about going to college in a big city was the long graduation. Graduation at Midtown High School lasted about forty minutes while graduation here at Berkley was running into two hours just to call my name and Lovelace wasn't even halfway through the alphabet. 

"Lylah Lovelace," the commentator announced, his voice much more monotonous now than the excitement he'd displayed until the C's came around. 

Finally, I thought. Even though graduation was supposedly one of the most 'magical' moments of your life, you had to wait an hour and a half for not even thirty seconds of glory. And yes, those seconds are glorious, but waiting for them? Not so much. 

Megan's inhumanly loud cheer came from somewhere in the line behind me. She had warned us all that she was going to do that for every single one. It still threw me off guard though. I smiled toward the camera, knowing that she would be watching for my reaction. Friends like Megan were the ones that you knew you'd stay in touch with for the rest of your lives no matter where you ended up. Those were the hardest friends to leave. 

As I walked forward to receive my diploma, I felt like my stomach my flip inside out right then and there from the confusing muddle of chemicals that my mixed emotions were pumping through my bloodstream. This was it. It took all my strength to move my tassel from one side to the other right after I shook the Dean's hand (who must really want some hand sanitizer after shaking 500+ hands).

I looked at the stands and by chance, I spotted my family all waving. It had been a close call, but my mom's parents had also made it as well as my dad's brother. My dad's father had passed a couple of years ago and his mom was in a nursing home in Toledo and it was nearly impossible to take her out for a day let alone halfway across the country. My brother was originally supposed to come but claimed he had 'work' at the last minute. They all violently waved to me when they somehow sensed that I was looking at them. Caught up in the moment, I had to remind me to keep walking back to my seat so I didn't create a human dam. 

Nicole and the other girls were never going to experience this. Their parents were never going to either. And here I was. 

Maybe the universe threw that memory my way to remind me how lucky I was.