Rory hands Smith a white dogwood blossom and says, “I got you these. I thought you might like to wear one or something.”
“Is that why you were on the roof this morning?” Shara says. “I was wondering.”
“They’re fresher if you get them off the tree than the ground, okay?” Rory mumbles.
“I love them,” Smith says, grinning as he takes it. “Thank you.”
He spends a minute fussing in the mirror on Rory’s closet door, trying to get the flower and cap to work together with his hair. He’s been growing it out for a month now, and it’s grown fast into short, dense curls.
“Hang on,” Shara says. “I have an idea.”
Smith lets her take his cap from him, and she produces a few hairpins from her dress pocket. She folds the elastic under and passes him the pins, pointing out the most strategic places for him to pin it into his hair.
“There,” she says, plucking up one of the flowers from the desk and tucking it behind his ear.
Smith turns to examine himself in the mirror again. He tilts his head from side to side, and then he catches Shara’s eye over his shoulder in the reflection and grins. She smiles back.
“Needs more flowers,” he concludes.
“More flowers,” Rory repeats with a nod before climbing dutifully out of the window.
He returns with two fresh handfuls of dogwood and crepe myrtle blossoms in white and pale pink, and Smith carefully twists them through his hair until it looks like there’s a garden growing straight out of his scalp. At his request, Chloe smudges a hint of gold eyeliner around the corners of his eyes. By the time they’re done, he looks like a god of the forest in white Air Forces.
Rory stares at him from across the room with wide eyes, like he’s never seen anything quite like him before. None of them have, really. There’s nobody like Smith Parker.
* * *
At the dealership across the highway from Willowgrove, Brooklyn descends on them with a clipboard before Chloe’s even shut the door of Rory’s car behind her.
“Do we all have our caps and gowns?” she asks. “Again, do we all have our caps and gowns? Rory?”
“It’s not even a real graduation, Brooklyn,” Rory grumbles.
“Not without caps and gowns it’s not,” Brooklyn says. It looks like it’s going to be a standoff between an unstoppable force （Brooklyn’s dedication to micromanaging anything that can possibly be micromanaged） and an immovable object （Rory’s refusal to do anything he is told to do, ever） when Smith appears over Rory’s shoulder.
“He has it,” Smith says, cheerfully slapping a folded gown and mortarboard against Rory’s chest. “Forgot it in the car.”
“I’m not wearing it,” Rory says.
“Yes, you are,” Brooklyn argues.
“It looks cute on you,” Smith says.
“Ugh.” Rory rolls his eyes so hard that his whole head goes around in an annoyed circle. “Fine.”
“Good,” Brooklyn says. She spins, cups her hands around her mouth, and yells, “They got theirs!”
Summer, who is standing on top of an ice chest in the middle of the lot with a megaphone in one hand, says through the crackly speaker, “Thanks, Brooklyn, but you really don’t have to take this job so seriously.”
“Agree to disagree!” Brooklyn yells.
Georgia’s standing next to Summer’s ice chest with a tank of helium. Summer leans over and holds the megaphone in front of Georgia’s mouth.
“Hey, Chloe,” she says into it.
Brooklyn puts them to work. Most of the cars have been moved to the back lot to make room for a small stage and a single mic stand, the former on loan from Summer’s parents’ church and the latter from Rory’s A?V collection. Ace and Smith and all the other jocks are tasked with the manual labor of setting up chairs and tables, while Ash and the art club kids hang up signs and Benjy directs some of the choir contingent in assembling a balloon arch.
Across the two-lane highway, the rest of the class of ’22 starts pulling into the student lot, posing for pictures outside the auditorium in their caps and gowns. A few of them stop to stare over at the dealership, where a pink-haired Shara is on Smith’s shoulders, hanging a sign that says BLESSED ARE THE FRUITS with FRUITS in glitter glue. That’s got to be one of Benjy’s.
This is part of it, after all. There will always be people who like Willowgrove the way it is. The Mackenzies and Emma Graces and Dixons, the Drew Taylors, but also the quiet kids who feel safe there. Some of them have been in so deep for so long, they’ll always be happier like this. Some of them are too scared, or didn’t want to have that conversation with their parents. Some of them will reconcile these two sides of the highway in their hearts years from now.