She turns to her left, to Shara, who’s looking at her like she did on the bow of that sailboat, like the logic of the world all comes down to Chloe being there and she’d be disappointed to see anyone else.
“Make it a good one,” Shara says, and she pushes Chloe to her feet.
From the makeshift stage, Chloe can see it all. April and Jake with their feet up on the chairs in front of them, Brooklyn fussing with the tassel on her cap, Ash’s glue-and-glitter-decorated mortarboard flashing in the sun, Summer fanning herself with a paper plate, Smith’s and Rory’s shoulders pressed together in the front row, the TV cameras, her moms huddled by the news vans with Summer’s parents.
She reaches into the neck of her gown and pulls a sweaty sheet of loose-leaf paper out of her bra. Last night, around midnight, she finally figured out what she wanted to say and scribbled it down in the nearest notebook she could find.
“Hi, guys,” she says into the mic. “I’m Chloe, obviously. Um. I’ve imagined this moment a lot. Pretty much every day, actually. I don’t even know how many drafts of this speech I’ve written, but I ended up scrapping them all. None of the old versions were right, because they were written for a different place with different people in it.
“A lot of those drafts were angry or had a lot of curse words or were just kind of mean, which I’m not really sorry for, because Willowgrove can be pretty mean, so I think it’s fair. But I’ve learned more about Willowgrove in the past month than I have in the past four years, and that’s not really the speech I want to make anymore.
“When I first moved to False Beach, I was pretty sure I was smarter and better than anyone in Alabama. I found my friends, and I decided those were the only people at Willowgrove worth my time. I was convinced that I knew, with absolute certainty, who did and did not deserve a chance. But then, about a month ago, someone kissed me.”
She looks out at the crowd, to where Shara’s smiling a soft smile under the Alabama sun. She sent Shara the speech last night for her notes, so she already knows most of what Chloe’s going to say. She even ghostwrote a line or two.
“It’s a long story—like, really long—but the short version is, that kiss brought people into my life who I’d never even spoken to before, and I discovered we had more in common than I ever would have guessed. I learned that there are jocks who love theater and stoners who know a lot more about the world than I do. I learned that a lot of us—a lot more than I thought—are doing whatever it takes to survive in a place that doesn’t feel like it wants us. I learned that survival is heavy on so many of us. And on a personal level, I realized I’d gotten so used to that weight, I stopped noticing how much of myself I’d dedicated to carrying it.
“A lot of high school is about figuring out what matters to you and what doesn’t. For some of us, popularity matters. For others, it’s grades or dating or extracurriculars or our parents’ opinions or all of the above. Sometimes, it’s a question of whether anything that happens in these four years matters at all. And it does, but not in the way a lot of people think.
“High school matters because it shapes how we see the world when we enter it. We carry the hurt with us, the confirmed fears, the insecurities people used against us. But we also carry the moment when someone gave us a chance, even though they didn’t have to.”
She glances up at Georgia.
“The moment we watched a friend make a choice that we didn’t understand at first because they’re brave in a different way.”
She finds Mr. Truman in the crowd, sweating rings in his dress shirt.
“The moment a teacher told us they believed in us.”
Benjy and Ash both smile back when she looks at them.
“The moment we told someone who we are and they accepted us without question.”
In the front row, Smith and Rory are easy to find.
“The moment we fell in love for the first time.”
She drops her eyes back to her paper.
“Most of the things we’re feeling right now are things we’re feeling for the first time. We’re learning what it means to feel them. What we can mean to one another. Of course that matters. And this, here, right now—even if nothing changes, even if all we can do today is prove that we exist, and that we’re not alone—I think it matters a whole fucking lot.”
She flips the page over. Almost done.
She takes one last look out at the crowd, and she thinks that this can be what it means—even only in part—to be from Alabama.