This was the worst day ever

A graduation story

Sunday, June 15th, in Hanover, New Hampshire. It’s the first hot day I can remember in months, the air sticking between my lacy white Free People set. My feet hurt from the sparkly high-heels I’m wearing and my eyes are puffy and exhausted from the lack of sleep. I shuffle into the library and pick up my Dartmouth diploma. Say hi and bye and see you never to the kid I made out with in a frat basement my freshman fall, give a half-hug to red-headed Charlie. Thousands of people are milling around on the green. Picture, picture, another picture. I’m ready to kill the moms who keep arranging us and rearranging us, capturing our feigned smiles. I hold my cobra-headed cane over my head one more time and then Fuck. I can’t be here.

“Wanna swim?” Kalyn asks. She’s my friend whose dad almost married my mom, the closest thing I have to a blood-related sister. I nod. It’s exactly what I need.

“Watch my shoes,” I say to my mother. She is wearing a paisley printed blue dress and she’s beautiful. All weekend, people have been telling me I look like her. If only.

I link one arm with Kalyn and the other with Emma, our half-bleached blonde friend. I am much taller than both of them and our strides are uneven. We run across the green pass Sandra Oh, our commencement speaker, pass the hoard of graduates who are just like us: terrified. My feet strike against the familiar well paved pavement and crunch the occasional pebble. Come-on, come-on, come-on. I am eighteen again. Nineteen again. Twenty-one and with a boy who says thank you every time I tell him I love him.

“My mom said I don’t have time to dip because I have brunch with my grandparents but you know what? Fuck it. It’s my brunch,” Emma says. I laugh. I call Kalyn’s brother Cutter because Kalyn isn’t actually beside us, she’s busy taking pictures with someone who I am convinced she’s in love with. But I am in love with Kalyn, albeit entirely platonically, and right now, I want her by my side.

Kalyn materializes, winded, keeping up with our hurried pace. “You didn’t wait for me,” she says, “and it was my idea.”

Emma and I exchange a look, like it was our idea too, like throwing our naked bodies into the Connecticut River was the only proper way to say goodbye. “I’m sorry,” Emma says. I agree.

Yeah, okay. Okay, okay okay.

We run past 8 School, the house I always wanted to live in, where bands would play shows and I would watch the 6’8” boy with the long red hair who screamed into oblivion on his bass. Pass 5 Maple, the house I lived in for a year, the house I grew up in with Kira and Zanna and Catie. I wanted so badly to be there forever. Pass the familiar wandering lady with silver hair muttering to herself. I’ll never see her again. We pass Nathan’s Garden, built to honor the eleven-year-old boy who will always be eleven because he is dead and I am twenty-two and I don’t know if I will stay this way forever. I broke up with my boyfriend twice in that garden. I told my mother I loved her in that garden. I once kissed a girl on dew-wet grass in that garden. We wiggle our bodies through the construction, pass the man in the yellow hard hat who asks me how the temperature is in that water every day. Enter the gate to Mink Brook, like we’ve done so many times before, down the haphazard wooden stairs, my feet raw against the pine needles, my body aching. We reach the river and peel our stained white dresses off our bodies.

“I think I’m going to be late,” Emma says.

“That’s okay. Worse things happen to better people every day,” I say. “Except for today. This is the worst thing and we are the best people.”

Kalyn sobs. Then her and Emma jump off the mud encrusted bank and I follow. We wade into the now warm Connecticut river. I want to sleep and I want to stay awake here forever. Our bodies are naked and there is a man watching us in the Pantoon boat across the river and there is a family canoeing and we don’t care. We wade until the water reaches our hips. Our tears engrave our bodies.

“Okay, I’m going to baptize myself now,” Kalyn says. Arms outstretched, she falls backwards into the water. Emma and I follow suit.

We emerge sobbing.

“I’ll never live in a place with this much water again,” I say. Emma nods. Kalyn holds her breasts and keels over.

“I’ll never have fun again,” she says. “I didn’t have fun before Dartmouth.” We all nod. We all agree. This is the place where we learned how to have fun. How could we ever recreate it? I remember what Kalyn told me yesterday, that my dad said she’d forever be chasing this feeling. I wonder if he meant it.

We stand in the water until Emma says she has to go. Kalyn and I take a little more time but not much. We exit both hurried and slow. I want my body to melt into this New Hampshire air. Emma leaves and we stay.

Two clumsy bulldogs come running down the steps, their paws muddy. One is younger and loose-skinned and the other is aging, like we are. The younger one steps all over Kalyn’s dress, playing with the denim she strung through it to make it fit her body. He takes her white lace shoe in his puppy teeth. She laughs in her same, high pitched way that exists, imprinted, in my brain. I remember what I heard at the funeral service we attended two weeks ago, when a girl gave a eulogy for her best friend, and said that nothing they could ever do together would be lame or weird as long as they liked it.

The keepers of the bulldogs follow and I am still naked, in my skin-tonned slip and clipping Emma’s bra to my small chest. Kalyn is slipping her dress over her head.

“Hi,” the woman says. “Sorry about them.”

Kalyn shakes her head. “No, don’t worry.”

I smile. The woman grimaces. She has round blue eyes and she threads Kalyn’s shoes through her dog's teeth, freeing them at last. “What’s with the canes?”

She’s looking at our staffs leaning against the mud bank. One with the Osiris head, one with the Cobra, both symbolizing the spaces we inhabited during our last two years at Dartmouth. “They’re for secret societies,” Kalyn says.

“I’m in Cobra, she’s in Orsis,” I say. I want to tell her about the times I spent in the red-walled room, singing with my sisters, this is so long and not farewell.

“Oh, I see. Did you graduate today?” the woman asks. Her bespectacled husband stands a few feet behind her. He readjusts his hat.

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, congratulations!” she exclaims.

“I don’t know why everyone keeps saying that,” Kalyn points at her and sobs. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m taking this out on you.”

“Trust me, it’s wonderful you feel this way,” the woman responds. She’s beautiful, too, her wrinkles around her eyes displaying a life-time in the sun. “You will keep coming back here.”

I want to believe her. I want to believe that I’ll keep coming back to this water, to keep baptizing myself. Yesterday, I came here with my father, an ‘86. He told me it was the best part of his day. Kalyn is kneeling on the ground, her face in the shoe-thieving puppies’s skin. “They’re therapy dogs,” the woman says. “We’re training him.”

“I worked in alumni relations for twenty-five years,” the man finally says. “You have something special.”

The woman continues. “We live on Sargent Street, in the big house with the two-bull dogs outside. We call it the bull-dog house. We have an airbnb in the back of the house that alums stay in every time there is a reunion or a homecoming.”

I know that house. I know that house because it exists on the street with the beautiful colorful houses, the street I walk down when I want to imagine all of the possible iterations of my life. There’s the blue one and the yellow one and the pink one. And in each house, I imagine the inner lives, smiling parents and smiling children.

“That’s wonderful,” Kalyn replies.

“You two are welcome to stay there anytime. And if there isn’t room in the airbnb, just stay in our daughter’s empty room.” The woman says this earnestly, like she really means it.

“Thank you.” I sob. I mean it, too. I realize I don’t even know her name.

Kalyn and I are clothed now. We walk back up the hill, pass the construction work, pass Sargent Street. We walk to our no-longer home, on 17 South Park Street, where we’ve lived for the past year and where students will continue to live for many more years. We part ways, exchange love-yous. Waiting for us is the world.

Me and Kalyn in Mink Brook that day. As seen on Emma’s iPhone.