Graduate

My mother-in-law is visiting for Gavin’s high school graduation. I got home from work on Friday to find takeout on the table and the boy in the shower after a day at rehearsal. We sat down to wait for him and chat a bit, and when Gavin walked in behind her, I did a double-take and burst out laughing, because apparently the school had decided to hold rehearsal out on the football field for four hours and give all the graduating seniors mask-shaped sunburns just in time for one of the biggest and most photographed events of their lives. I went into the worst kind of sudden hysterical laughter - doubled over, incoherent, banging the table -  before struggling to get my shit together and asking, through tears, “so... it was an overdose?” Mother-in-law had been in the middle of describing the circumstances of her friend’s daughter’s death.

And that is why she doesn’t like to talk with me.

But really 

It was a good ceremony, even though the pandemic protocols required us to drop off our senior at the gym and wait in our cars to be escorted to the field, so I wasn’t on hand to get in a fight with the principal when she tried to stop Gavin from walking because his jeans weren’t dark enough and his tie had tiny skulls on it. One of the security guards ran next door to his house and lent Gavin a pair of dress pants, which he pulled on right over his jeans because his legs are pool noodles. The principal had to yell at some girls about wearing white sneakers instead of white high-heeled sandals, so the tie slipped by.

SKULLS OH NOES

Having big feelings about this thing.