Now I cut in. “Seventeen is a million questions about love, and searching every book and movie for an answer. Seventeen is being very certain you will be nothing like your parents. It’s a text to a random number who’s known you all along, a lot of texts, actually, usually at three AM.”

Abigail laughs. “Seventeen is a dream we’re all awake for.”

“It’s all these reasons to run away from home, but then Mom makes pie, and actually your favorite socks just came out of the wash, and really there is always tomorrow to flee to your freedom.”

“It’s worrying about not being invited to things like sleepovers and parties and bowling nights and movie dates.” I look at Abigail. I didn’t know she worried about those things.

I pause, then say more seriously, “Seventeen is being very aware of this thing called other people’s eyes and what you look like in them and who you really are when you’re alone at night and your phone just died. Seventeen is a lot of mornings cursing alarm clocks and wanting so much to tell someone something, but no one’s invented the vocabulary for it yet, so it sits in your throat like a bolus of FUUUUUUCKKKK!”

“FUUUUUUCKKKK!” Abigail yells back.

“Seventeen is the suspicion that an emoji understands you better than your own parents. It’s having to write a stupid college essay, when instead of trying to answer fake questions, you could actually be asking real ones.”

The drums wind down and Abigail waves hurriedly at me. I put my face very close to the camera. There’s no way we’re sending this to Evelyn, but it matters even if no one sees it but us. “Seventeen is Cham about to turn eighteen and she’s officially asking the universe what the hell she’s supposed to do. She will donate a boob if she has to, just show her a sign, a flash of brilliance, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It could be a freaking tampon applicator, something so that she knows. Because she wants to know.” I lean in closer so it’s only my blue lips filling the screen. “She’s ready.”

18

Days ’til graduation: 11

FOR MOST OF SENIOR YEAR, I COULDN’T WAIT TO CHARGE OUT the doors of the Gill School and flash the world because I did it. I graduated high school. Now that it’s actually happening, though, it’s less of a tits-out situation and more of a shit-my-plaid-skirt situation. Everyone’s talking about college and gap years and a summer spent backpacking the edge of the freaking universe, but do any of them have a dad who may or may not live through the summer?

The good news is that as long as I don’t think about the end, it’s marvelous. The teachers in all my classes besides English have officially stopped bothering to teach. The window of opportunity to educate has closed, and every senior is standing behind it, smiling and waving. (Okay, some people are making obscene hand gestures. Others are perfecting a good old pants-down-ass-up mooning.)