Adam had always been Clare’s best friend, but the older they got, and the more amazing Adam became, the more she had begun to wonder why herself. She watched him, in that spotlight, lean into the keys and away again, the music flowing from him, through his hands, and touching every person in the room.

He was beautiful, mesmerizing. She already missed him and felt the impending loss of him rising up like a claw in her throat. She was going to lose him. The best thing she’d ever known, the person she loved most in the whole world—he was leaving. She was staying. Everyone here knew it—but no one but her felt the excruciating pain of it. The reality of it was a weight on her heart, the pressure building, squeezing harder every day that brought them closer to their graduation day.

What would she be without him? Who? A handful of their friends were staying in town, working for family businesses or picking up shifts at the Exxon. Some would be heading to Laramie to go to the University of Wyoming. A couple were going to Colorado for school. It felt to Clare like being left behind, left alone.

She would be forgotten, her and her amazing typing skills, sitting at a secondhand metal desk out on Old Round Road taking calls at Carter’s Moving and Storage. She could have done better in school, easily—she just didn’t do the work. Or care to, except now it mattered. Now, four years too late, every stupid assignment, quiz, test she’d half-assed her way through—it all mattered. She half-assed her way right into a dead-end job she already didn’t want.

Onstage Adam began playing a crowd favorite, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” When they heard the familiar start, a few people clapped before they were shushed back into silence. Most of the people in this room hadn’t heard Adam play since they saw him on this exact same stage last year. Clare and Adam had grown up less than a block away from each other; she’d heard him play almost every day of their entire lives together. Sitting on the sagging couch in his parents’ front room, she’d read, or sometimes write in her journals, and Adam would practice the piano before his parents got home from work. None of that would be happening anymore. It was all coming to an end.

Three rows in front of her, Heather Roberts made an act of sighing and placing her hand over her heart as she tilted her head to the side. Winnie smiled and nudged her friend before whispering something in Heather’s ear that made her turn, bite her bottom lip, and grin.