The first Sunday in June was graduation. It was blisteringly hot out and three hundred plus grads herded into the middle of the football field. The PA system sucked, so all the speeches were accompanied by Sonic Youth–esque feedback and distortion. I skittered across the stage to the most tepid of perfunctory applause, or tepfunctory applause: the passionless, percolatory clapping of damp, sweaty hands by a crowd pummeled numb and nearly drooling from pomp-and-circumstance boredom. After the tossing of mortarboards, kids who wouldn’t deign speak to me in the hallways slapped my back or chucked my shoulder and wished me luck in college, telling me that I would do great, would be a big success. I didn’t run into Cayla to wish her the best, but that walking troglodytic row of exclamation points, Ian, shouted, “Artie the one-man partyyyyyy!” across the width of the field, and that toolbag sociopath-without-the-charm Eddie Patrick, true to his inveterate dickishness, said, “Have fun at dead-people school,” and as usual, the worst part, the one that made me hate myself almost as much as him, was his self-satisfied laugh at the punchline (me) to the joke that would never get old. I wish I could write that I said “Fuck you” through gritted teeth to everyone who deserved it and even those who might not have, but the best I can do is to express that sentiment in writing now.

Maybe the above paragraph is an ungenerous memory or reflects me being ungenerous in interpreting the memory for you. Or one more: I’m filling a yawning gap in memory with a narrative curated to what I know or believe to be true now.

* * *

Time continued to speed up on me (as it does), and five days later, I’d somehow arrived at the early evening before my back surgery. Dad was out picking up pizza, a last-meal kind of gesture, and Mom was in her bedroom packing. My parents planned to spend the next three days at a hotel near the hospital. I’d packed a bag earlier, but Mom went through and took most of the stuff out, somberly saying the hospital requested I not bring more than I needed and I wouldn’t need more than one set of clothes to change into for when I was discharged. Not getting it, I mumbled something about having to wear the same stupid T-shirt for my entire weeklong stay. Mom patted my shoulder, lightly, and said that I’d be in hospital garb the whole time. That was an “Oh” moment. After months of simultaneously obsessing on the abstract concept of surgery and choosing not to think about the surgery itself, my sagging, deflated knapsack was a sting of the soon-to-be-reality I was not in the least prepared for.

The phone rang, the kind of ring that made everything else stop, go quiet. I shouted upstairs, “Don’t answer it, Mom!”