The restaurant specialized in a certain kind of quiet that cost money. Linen fell to the floor without a wrinkle. Flatware sat aligned like coordinates on a grid.
Someone had decided the music should sound like memory—brushed drums, a piano that never raised its voice.
Outside the high windows the city had started its evening choreography: cabs sluicing along the curb, a delivery truck idling, a siren far enough away to register only as a thread of attention. The hostess had said congratulations twice, and both times my mother answered for me, her smile all porcelain and ownership.
I still had the gown on because we came straight from campus.
The cloth was surprisingly soft for something so ceremonial; the cap lay beside me on the banquette, tassel coiled like a comma waiting for its clause. The diploma rested in my hands inside its leather folder.
People who have never held one imagine weight as metaphor; it isn’t.
It sat in my palms with the density of everything I had traded for it: late bus rides, cafeteria coffee, lab air at 2:13 a.m., code that kept rewriting itself in the back of my mind while I brushed my teeth, loans with interest rates I could recite the way other people recite song lyrics from high school. The embossing caught against my thumb each time I moved.
My father arrived with a leather portfolio tucked under his arm. He carried it like it belonged to him because he carried everything that way.
He didn’t ask how the ceremony had gone or if the Dean mispronounced my name.
He didn’t sit before speaking. He signaled for still water in that clipped gesture of his—the one that used to make my brother sit up straighter—which in our family functioned like a doorbell.
The waiter appeared. The performance began.
“Olivia,” he said, lowering the portfolio to the linen and tapping it once as if to awake the contents.
“We’ll get this done so we can enjoy dinner.”
My mother placed a hand—nails pale, pearls precise—on my sister’s shoulder.
Kate looked like a magazine advertisement for a life that always arrives on time: hair smooth, smile calibrated. The last time she had smiled that way, an app had been born that promised to categorize closets and monetize taste, and USD 200,000 had slid from my parents’ accounts toward servers and sponsored posts and a warehouse of unsold ideas. When I asked how the burn would be managed, my father told me to stop using words like burn.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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