The Bus to Graduation
My parents made me take the bus to my graduation while buying my sister a Tesla. My name is Daisy Parker. I’m 23 years old.
The morning of my college graduation, I stood at the bus stop in my cap and gown.
The scratchy fabric of the gown felt heavy on my shoulders, and the cheap cardboard mortarboard kept slipping down my forehead no matter how many times I adjusted the elastic band. It was a bright, sunny day in Nashville, the kind of day that’s supposed to feel full of promise and new beginnings.
But for me, standing alone on that corner with my tassel swinging in the warm breeze, it just felt empty. Down the street, in the driveway of our family home, a different ceremony was taking place—one that apparently mattered more.
My parents, Lydia and Charles, were handing my younger sister, Amber, the keys to a brand-new pearl white Tesla.
Its chrome handles gleamed in the morning sun like jewelry. A giant red bow was perched on its hood, looking ridiculous and perfect all at once, the kind of bow you see in car commercials on Christmas morning. My mother cried.
They were big, happy tears that streamed down her carefully made-up face as she hugged Amber tightly, rocking her back and forth like she was still a little girl.
“Oh, my baby,” she whispered, loud enough for me to hear from the sidewalk fifty feet away. “You deserve the world.
You deserve everything.”
My father beamed, his chest puffed out with pride like a peacock displaying its feathers. He clapped Amber on the back with one hand, his expensive Rolex catching the light, creating little prisms that danced across the Tesla’s pristine paint job.
“The safest car on the road for our girl,” he announced to no one in particular, his voice carrying that booming quality he used when he wanted everyone within earshot to know he was successful.
“Nothing but the best for our princess.”
Amber squealed, jumping up and down in her designer sundress—not a graduation gown, just a regular sundress that probably cost more than my entire graduation outfit combined. Her senior year of high school had just ended three days ago. Mine, the one I’d worked three jobs to get through, was culminating in a ceremony that would begin in exactly two hours and forty-three minutes, a forty-five-minute bus ride away.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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