"Grandma Ida would've liked you being a paramedic," I said.
"Grandma Ida would've told me to stand up straight and stop mumbling," Grant said. "And then she'd have bought me a stethoscope." He was quiet for a moment. "Jo. Can I ask you something weird? At dinner, when Mom said Grandma never did that for—and then she stopped. Do you know who she meant?"
"No," I said. "Do you?"
"I think she meant herself," Grant said. "I just don't know what that means."
* * *
I submitted my deferral request on May fourteenth, at 11:40 p.m., at Mrs. Greer's kitchen table, with Tasha sitting next to me holding my left hand because my right hand needed to work the trackpad. Mr. Hale emailed back at 7:02 the next morning. He must have been sitting there waiting. Deferral approved. Your place in the Class of 2032 is secure. I've made a note in your file. Go do something useful with the year, Josephine, and call me when you're ready.
I printed it out. I'm the kind of person who prints things out.
* * *
Graduation was at McKenzie Arena on the UTC campus, on a Thursday night in late May, four hundred and some of us in maroon gowns in folding chairs on the floor, and the families up in the stands with balloons and air horns and signs.
I wasn't valedictorian. I was fourth. I didn't give a speech. I mention it because people always want the girl in this kind of story to give a speech, and I want to be clear that I just walked across a stage, and a vice principal mispronounced my middle name, which is Idabelle, after my grandmother, and I shook a hand and took a cardboard tube with nothing in it and walked off the other side.
But I heard them. Over everything. Over the air horns. Grant, from section 112, a voice like he was calling a play: "THAT'S MY SISTER. JOSIE CALDER. THAT'S MY SISTER." And Tasha's whole family, three rows up from him, Mrs. Greer in a sunflower dress, waving a poster board that said WE ARE SO PROUD OF YOU JOSIE in glitter letters that Tasha's little brother had clearly done most of.
And, two sections over, my parents. My mother standing up. My father sitting with his arms crossed. My mother wasn't yelling. She was just standing there with her hands pressed together under her chin, the way she stood in church during the prayer for the sick.
Afterward, in the crush on the concourse, she found me. She'd always been good at finding me in crowds. When I was little I used to think she could see the top of my head from anywhere.