He was not, technically, supposed to be valedictorian. Meridian Valley wasn't the kind of school that produced them from families like his. His mother, Denise Cross, worked the overnight stocking shift at a grocery distribution warehouse forty minutes away and picked up weekend shifts cleaning offices downtown, and there had been more than one week during Julian's junior year when the electricity in their apartment had run on a countdown clock he wasn't supposed to know about but did anyway, because he was the one who checked the mail.
He had also, in the same four years, taken five AP courses, run varsity cross country, tutored middle schoolers on Tuesdays and Thursdays for eleven dollars an hour that went straight into a coffee can labeled COLLEGE, and graduated with a 4.6 weighted GPA that put him a full tenth of a point ahead of the school's next closest contender — a sophisticated, sharp-minded, entirely likable girl named Madison Radcliffe, whose last name happened to be attached to a two-million-dollar science wing that had broken ground behind the gymnasium eighteen months earlier.
Nobody had said that part out loud. Nobody needed to.
What people had said — what Whitfield had actually said, three weeks before graduation, in a closed-door meeting Julian wasn't in but heard about within twenty-four hours because Meridian Valley had exactly one guidance counselor who actually cared about students and she couldn't keep her mouth shut when something made her sick to her stomach — was that "a few concerned families" felt the valedictorian address should "reflect the values of the broader school community." That certain families had questions about whether Julian's "background" made him "the right face" for the ceremony that would be livestreamed to parents, alumni, and — not incidentally — several members of the Radcliffe Family Foundation board.
Julian had heard all of it. He'd gone home that night, sat at the kitchen table across from his mother, who was eating cold leftover rice with one hand and correcting a stack of invoices with the other because she also did freelance bookkeeping on the side, and he had not cried either. He had simply opened his laptop and started writing.
He wrote two speeches.