Dana looked at the pieces of her own name.
Renee dug in her purse. She had carried a roll of green floral tape in it for twenty years, the waxy stretchy kind you wrap stems with, because you never knew when a boutonniere would come apart at somebody's wedding. She laid the pieces on the dashboard and fitted them together, RESERVED, DANA KESSLER, MOTHER OF THE VALEDICTORIAN, with the jagged tear running through the middle of MOTHER like a crack in ice, and she wrapped the floral tape across the back in three long strips, pressing it with her thumb until it held. It was ugly. It was green and crooked and still damp. It held.
She put it in Dana's hands.
"... please welcome," said the radio, "Nora Lindqvist."
Applause came out of the dashboard speaker, roaring and tinny. Dana closed her hand on the card. Then she opened the door of the truck and got out into the rain, and Renee got out the other side, and they ran.
* * *
The podium was taller than it had looked from the chair. The microphone had been set for Dr. Halvorsen, who was six feet, and Nora had to bend it down, and it shrieked once, the way microphones in gymnasiums have shrieked since the invention of gymnasiums, and two thousand people winced and laughed, and that helped a little.
She laid the papers flat. She looked down at them and saw that the river speech was on top. She had not decided that. Her hands had.
All right, she thought. All right. That's the answer, then.
She looked out. You are told, in debate, to find three faces in the audience, left, center, right, and speak to them as if they were the only people there. She found Coach Okafor on the left, arms folded. She found Jess in the center, giving her a face that said, very clearly, do not do anything insane. On the right she found her own family, because she could not help finding them.
Her grandmother in the navy coat, very upright. Uncle Pete, who had gotten a haircut for this, which was so moving she had to look away from it. Her father in the first chair, with his hands on his knees and his face the color of putty. And beside him, two empty chairs.