The first speech was the one Dr. Halvorsen had approved in May. It was good. It was about the river bar at the mouth of the Columbia, the Graveyard of the Pacific, two thousand shipwrecks, and about the bar pilots like her father who went out in all weather to bring ships across it, and how leaving home was like crossing a bar: you needed someone who knew the water to get you over. It had a joke about the sea lions and a quote from Lewis and Clark. People would laugh at the right places. Her grandmother would cry. It would be fine.
The second speech she had written at three in the morning a week ago, in one sitting, on the floor of her room, after a dream she couldn't remember except that her mother had been in it, standing at the bottom of the Astoria Column holding a balsa wood glider, the kind you bought for a dollar in the little gift shop and threw from the top and watched loop down over the trees. Dana used to take her there when she was small. That was one of the only clear memories Nora had of her: the hundred and sixty-four steps of the spiral staircase, her mother counting them out loud behind her, and at the top the wind, and the whole world spread out below, the river and the bridge and the ocean, and her mother's hand on her back saying, Throw it hard, baby. They always come down. Just throw it hard.
The second speech began: My mother did not abandon me.
It went on from there. It said the words Coffee Creek. It said seventy months. It said that she had been lied to for ten years by the people she loved most, and that the town had let it happen, that half the people sitting in this gymnasium had known where Dana Lindqvist was and had looked at a seven-year-old girl in the grocery store and said nothing. It was the truest thing she had ever written. It was also, she knew, a bomb. She did not know yet whether she was going to throw it.
An hour ago she had been almost sure she wouldn't. An hour ago she had walked out to the gym to see the front row with all six names on it, just to look at it, just to see the word MOTHER on a card, and she had seen Renee peel it off the chair as carefully as a Band-Aid and tear it in half.
Now she didn't know anything.
"Hey." Jess touched her elbow. "Whatever you're doing up there, you know I'm with you, right?"
"I know."
"Even if it's insane."
"I know, Jess."
The band started. You could hear it through the cinder-block wall, the first long notes of Pomp and Circumstance, slightly flat, the way it was flat at every high school graduation in America. Mr. Abernathy waved the honors students forward. Nora folded both speeches together, so that she could not have told you by feel which one was on top, and walked out into the light.