Students climbed onto the benches along the wall. A girl in the front row was screaming - not words, just sound, the pure noise of a human being who had just watched something she would tell her grandchildren about. The young teacher on the mezzanine was pounding the railing with the flat of his hand.
The chemistry teacher had turned away from the railing entirely and was wiping his face with a handkerchief he had pulled from his breast pocket. Trevor Klein, second chair in the jazz band, was on his knees - actually on his knees on the marble floor - both hands over his mouth, laughing and crying at the same time.
Brendan, the lacrosse captain who had shoved Caleb into a locker 2 months ago, pushed through the crowd to get closer. His face was wrecked. He was clapping so hard his palms had gone red.
And Harold Whitaker was not moving.
The color left his face in stages. The first thing to go was the flush of anger in his cheeks. That drained out of him in the first 2 seconds of the silence, before the applause ever started.
The second thing to go was the set of his jaw, the tight, controlled line of the man who was always about to win. That softened into something slack and unfamiliar.
The third thing to go was the most important thing, the thing he had worn for 58 years: the certainty in his eyes that he was the most important person in any room he walked into.
That left him last. It left him slowly. And when it was gone, he looked for a moment like a man who had walked into the wrong building.
He tried to speak. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. He tried again.
Beside him, the senior assistant dean, a woman named Laura Hastings who had worked under him for 6 years, leaned in and spoke without moving her lips.
"Harold, the parent in the red coat is still recording. It's already uploading."
He did not respond. He was not there.
Diane Kessler, the senator's advance coordinator, was still speaking into her cuff. Her voice had dropped to a murmur. Whatever she was saying, the voice on the other end was no longer telling her to stand by.
A side door opened at the east end of the atrium.
Senator Elaine Whitmore walked in. She was 67 years old, a two-term United States senator from Massachusetts and the daughter of Reginald Whitmore, the jazz pianist who had played the Savoy Ballroom in 1952 and died the year she was elected to her first office.
She was wearing a navy coat and low heels. She had been standing behind the marble column at the east entrance for the last 3 1/2 minutes of Caleb's performance because Diane Kessler had radioed her the moment she understood what was happening in this room.