Lucas did not remember marching to the foot of the stage. He remembered standing there, third in line, the two midshipmen candidates ahead of him going up one after the other, his hands at his sides, the sun on the white of his uniform so bright it hurt to look down at himself. He could see the front row from here without turning his head. He could see his mother, in blue, with the silver camera already up. He could see his father beside her.
His father was crying.
Not the way men cried in movies, one dignified tear. His father was sitting there in the front row in his olive shirt with his face wet and red and his mouth working, and he'd let go of Lucas's mother's hand and was dragging his right forearm across his eyes like a little boy, the rolled sleeve, the trident flashing on the inside of his arm, again, and again, and he did not seem to know or care that anybody could see him.
"Lucas Michael Chardi."
The baritone rolled out over the lawn and Lucas went up the steps.
He would remember the walk across the stage for the rest of his life. The admiral waiting at the podium with the blue diploma cover in his left hand and his right already half extended, the polite fixed smile of a man who has shaken a hundred hands that morning and has a hundred more to go. Lucas came to a halt in front of him exactly as he'd been drilled, and squared his shoulders, and lifted his own hand.
The admiral wasn't looking at him.
The admiral was looking past him, past his shoulder, down off the stage, toward the front row. And as Lucas watched, the smile went off his face like a light switched off. It didn't fade. It simply stopped. His hand, extended, stopped too, an inch from Lucas's, and stayed there in the air.
Lucas waited. One second. Two. On the far side of the stage the commanding officer of the school, a captain, had begun to frown. The announcer's baritone had fallen silent. The band, sensing something, faltered and trailed off in the middle of a bar.
Rear Admiral Thomas Reyes set the diploma cover down very carefully on the corner of the podium. He looked at Lucas for one instant, a strange look, searching, as if he were trying to work out a very long sum. Then he stepped around him, and walked to the edge of the stage, and went down the three steps onto the grass.
A murmur went through the chairs and died out.
He walked up the center aisle, slowly, in his dress whites, his ribbons catching the sun, and four hundred people watched him do it in total silence. The commanding officer half rose from his seat and then, with the instinct of a man who knows when not to interfere, sat back down.