September arrived the way September always arrived in Stockton: with the particular cruelty of heat that refused to acknowledge the calendar.
The school smelled like floor wax and new notebooks and the specific anxiety of people who were performing confidence about futures they hadn't figured out yet. The hallways had a different quality on the first day of senior year — everyone slightly taller in their own estimation, slightly more aware of the clock.
Senior year. The last of the official structure.
I got my schedule. AP English. Music Theory. Study Hall, which I would use to practice guitar rather than study anything. I sat in the guidance counselor's office across from a woman in a blazer who kept saying "post-secondary options" like it was a phrase that lived in the real world, and I wrote "music" on the form and crossed it out and wrote "undecided" and crossed that out too and wrote "music" again and handed it back.
She looked at the form. She looked at me.
"Music is a challenging field," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Have you considered —"
"Music," I said.
She made a note.
Jimmy signed up for the service.
I heard it from Dougie, who heard it from Rick, who had run into Jimmy's mother at the supermarket. Third-hand. The news traveling the way important news traveled in our world — through the network, through the people who paid attention to things.
I sat with it for a full day before it became real. Then it became real all at once, the way certain facts do — the way a thing you've been holding at arm's length suddenly closes the distance and is right there, undeniable, in your chest.
Jimmy was going.
He had found his direction the same way he found everything — decisively, without extensive consultation, by identifying the thing that matched the shape of himself and walking toward it.
I thought about what he had said on the bench at Victory Park, spitting sunflower seeds, watching the ducks. Before senior year. Before people start leaving.
He had always known this was coming. He had just been trying to outlast it.
We had all been trying to outlast it.
Dougie registered for community college with the same sincerity he brought to every major undertaking. He was going to study business, he informed me, because someone had to be in charge of the world and he had assessed the competition.
Rick had already half-decided on a school down south. He mentioned it the way Rick mentioned everything — plainly, in passing, without drama. Like a fact being filed in the appropriate location.
"When did you decide that?" I asked.
Rick shrugged. "May."
May. Before the Last Great Summer had even been declared. Rick had always known too. He had just been kind enough not to say so.
In Music Theory, I discovered something uncomfortable and necessary: I was better than I thought.
Not prodigy better. Not the kind of better that announces itself. Just real better — the kind that reveals itself when you stop performing ability and start actually using it. The teacher, Mr. Pacheco, had the quality of a man who had been teaching long enough to know the difference between a student going through motions and a student waking up. He let me stay after class twice a week to use the guitar in the practice room. He didn't make it a big thing. He just left the room unlocked and didn't ask questions.
I practiced Hotel California until I couldn't hear the nervousness in it anymore. Then I practiced other things. Songs I had been carrying in my head for years without knowing why. Songs that came out of my hands differently than they came off the radio — slower in some places, heavier in others, more personal, less polished. The specific sound of one person working something out.
The direction was getting clearer. It was still terrifying. But it was mine.
Senior year is what happens when the kingdom officially closes its gates. Not with a battle — with paperwork. With website forms asking what you're going to be, with the slow and terrifying and wonderful realization that the answer, whatever it was, was going to be yours. You didn't get to blame anyone else for it. You didn't get to point at the rules of the kingdom and say: that's why. You just got the blank form and the guidance counselor and the word "music" written twice in your own handwriting. That was mine. That was exactly mine.