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Wait.

“He left with grades in the high nineties and the glowing, if slightly exhausted, praise from every member of staff to come into contact with him.” Her eyes met his in the crowd and she gave him the sort of tired smile he’d grown up seeing on most adults when they weren’t yelling at him.

Fuck off, lady.

“So, we’d like to ask one more student to make the walk.”

He met Arlo’s eyes now. Either the lad was as shocked as him or he’d been given enough time to get into a character for this one.

“Brendan O’Shea, would you please come up and get your honorary diploma?”

The fleeting thought of making like Bugs Bunny and leaving a Bren-shaped hole in the nearest wall occurred to him as he rose to his feet. The murmuring turned to applause and Dustin’s unmistakable baritone tried to start a chant of, “I-re-land! I-re-land!”

Thankfully, it didn’t catch on, even if Bren’s cheeks caught fire by the time he got to the raised platform.

He was intent on speeding across the stage and back to his seat as quickly as possible, but he was stopped by Tweedle-Yu and Tweedle-Nat before he’d made it two steps.

They had apparently been in on this, because they produced an extra set of robes and a tasseled cap.

Ignoring the fact that he had a few months before Canada would try him as an adult, Bren pulled the robes over his head and let Nat set the cap on straight.

He was already shaking Principal MacDonald’s hand to scattered applause and a hushed, “Good to see you again,” by the time Nat and Yu made it back to their seats.

He turned to walk back to his seat in the audience, but the principal shook her head and indicated the sea of black-robed figures behind them.

The row Arlo was standing in shifted as the students made space next to him—a perk to being the school’s token gay couple.

“Your face is so red,” Arlo said in a whisper that dripped with suppressed laughter.

“You actin’ like me; me actin’ like you. I thought that’s what we’re doin’, no?”

“I had no idea they were going to—”

“I know.”

The mic crackled as Principal MacDonald leaned in to release them from this hell. “Students, please move your tassels from the right to the left.”

Bren did a double take to make sure there wasn’t some special Canadian way of doing it, then moved his tassel.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to present to you Peacock’s graduating class of two thousand and eight!”

Bren only knew what came next because he’d seen it in movies. His cap flew into the air with an ascending mass of black as cheers erupted from all sides.

He was kissing Arlo before the first hat hit the ground.

54

“How long does it take to put on a tux?”

Nat’s words rose above the chorus of You Can’t Stop The Beat that boomed out of the stretch limo’s sound system. She leaned across so her face pressed against the window as she stared at the Richards’ still-deserted front steps.

“You’re going to smudge that fancy makeup if you keep that up, like,” Bren said, his arm wrapped around A.J’s waist.

A.J.’s hand fiddled with the emerald-green tie over the three-piece suit he’d helped Bren put on minutes before the limo had shown up. Maura had given him her best guess on Bren’s measurements at the start of June and as with most things, she’d been right on the money.

“Good,” Nat said, rubbing her cheek along the window. “I’m not exactly going for tradition here.”

That was one way of putting it. She had spent the last six months working on her prom dress for credit in Clothing 30 and the results were something worthy of being preserved in the yearbook at the very least. An off-the-shoulder black top with a sweetheart neckline and sheer sleeves that fell down with the hint of a wave before gathering at her wrists. Below was a cascade of black and pink tulle, artfully cut and singed in places so it looked distressed in a way that matched the spiky bun she’d chosen for her hair.