This is it. The moment she's been working towards for the past six years and the twelve years before that.
Julia's graduating.
And her parents aren't here.
At least, not her mother. She wouldn't expect her father to show up. Not since...
Don't think about that.
Anxiety crawls at her skin and sinks into her stomach, both from the nerves of graduation approaching and her name being high on the list and why wasn't her mother here??
She tugs at her gown, running it through her fingers, the red soothing her a bit. Casting a glance around for maybe the hundredth time, her sharp gaze finds no familiar face smiling up at her, no wind-tossed hair and smiling lined face.
Their presiding officer has started calling names.
Pull it together, Julia. This is the day your life changes.
It does not take long for him to reach her name on the list and she steps up and receives her diploma with a smile that becomes real as the paper touches her hand. As she moves her tassel from the right to the left.
She's made it.
She watches the rest of her classmates graduate with polite enthusiasm; she'd never connected with the partygoers that were, for some reason, so prevalent. Wasn't this a place of study?
She's started drifting off into her own little world again, and is jolted out of it as all her classmates cheer. She stands with them a bit belatedly and lifts her cap off her head, but her fingers tense and she finds herself just staring at it as her companions hurl theirs in the air.
Her mother wouldn't miss this.
Then why had she?
She's once again thrown out of her thoughts as her friend and roommate grabs her arm, pink faced from excitement.
"Juliaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!! We did it!!!!" She shrieks, bouncing up and down in a way that makes Julia's glasses bounce too the end of her nose. She smiles at Laurie nonetheless, well used to her bubbliness by now. Her face is no longer as tinged with a pink as it used to be but, that being said, Laurie could make a cactus flustered.
Laurie drags her over to the edge of the stage and nearly breaks her leg pulling Julia off it with her. "C'mon, lets take a picture."
The school is a beautiful one, with marble and white backed by a lush forest. Julia finds herself against a beautiful backdrop, smiling , clutching her diploma with two hands, her cap back on her head.
Laurie looks at the picture she takes mildly. "You don't even look excited. But that's my bookworm bestie to a tee, I guess!"
Julia smiles at the phone. "I never understood why you didn't become a photographer." The red in her gown contrasts the trees without it being distracting and she's even managed to keep the glare off Julia's round, wire-rimmed glasses.
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