She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.
“I wasn’t asking you to give him a diploma he didn’t earn. I wasn’t asking you to change the rules or pretend he was still alive.”
She looked around the gym.
“I was asking you to remember that he was here.”
No one moved.
Then she added something that made my heart ache more than anything she had said so far.
“My brother hated being treated like a tragedy. He hated when people talked about his illness instead of talking to him. He wanted people to remember his jokes, his terrible basketball skills, his ridiculous drawings in the margins of his homework.”
A faint laugh escaped someone near the back.
Emma smiled through her tears.
“He once told me that if he didn’t make it to graduation, I wasn’t allowed to turn his photograph into something people looked at only because they felt sorry for him.”
