Free Out of Order by Casey Lawrence

waist.
    “Tie it around your waist like this,” she interrupted, demonstrating on herself by quickly turning the long sleeves into a bow at the front of her own hips. The body of the sweater hung down far enough to cover Jessa’s butt when she spun around. “Like you brought it but don’t want to go hang it up in your locker.”
    Jessa untied the sweater from around her waist and handed it off to Kate, who mimicked Jessa’s demonstration. I’d seen it done time and again by kids who were made to wear sweaters by overbearing parents when it was not cold enough to need one. In fact, we had been guilty of doing the same when we were kids—but the practice fell out of use in high school for the bulk it added around your hips, or perhaps the air of unpreparedness it exuded.
    Kate spun around to examine her posterior in the mirror, tugging on the sweater to make sure it completely hid the mess of her white shorts. “It’ll have to do….” She sighed, and Jessa clapped her hands suddenly.
    “Corinna, you need to be onstage! Let’s go!”
    “To fake-graduation!” Kate whooped as the four of us ran down the empty halls toward the auditorium, flying past a startled freshman at the water fountain in our rush.
    We snuck into the back of the auditorium, panting, only to see the mass of seniors not sitting quietly in the audience but huddled around the stage en masse while each seat was assigned alphabetically. They were starting on the Ds, but there was an open seat beside Olivia Bateman that was clearly meant for Kate.
    Taking a deep breath, she held the back of the sweater to her butt as she scooted around people’s knees to get to her spot halfway down the row. Even with the stain so close to their faces, no one in the row seemed to notice that Kate had so suddenly and so disastrously gotten her period, and I let out the breath I’d held tight in my chest as she plopped down next to Olivia as if nothing had happened.
    “Corinna Nguyen!” someone hissed, horribly mispronouncing my last name, and I followed the voice around the back of the mass of bored students to see Vice Principal Redding waving me forward. “Where were you? You have to sit up front with the other speakers!” Redding’s hair was a frazzled mess of blonde curls sticking up every which way, as though she’d been running her hands through it impulsively. This was not an uncommon look for her.
    “Bathroom. It was an emergency,” I tried to explain, but she was already giving me the rundown of all the instructions I’d missed and leading me to a seat in the front row, where I’d have easy access to the stage door on the left.
    I spared a glance three rows back to meet Kate’s eyes. She shot me two thumbs-up and a brilliant white smile. When we’d all been seated properly, we began the mock ceremony, moving onto the stage in lines to receive tubes of blank paper that the other prefects and I had spent three days rolling and tying bright ribbons around, each a different shade of our school colors. We’d be receiving these fakes on the real day as well, and our diplomas would be mailed to us in thick envelopes to protect them from damage.
    After we’d each been given a roll of paper, I stood up in front of a sea of my classmates and told them approximately what I’d be saying on the day of—leaving out large portions of my speech for time and to leave something for the actual ceremony. As I made my closing remarks, I found each of my friends in the audience, since without the stage lights on I could clearly make out each of their faces: Kate, with the Bs, watching me attentively; Jessa, several rows behind her in the Fs, smiling encouragingly with her hands folded neatly in her lap; and Ricky, nervously chewing her lips much closer to the back of the room, where I would have been sitting on her left if I’d been sorted alphabetically with the rest.
    The pomp and circumstance of the whole thing was both irritating and exciting. A ball of