The Valedictorian Spot They Gave Away
Number one was Kessler.
“I ran this on April fourteenth,” she said. “The gown company needs the honor cord order by the fifteenth. I always run it the day before, by hand, and I put the printout in my drawer, and I have done it for twenty-seven years because one time, back in the nineties, somebody wanted to argue about a rank and I had nothing to show them.” She laid it flat beside the change log. “That is what the rank was on the fourteenth. On May sixth, someone had Marsha take the weight off the college composition grades, and ran it again. The list in the glass case is not this one.”
Maddie took the page in both hands. At the top it said her name, and a number, and it was a number she had earned. I watched her read it. I watched something go back into her face.
“Why are you telling us this?” Maddie asked.
Ms. Larkin took off her glasses. “Because I have been sitting on this since Friday, and I can’t make it sit right.” She folded her hands. “I can’t tell you who else was affected. I can tell you that if I were a mother with a child in the top twenty who had taken that class, I would hold the January list up against the one they posted Friday.”
The January list.
Every January the school posts the top ten in the glass case by the office, and half the seniors photograph it on their phones because their grandmothers ask them to. Maddie had a picture of it from January 12. So did the Baker girl. So did the Anders boy, who had kept it as his lock screen for a month because he was ranked sixth and had never in his life been ranked anything.
Wednesday after school Maddie went to work her shift at the feed store, because she had never in her life skipped a shift, and Bryan drove out to pick her up at six. He told me later that she had stacked forty bags of layer pellets by herself and that old Mr. Aldridge, who owns the place, had come out of the back office twice and gone in again without saying anything. On the drive home she asked her father whether the rank would be on her diploma. He said no, the rank was not on the diploma. She said, “Then it’s just a thing people say in a gym,” and he said yes, and she said that was why it was hard. That is the thing I keep coming back to. It was never about the paper. It was about the sentence, and who gets to say it.