I grew up in the second life the way I had not grown up in the first one, which is to say slowly, and with a family.
Hannah got married in the spring of my tenth year. It was a small wedding, in a backyard, with string lights and folding chairs. My mother cried. My father shook Priya's hand and said something that made both of them laugh. I stood beside Hannah and held the ring, and when she leaned down to whisper to me, she said the thing I have never forgotten.
"Thanks for the push."
I graduated from high school in a class of three hundred and twenty-two. Hannah came. My parents came. My mother was still tired, in the way she would be tired for the rest of her life, but she was alive, and she was at the graduation, and she took a photograph of me in a cap and gown that she keeps on th
