Camp Hustler

── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──

Maybe it was the fact that I was graduating in—what—three minutes that made my head hurt.

Or maybe this stupid cap was cutting off circulation to my frontal lobe.

Either way, my name hadn’t even been called yet, and the stage lights were already too bright.

Calm down, Liana.

Breathe.

I wedged my index finger between my golden curls and the cap’s band, trying to loosen it without sending the whole thing crooked.

Stages weren’t my thing. The last time I’d been on one was sixth grade, and I puked on an orphan.

Not a real orphan—sorry.

Oliver Twist.

To be exact.

“You only have to walk across the stage, Li,” Violet Lynx murmured beside me. “I can flip everyone off if you need a distraction.”

Dark purple lipstick stretched over her grin. Against Violet’s pale skin, grey-blue eyes and pitch-black hair, it looked almost violent.

She stood out everywhere.

She also couldn’t care less.

That was one of the reasons I loved her.

Because I didn’t care either.

Not really.

Not about this hellhole’s opinion.

If it were any other circumstance, I’d tell them all to fuck off and call it character development. But apparently, all it took was a polyester robe and a stage two feet off the ground to turn me from broke into a broke coward.

Graduation was supposed to feel like an ending.

That was what everyone kept saying, anyway.

The end of an era.

The beginning of the rest of your life.

You must be so excited.

Easy to say when the rest of your life came with UBC tuition, used textbooks, and the small but emotionally taxing issue of eating.

Personally, I was less excited and more experiencing early-onset financial organ failure.

In three minutes, I was supposed to walk across the stage at Kingatoa Bay Secondary School, shake Principal Bexley’s hand, accept a rolled-up piece of paper tied with navy ribbon and officially graduate from impoverished teenager to impoverished adult.

Someone should’ve put it on a freaking mug.

Across the aisle, Carter Wright leaned back in his chair like stress was something that happened to other people.

Carter could make sitting in a folding chair under fluorescent lights look athletic, all blond hair, blue eyes, straight teeth and a clean white shirt under his robe like he hadn’t already sweat through it twice.

One of the soccer guys whispered something to him. Carter tipped his head back and laughed, that easy smile flashing across his face.

My stomach did the pathetic little flip it had been doing since Grade Two.

“You’re staring again,” Violet said without moving her mouth.

“I’m looking in a direction.”

“You’re looking in a Carter direction.”

“I have eyes. It’s not a crime.”

“It should be when you use them that sadly.”

I tore my gaze away and looked at my hands. My nails were short and clean because I’d spent the morning helping Mom load extra trays into the church basement fridge before graduation.

Nothing said milestone event like smelling faintly of dish soap and ham.

Carter and I once ate free school lunch together in the corner of Mrs. Pembroke’s classroom because neither of us had lunch money, and we both had enough pride to pretend cafeteria pizza was a personal choice.

Then he got tall.

And good at soccer.

And socially acceptable.

A tragic condition, really.

He hadn’t stopped being nice to me. That might have been easier. He still smiled when he saw me. Still asked how I was. Sometimes he even called me “Li” in that soft, familiar voice that made my brain remove itself from the premises.

But somewhere between Grade Seven and now, Carter had drifted into the world of people who got invited places without having to overhear, Oh, is Liana coming too?

I had stayed where I’d always been.

Useful.

Weird.

Poor.

Good with kids.

Good with animals.

Excellent at pretending I didn’t notice when people looked at my mother’s name tag before they looked at her face.

“Liana Burke,” Violet whispered, nudging my knee. “If you start mentally writing his last name after yours, I’m leaving you here.”

“I would never.”

“You wrote Liana Wright in your math binder in Grade Six.”

Oh I did it a lot more than that.

“I was eleven. I also thought dolphins were fish and bangs would save my face.”

“Both were devastating eras.”

Before I could defend the bangs—which had, in fairness, been a hate crime committed by a woman named Tammy at First Choice Haircutters—the microphone squealed.

Principal Bexley smiled as if the sound hadn’t just sterilized half the gymnasium.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said, tapping the mic again because apparently once wasn’t enough. “We’ll now continue with our graduates.”

Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)” crackled through the gym speakers, because every school board in Canada had signed a blood oath in 2001 and never looked back.

The names kept coming.

People clapped, and parents cried.

“Sienna Monroe.”

The room woke up.

Sienna rose three rows ahead of us, her red hair glossy under the lights. Somehow, she had made the same shapeless polyester robe the rest of us were wearing look fitted. She walked like someone who had never tripped over a backpack, calculated gas money or watched a debit machine with genuine fear.

Sienna had been born with light brown hair and a God complex, but sometime around Grade Ten, she’d decided red made her look more expensive.

Unfortunately, she had been right.

She crossed the stage with her chin lifted, accepted her diploma and smiled for the photographer like she was signing a peace treaty in a country she planned to invade later.

Violet made a small choking noise.

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You breathed meanly.”

“I have asthma.”

“You don’t have asthma.”

“I have emotional asthma.”

Sienna stepped off the stage and glanced toward Carter before returning to her seat.

If there was one thing Sienna enjoyed more than being admired, it was making sure the right people knew she was being admired.

Carter smiled back.

“Liana,” Violet said softly.

“I’m fine.”

“You have the face.”

“What face?”

“The face where you pretend you’re above everything while actively being murdered by generic whiteboy number forty-three.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

Cross-examining Violet was pointless when she had already buried the body and marked the grave.

The names moved closer to mine, and my heart started climbing up my throat like it had somewhere better to be.

Mom was out there somewhere.

Gran too.

Mom had taken the afternoon off for this.

That sounded normal until you knew Cassandra Burke did not take afternoons off. Cassandra Burke worked through fevers, blizzards, broken appliances and one memorable Thanksgiving when she sliced her thumb open on a can of cranberry sauce and finished plating dinner with her hand wrapped in a dish towel like a Civil War soldier.

She had worn her good blouse today.

The blue one.

The one she ironed twice.

That was somehow worse than crying.

I knew what she was thinking. I knew what Gran was thinking too.

They weren’t just watching me graduate.

They were watching the whole point of everything.

All the extra shifts and late nights.

The used car that only started when spoken to gently.

Every time Mom came home with swollen feet and still sat at the kitchen table doing training modules because she was going to get out of the camp kitchen if it killed her.

Then there was UBC.

The scholarships.

The terrifying letter that had arrived a couple of months earlier.

I was supposed to be proof.

Proof that it had all worked.

Proof that Burke women could climb.

No pressure.

Just an entire bloodline sitting on my shoulders in non-slip shoes.

“Liana Burke.”

In the blur beyond the lights, Mom sat up straighter, like posture alone could carry me across the stage.

My body stood before my brain approved the decision.

For half a second, everything narrowed to sound.

Applause.

Violet’s sharp whistle beside me.

The squeak of my shoes against the gym floor.

My own heartbeat, which was behaving like it had been paid by the drumline.

I headed for the stairs.

Do not trip.

Do not trip.

Do not trip and become a cautionary tale.

The stage lights hit me full in the face, bright and hot enough to interrogate a war criminal. I smiled because that was what you did when adults pointed cameras at you and expected gratitude.

Principal Bexley held out my diploma.

“Congratulations, Liana.”

“Thank you.”

The photographer raised his camera.

Flash.

And then—

A whistle split through the gym.

This wasn’t a proud-grandmother whistle or even a normal woo-sports whistle.

It was a full PPFFFTTT—PPWEEEFFUUU cartoon-construction-worker wolf whistle.

The kind that should’ve come with a hard hat, a suspended HR investigation and at least one woman throwing a shoe.

Half the room turned.

Including me, unfortunately. My neck nearly snapped off my body like a Pez dispenser.

Then a deep voice yelled from somewhere near the back:

“GO, LANA!”

My smile died so fast it should’ve had a chalk outline.

Lana.

No one called me Lana anymore.

There were only two people on this planet who had ever gotten away with it.

One was Gran, who had earned the right through childbirth-adjacent suffering and ownership of a cast-iron frying pan.

The other had disappeared to university two years ago with a rich-boy smirk and a disciplinary record so impressive it probably had its own filing cabinet.

My eyes found him before I wanted them to.

Back row.

Sebastian King was leaning against the wall like chairs belonged to a tax bracket beneath him.

He looked older.

Taller too.

Still unfairly pretty in that rich-boy way that made you believe the universe had favourites and all of them owned boats.

Sun-brown hair fell messily away from his forehead. His white shirt was open enough at the collar for a thin gold chain to catch beneath the gym lights and personally insult my student-loan application.

He grinned.

Just enough to show me he knew exactly what he had done.

My fingers tightened around my diploma.

Two years.

I had enjoyed two entire years of peace.

Sebastian King had been back in my life for approximately four seconds, and he had already publicly reminded me that men were, as a species, a design flaw.

Somewhere in the front row, Sienna Monroe was staring at me like I had vandalized her future wedding.

Wonderful.

Amazing.

Perfect.

I had just graduated high school, and apparently my first act as an adult was going to be resisting the urge to throw my diploma at Sebastian King’s head.

Then I thought, stupidly:

Well, at least I’ll be an hour away from him in less than a week.

I was very,

very,

wrong.