The graduation ceremony wasn’t as bad as Dana had feared. The convocation for her individual major had taken longer; the College of Arts and Sciences was one of the largest divisions in the university, and if she had known the ceremony would take most of the evening, she would have skipped it. But her parents had come up for that one, too, so she’d been forced to sit through a roll call of over a thousand names, watching as each student walked across the stage to receive a handshake from the dean and a fake diploma (the real one would be mailed over the summer) and waiting for her turn. Though she’d been in school all four years, she only recognized a few of the names, but like her classmates, she’d clapped for each and every one.
By comparison, graduation was a breeze. The hardest part w
