The Oath

At nine forty, the Riverside Community Hall was already full.

In rows A to F, the candidates sat in their best clothes: sixty-two people from more than thirty countries, some in suits, some in long bright dresses, some in the uniform of their jobs because they had come straight from a night shift. In rows G to M, the guests: husbands, wives, children with balloons that had been confiscated at the door, grandparents with canes, a teenager filming everything with his phone and being told by his mother to stop filming everything with his phone.

Lina and Kai sat in row H. Kai wore his white shirt, ironed five times, and sat so straight that his back did not touch the chair. Lina wore her only dress, which was dark blue, and which Marco had never seen, because Marco was not inside. Marco was in the parking lot with seven other people and, Lina suspected, balloons.

On the right side, in the accessible seating, Frank sat in a chair by the aisle, with Margaret next to him holding his medication box in her handbag. He was thinner than in June. He had a cane now, which he hated. But his eyes moved over the room the way they moved over a classroom on the first day of September.

"Look at them," he whispered to Lina, across the aisle. "Every one of them has a story. Every one of them sat in some room somewhere, learning, failing, trying again."

Sasha was in row C, seat 9. They could see the back of his head, his grey hair cut very short for the occasion. He had not turned around once.