He wore the dress anyway.
I asked him once, during those two weeks, how he could face all of it. The ridicule. The isolation. The whispers he knew were coming.
He told me something Lily had said to him during one of their last conversations.
Lily told him that the hardest thing about being sick was not the pain. It was the way people looked away. She told him people looked at her and then looked somewhere else, as though illness were a brightness they could not face. She told him she wanted the dress to be so bright that nobody could look away.
She told him if he wore it, they would have to see her.
Ethan told me he was going to make them see her.
I looked at my son, eighteen years old, quiet, careful, carrying the weight of a promise made to a dying girl who was seventeen minutes older than him and a lifetime braver, and I understood that the dress was not a costume. It was a stage. A platform. A vermillion-colored refusal to let six hundred people look away from the girl who was not there.
