Last night I stood at an overlook with a group of seniors watching the sun go down over Albuquerque. They pointed across the river, calling out landmarks: there’s the Big I, there’s my neighborhood, look how bad that traffic is. They laughed at the city spread out below them like something they were seeing for the first time and the last time simultaneously.

Tonight they’re at prom.

I’ve been trying to find the right words for what that means to me, and I keep coming back to the rabbit ears.

When we gathered for pictures, almost every kid threw up rabbit ears. There’s one photo that’s going to live in my head for a long time: a girl crouched down behind two administrators, fingers raised over both their heads, grinning like she’d gotten away with something. Which, in a way, she had. They all had. They got away with growing up.

These kids were my seventh graders during Covid.

If you weren’t a teacher during that time, it’s hard to explain what that means. When they first came back to school that year, we taught remote and in-person simultaneously: some kids in desks in front of me, others still at home in little rectangles on a screen, and me trying to reach all of them at once. Some students stayed remote longer than others. We were all just doing our best with what we had, which often didn’t feel like enough.

There were about a hundred of them in that seventh grade class.

By ninth grade the cracks were showing. They hadn’t learned how to be middle schoolers, not really, and now they were supposed to figure out high school. A full year of remote learning had taken something from them that’s hard to name, not just academic ground, but the social wiring that kids build by being in rooms together, reading each other, navigating lunch tables and hallways and all the small awkward machinery of growing up. Ninth grade was hard. For all of us. A lot of their class didn’t stay at the school for high school at all. More left after that ninth grade year.

By the time I saw them again as seniors, there were 37 of them.

One hundred. Sixty-five. Thirty-seven.

I’ve been sitting with those numbers since last night. The kids at that overlook aren’t just graduates. They’re the ones who stayed. Who came back. Who figured out, somehow, how to keep going through one of the strangest and most disorienting chapters any generation of students has ever had to live through. And now here they are, seniors. Done.

Standing at that overlook last night, eating pizza and pointing at the city, throwing rabbit ears at cameras. They weren’t performing for anyone. They were just themselves. Loud and funny and a little sentimental underneath it all, even if most of them wouldn’t admit it.

The fencing at the overlook was covered in hundreds of padlocks, the kind couples put up as a symbol of something lasting. A lot of them had names and dates written on them. One girl made it her mission to read as many as she could, offering commentary on each couple and their almost certain demise. Someone else pointed out that the school had been short on locker locks all year and maybe they’d found them. It was that kind of night.

For the senior slideshow, a few of them submitted pictures from spring break in Paris. Three kids from Albuquerque, New Mexico, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. I thought about that a lot standing at the overlook. These same kids who learned fractions on a Chromebook in their living rooms, who grew up during the strangest interruption of modern childhood, standing in front of one of the most iconic structures in the world. The city below us suddenly felt both small and exactly the right size.

That’s the part of teaching nobody really prepares you for. The kids you worry about the most, the ones who drove you to the edge of your patience, the ones you stayed up thinking about. They grow into people. Real ones. Most of this class is heading to college in the fall, mostly staying in New Mexico, carrying the desert with them even as they go. A couple are joining the military. All of them are stepping into something larger than what they’ve known. And then they leave, and you feel proud and gutted in equal measure and there’s no clean word for that combination.

Tonight they’ll dance and take pictures and make memories they’ll carry for decades. Tomorrow the countdown to graduation gets very real.

I’ll be there when they walk across the stage. I’ll probably throw up rabbit ears in at least one photo.

It seems only right.