Chapter Two
I’m a four on the chill scale, or his cycling skills have seriously tanked.
It’s a miracle that we manage to get home with our limbs intact. Maybe that’s thanks to the prayer I said under my breath when he almost sideswiped a soccer mom’s minivan. It’s only a ten-minute journey and yet Joaquin managed to make my life flash before my eyes twice.
“Are you trying to kill us?!” I shouted into his ear when he plowed through a stop sign.
“Calm down. Car rules don’t apply to bikes.”
“They do if you want to survive.”
My protests went ignored, so I chose to squeeze my eyes shut and bury my face in the crook of his neck instead. If we were going to die at the hands of a Suburban, I didn’t want to see it coming.
As soon as he stops in my driveway, I launch off the vehicle and collapse to my knees, leaning down to press my forehead against the asphalt. I’m grateful to be alive, but not grateful enough to put my lips where car tires and motor oil have been.
“Never again,” I whisper against the pavement, just loud enough for Joaquin to hear.
“You lived, didn’t you?” he calls back.
I stick my tongue out at him as he wheels his bike into his garage. His shoulders are engraved with dozens of crescent-shaped moons my nails left behind. I’d apologize if he wasn’t the exact reason I had to cling for dear life.
“This is why I need a car,” I proclaim to the universe. “To save myself, and innocent bystanders, from reckless cyclists like you.”
“You’re such a saint,” he replies dryly, even though we both know a car would make our lives here in Jersey substantially easier. Herbert, the car his mom passed down to him before she moved back to Puerto Rico last summer, was ancient when she bought it. Now it can barely handle the twenty-minute drive to school every morning.
Joaquin nods his head toward his place. “You coming?”
Thanks to the fear and adrenaline coursing through my veins during the ride home, I started sweating in places where no one should sweat.
“I desperately need a shower. Meet at mine in ten?”
He gives me a thumbs-up before disappearing into his house, and I lug up the driveway to my own.
Opening the door, I’m met with a round of earsplitting barks.
My twenty-pound terror of a dog, Nurse Oatmeal, comes tearing through the living room, growling and snarling beside me as I step into the entryway to take off my shoes.
“Cállate!” Joaquin’s grandma, Doña Carmen, bellows from the kitchen, even though there’s no point telling her to be quiet. Nurse Oatmeal is the only terrier on this planet that can’t smell her humans coming a mile away. In the four years since Joaquin and I found her, she’s never once let anyone come through the door without giving them a symphony of high-pitched barks for at least thirty seconds.
Sure enough, she settles down once she realizes “Oh yeah, this person fills my bowl every day” and returns to the very important task of chewing on a throw blanket in the living room. It’d be one thing if she just barked at everyone who comes through the door, but no, she’s a chewing menace too. Her massive pile of destroyed stuffed animals, shoes, and old T-shirts is practically part of the living room décor.
“Thank you again for walking her,” I say to Doña Carmen after our usual cheek-kiss greeting.
“Claro, claro,” she replies, waving off my thanks. Doña Carmen had jumped at the chance to watch the dog when I’d mentioned it in passing over dinner at their place last week, insisting that we didn’t need to pay a sitter when she knew how to tame the beast herself.
Both she and Joaquin have been over at our place more often lately. Probably since theirs is unusually lonely now that Mrs. Romero is back in Puerto Rico taking care of her mother, who has rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s, and Joaquin’s older sister, Isabella, left for her freshman year at American University in DC. Without the cacophony of Isabella yelling at Joaquin to let her use the TV, or Mrs. Romero singing along to the radio in the kitchen, the house feels deserted.
Doña Carmen hoists herself up and starts gathering her things. “Hiciste mucho chavo?” she asks with a raised brow, waiting for me to show off the spoils of my labor.
I frown, pulling the few crumpled dollar bills out of my pocket. Barely thirty bucks. “Nah, slow day.”
Doña Carmen gives me a consoling pat on the shoulder. “You’ll get there,” she whispers before shuffling over to the living room to give Nurse Oatmeal a parting scratch behind the ears. “I made arroz con gandules, if you want any.”
I cross the kitchen to the pot on the stove, lifting the lid and taking in a deep whiff of her signature rice. The intoxicating scent of her top-secret sofrito blend makes my mouth water. Watching our goblin of a dog while Mami and I are at work and making us food? Forget me, she’s the real saint around here.
Pulling my tongue off the floor, I head to my room to store my tips, then go to the bathroom to scrub away the smell of a hard day’s work. By the time I make it back to the living room, hair in a clumsy braid and dressed in my finest semi-clean sweatpants and concert T-shirt, Joaquin has made himself at home.
He and Nurse Oatmeal are sprawled out on the couch, her body flopped on his chest while he rubs her belly and talks to her in his signature For-Nurse-Oatmeal-Only baby voice.
“Who’s the best girl?” Her ears perk up. “You are!” Her tongue rolls out of her mouth in delight.
It’s a cruel twist of fate that Nurse Oatmeal lives at my house instead of Joaquin’s. She’s always preferred him over me, even though my belly-rubbing technique is far superior. Even the day we found her freshman year, eating oatmeal next to the dumpster behind the nurse’s office, she ran up to Joaquin the second she saw him and completely ignored me and the hot dog I offered her to lure her in. The only reason we wound up taking her in was because Isabella is allergic to dogs. Now Joaquin has an empty house, and I’m in an unrequited relationship with our dog.
“Can you please tell the best girl to stop chewing on all of my stuff?” Last week the little shit destroyed my favorite pair of sneakers.
Joaquin leans in close to Nurse Oatmeal, his brow furrowing as if the two are having a heated discussion. “She says no.” He ducks his head close to hers again. “And that you should give her more treats.”
“Shocking how she always says the same thing whenever I ask you to translate,” I reply as I stand between him and the TV with crossed arms and a raised brow. “So.” I pause for dramatic effect. “My souvenir?”
“Yeesh.” Joaquin groans as he sets Nurse Oatmeal aside and stands up. “It’s like you’re only friends with me for the gifts.”
“Duh, wasn’t that obvious?”
He ignores my reply in favor of covering my eyes and guiding me carefully into the next room. “Keep ’em closed,” he whispers before letting go of me and walking off. I hear what I think is the fridge door, then his footsteps approaching before he rests his hands back on my shoulders. “Okay, open.”
My eyes fly open and my jaw almost hits the ground as I take in the surprise. “You did not.”
With a flourish, he waves his arms toward the dozen slushies spread across the dining room table. “I did.”
Backing out of our spring break plans had hurt my soul, but nothing pained me as much as having to cancel our slushie-taste-test road trip.
Slushies have been our ultimate guilty pleasure for as long as we can remember. Probably because our abuelas told us about savoring the piraguas they’d save their allowances for as kids growing up. Sadly, shaved ice desserts haven’t made their big break in Elmwood yet—though Tío Tony is strongly considering adding them to the Casa Y Cocina menu—so we’ve had to settle for the next best thing.
The mini road trip was the perfect addition to our shoestring-budget spring break adventure. Better known as Spring Broke. On our way down to Wildwood, we’d stop at seven different restaurants to sample their slushies, collect our ratings, and crown the Ultimate Slushie Champion. Spending my spring break at home sucked, but missing out on the slushies just made the FOMO that much worse.
But thanks to Joaquin, I’m not missing out after all.
“How did you even get these here?” I ask, peeking into a white paper bag beside the slushies and finding an assortment of French fries and chicken nuggets, our slushie accompaniments of choice. “Shouldn’t they have all melted by now?”
“Borrowed a cooler from one of the guys,” he explains, carefully removing the slushies from their Styrofoam holders. Two cups per establishment. “They’re not perfect but should still be good enough for us to give impartial rankings. And I had to skip the place in Harrison. They’re closed on Sundays, so we’ll need to hit them another time.”
Eagerly, I sit down at the table and pull up the Notes app list I’d created weeks ago to keep track of our rankings. Once Joaquin is seated across from me, I reach for the closest option—from Iggy’s Ices—smiling when I notice my name written in Joaquin’s handwriting on the side of the cup.
On the count of three, we each take our first sips, savoring the sugar racing through our veins. My eyes widen as the sweet but not overpowering taste of piña colada washes over me—the taste so rich that if I closed my eyes I could easily picture myself sipping this straight out of a coconut on a beach in San Juan.
“You good?” Joaquin says around a laugh as my body trembles while I come down from the high of that mind-blowing first sip.
“So good,” I mumble, doing a little dance as I take a second sip. “Amazing. Life changing. I could die right now, and I wouldn’t even be mad.”
Once he’s sure I’m not going to collapse from delight, he reaches for my cup and takes a sip for himself. His eyes go wide, his cheeks flush, and his shoulders shimmy in the same mini-dance I performed seconds earlier as he goes through the same life-altering experience I did.
“That shouldn’t be legal,” he says as he helps himself to another sip. “I would do very dangerous things for that.”
I nod in agreement and join him in one last shoulder shimmy. I’d gladly give up my firstborn if it meant getting to have these for the rest of my life and not risk my health. As Nurse Oatmeal paws at my leg, I wonder if they’d take her instead.
Joaquin’s cherry slushie isn’t as exciting as mine, but still pretty solid. Definitely not dance break worthy, though. After two sips each of both, we pop open the lids and go through our practiced routine of carefully mixing the two together to create our own masterpiece. The combo definitely bumps the cherry up a few points but doesn’t top the OG piña colada.
“All right, ranking,” I announce after we’ve sampled our swirl flavor. “I give Iggy’s a nine and a half. Would be a ten if their fries were crispier, but a very impressive start.”
Joaquin nods, chewing a chicken nugget and rubbing his chin thoughtfully before giving his own ranking. “Seven. Cherry could’ve been better, and I’m docking points for them not having a drive-through.”
“You can’t factor that into your ranking,” I protest. “This is supposed to be objective!”
“My ranking, my rules,” he insists.
Well, I can’t argue with the person who made this possible in the first place.
“So, did I miss anything exciting while I was gone?” Joaquin asks. “Besides you rendezvousing with Chris Pavlenko.”
“Oh, plenty,” I reply. “I went to work. Binged three seasons of Gilmore Girls, and watched Nurse Oatmeal try to take a skunk in a fight. Thrilling stuff.”
Joaquin snorts, swirling the straw in his cup. “Did she win?”
We look down at where she’s given up on trying to snag a French fry and has flopped onto the floor and presented her belly for pets instead.
“She got a few intimidating barks in,” I reply, leaning down to give her the attention she so desperately needs. “But then the skunk just sprayed her and bounced.”
I’ll never forget that smell. Like the love child of a rotten egg and a McDonald’s dumpster.
“Dirty game,” he says with a snort, waiting until his laughter has subsided to peer up at me with a more ominous expression. “Hear anything from Sarah Lawrence yet?”
“No,” I reply with an attempt at a nonchalant shrug.
Not that I’ve been counting the days since I found out I was waitlisted at my dream school—but if I had, it’d be seventeen. Hope started fading over break, when I realized I only have three weeks left to either put down a deposit at one of the schools I actually got into or risk my entire future on a school that may not want me.
No pressure.
“It’ll come,” Joaquin is quick to reassure, knocking his knee against mine. “And if not, you’ve still got Rutgers.”
My smile is as stiff and awkward as the thought of Rutgers makes me feel. The day I got my acceptance email was the happiest I’d seen Mami in months. She may have dropped out her junior year after she discovered she was pregnant with me, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing Rutgers’ praises. And there are plenty of pros, more than any of the other schools I got into.
But I can’t shake the nagging feeling that the only reason I can see myself there is because it’d make her proud.
Mami wasn’t over the moon about Sarah Lawrence, at least not the way I was. The campus, the theater program, the city. The chance to live somewhere new and reinvent myself was so intoxicating I’d filled out an application the second we got home from our visit. All Mami saw was the distance between here and New York, making it seem like I’d be flying across the country instead of just hopping to the next state over. But no other place has given me that all-consuming, have-to-be-there feeling like Sarah Lawrence did.
There’s nothing wrong with Rutgers, really. They even have a solid theater program. The biggest problem is that more than half our class will be there next year. College is supposed to be about discovering yourself, finding new friends, yadda yadda. How am I supposed to do that when I’m only twenty minutes from home and surrounded by the same people I’ve known my entire life?
“Right,” I reply, brushing off the post-grad-plan cloud that’s been hanging over me for seventeen days, twelve hours, and forty-five minutes, and focus on the more important task at hand: trying slushies from restaurant number two. Limeade and watermelon from Talk Frosty to Me.
While Joaquin combines our—unfortunately mediocre—slushies, I pause, struck by how…different he looks. Besides the bold fashion choices, everything else about him is a stock-photo-worthy image of your classic high school spring breaker. An unfairly even tan, freckles dotting the bridge of his nose, and the smell of salt water and suntan lotion rolling off him in waves.
Something tugs at my heart, a weird, empty type of sadness as I dwell on the fact that I should’ve been on the beach with him, sampling slushies by the ocean instead of at my dining room table.
“Five. Nothing special,” Joaquin says after a lukewarm final sip. I jot down his ranking. “So, how was your mom’s Vegas extravaganza?”
As if on cue, the front door bursts open and Nurse Oatmeal springs into action, barking at top volume as she races to greet whoever just walked in.
Mami comes barreling into the kitchen with an armful of shopping bags, wearing the most god-awful cheetah-print jumpsuit I’ve ever seen.
“Hello, party people!” She greets both of us with a kiss on the cheek before setting her bags on the ground.
“Did you hit big?” I ask, eyeing the Chanel shopping bag on her arm.
She scoffs, rolling her eyes as she grabs a seltzer water from the fridge. “Lost three hundred bucks. Don’t gamble when you’re older, kids,” she warns before taking a long sip. “It’s a scam.”
While Mami quenches her thirst and Nurse Oatmeal inspects the bags on the floor, I scan the entryway for any sign of her travel companion. “Where’s Doug?”
The whole reason Mami was even in Vegas was to celebrate her latest fling’s divorce anniversary. Who the hell celebrates getting divorced?
“Dave is at his place,” Mami replies, emphasizing his name. In my defense, he looked like a Doug. “We, uh…didn’t work out.”
Joaquin gives her a sympathetic frown, while I hold back an eye roll. I saw that coming from a mile away. When Mami asked me earlier this year if I’d be okay with her slowly dipping her toes into romance again, I’d insisted on helping her take a new set of photos for her dating profile. It’s been over a decade since she and Papi split, and almost as long since either of us have seen him. No one deserves to be swept off their feet more than she does.
But when I was helping her apply winged eyeliner for the first time, I didn’t think the next six months would pass in a blur of dozens of different nondescript men hanging out in our living room every other week. We already rarely see each other thanks to her new job as an overnight ER nurse. Most days we’re on opposite timelines—her fast asleep when I get up for school in the morning and vice versa. With her days off now reserved for dates, I’m lucky if Mami and I can get a single night alone together every week, if I even see her at all. For years it was just the two of us, holding on to each other like lifelines, and now I’m off at sea alone.
I’d been talking about my own spring break plans for months when Doug—sorry, Dave—sprang the weeklong trip to Vegas on Mami. A weeklong trip that happened to be at the exact same time as my spring break. With my abuela down in Virginia and Doña Carmen off at a church retreat for a few days, Mami begged me to stay home and watch Nurse Oatmeal. Or at the very least bring the dog with me. Because, of course, their hotel and travel weren’t refundable.
But mine were.
Every potential dog sitter already had spring break plans of their own, the local pet hotel banned Nurse Oatmeal last year after she bit someone, and the Airbnb Joaquin and I booked had a strict no pets or late cancellation policy, so the decision was made for me.
Spring Broke was supposed to be perfect. Every year, Cordero High seniors flock to Wildwood—a resort town in South Jersey far away enough from Elmwood that parental supervision is minimal, but close enough that Herbert’s engine wouldn’t crap out on us halfway there.
Spring break in Wildwood is as essential to the senior year experience as existential dread about your future. After nearly four years, it was our turn to feel like the protagonists in a Disney Channel movie. Beach volleyball and bike rides on the boardwalk and finally using the fake IDs we spent all of our birthday money on last year.
But just because my mom decided to wreck my plans didn’t mean Joaquin should suffer. He’d insisted that he was fine with canceling his trip too—since we are co–dog parents—but he couldn’t hide his disappointment. Spending a week at a beach house alone isn’t ideal, but it’s not like he’d have to search hard for company. Most of our class was staying in the same budget-friendly block of rentals as us, and, unlike me, Joaquin never had trouble making friends. Within ten minutes of me officially backing out, he was making plans to go boogie boarding with his friends from the baseball team.
Mami sits down beside me, not clocking the pissed look on my face as she helps herself to a sip of my third slushie. “Did you have fun while I was gone?” she aims the question at me, even though we both know my disrupted plans were the exact opposite of fun.
“Just worked,” I mumble, the annoyance from her wrecking my spring break making the limeade slushie taste bitter.
Mami stiffens, clearly sensing my irritation, but doesn’t call me out on it. Instead, she grabs her bags and heads for the stairs. “I’m going upstairs to unpack and shower. Let me know if you two need anything, all right?”
I give her a noncommittal nod, waiting until she’s gone before slumping in my seat. “Looks like it went as well as I thought it would,” I say, answering Joaquin’s earlier question from before she arrived. “So, was Spring Broke everything we dreamed it would be?” I ask him, eager to switch to a less frustrating topic.
“Not exactly,” he replies with a coy smile. “Kinda hard to live up to the dream when half of it isn’t there.” Beneath the table, he nudges his foot against mine.
“Please tell me you and the guys didn’t spend your entire break playing video games.” Joaquin and his teammates have a one-track mind when it comes to video games. They see a TV, they sit, they play. For hours, unless someone comes along and offers them food. Then they learn to multitask.
“Not exactly,” he repeats. His smirk is even wider this time, like a mischievous imp.
“Stop being cryptic.” My leg hoists up to nail a kick against his shin, but he catches my ankle before I can make contact. Seriously, what is up with his reflexes today?
The mood shifts after he releases my foot, his teasing smile falling away. The color starts to build in his cheeks, as rosy as our cherry-stained tongues.
I’ve seen this expression before. It’s the same one from when he told me he had a crush on our ninth-grade homeroom teacher, Ms. Woodsen.
“Oh my God.” I lunge out of my seat. “You met someone!”
He doesn’t say a word, keeping his eyes on his remaining nuggets, but the silence speaks volumes.
For the shortest blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-moment, his lips tug into a smile. And that’s all I need to know that I’m absolutely right: Joaquin has a crush.
“I knew it!” I shout, slamming a triumphant fist on the table.
My response soothes whatever nervous energy has built up in him, his smile blossoming into a full-on grin as I shove his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you tell me?!” He bats my hands away, but it doesn’t wipe that dopey smile off his face. The boy has it bad. “Is it someone from school? That girl from the track team who’s always asking you if you like documentaries?”
“No, not her. It is someone from school, though,” he answers after a beat, going back to avoiding my eyes again.
“That could be a lot of people.” One person comes to mind, someone he might hesitate to tell me about. “You’re not getting back together with Chelsea, are you?”
Despite being a hopeless sap with a penchant for cheesy love songs, thanks to his intense baseball schedule, Joaquin’s only relationship was a month-long fling with Chelsea Sanchez sophomore year. A fling that came to a crashing halt when Chelsea dumped him in front of half the school because he was “too focused on sports to deserve her.” Which is bullshit if you ask me.
“God no, no, definitely not,” he reassures with a grimace, waving his arms to clear the air of that accusation. That doesn’t do much to settle my nerves. Other than Chelsea, who else could it be?
“It’s Tessa…Hernandez.”
Oh hell to the mother fucking no.
“Oooh.” My smile might be convincing, but the crack in my voice ruins the façade. Everything comes together—the shyness, the lack of eye contact. This doesn’t not make sense. Tessa and Joaquin would be a match made in cliché heaven. With Joaquin going to the local technical school after graduation to follow his late electrician father’s footsteps and Tessa going to Rutgers, they wouldn’t even have to deal with some dramatic over-the-summer breakup due to long distance.
The only problem is Tessa is the worst.
Tessa Hernandez has been at the top of the social pyramid since elementary school. Maybe even since birth. Popular, pretty, and loaded as hell, she’s had people scrambling to be in her orbit for as long as I can remember. Being in Tessa Hernandez’s inner circle means summers at her abuelo’s villa in Punta Cana and winters skiing at their Colorado chalet. Dinners with private chefs and shopping sprees charged to an Amex with a sky-high limit. And she’s not small-town beautiful, either. She’s the real thing—thick, silky dark brown hair, legs for days, and glowing, blemish-free brown skin. The type of girl you wouldn’t be surprised to see on the cover of a magazine years after you last saw her.
While she has enough admirers to start up a fan club, thanks to her overly strict dad, she’s never truly been on the market. Sure, she’s had her down-low hookups here and there, but until her crabby older sister, Julia, starts dating, Tessa’s strictly off-limits.
Or, she was, until Julia went social-media official with her boyfriend last week—the one time anyone at Cordero cared about a college student’s dating life. And thus, the floodgates have officially opened. The race for Tessa Hernandez’s heart is on.
Watching Joaquin compete in the Tessa Hernandez Hunger Games would be bad enough. What makes it worse is our—well, my—history with her. My first, and only, relationship lasted a whopping fifteen days freshman year. In retrospect, Danny and I were never meant to be. It was awkward enough that he was Joaquin’s teammate, but besides being in the same bio class, Danny and I basically had nothing in common. Still, that didn’t make finding out that he hooked up with Tessa Hernandez at a party barely two weeks into our relationship hurt any less.
And now Joaquin has a crush on her.
“I know what you’re thinking, and I swear, I have a shot,” he says, holding his hands up in defense of my judgment. “We ran into each other and got to talking and she seemed…I dunno…sweet. She made me dinner one night, and we went roller skating on the boardwalk, and talked for hours, and on the last day we watched the sunrise together, and it was…really, really nice.”
By the time he finishes and gulps for breath, the blush on his cheeks has traveled down to his collarbone. The spark never leaves his eyes, not for a second.
“That’s uh…” I take my time, knowing I should choose my words carefully.
It’s not that I mind that he met someone. Boys like Joaquin are hard to come by. Sweet. Thoughtful. Doesn’t smell like a wet sock. Watching him and Chelsea make out every lunch period the month they were together was stomach turning, but after that mess he deserves something good. A cookie-cutter romance that doesn’t end with him getting his heart broken in front of the entire school.
But couldn’t he have picked anyone else?
“Ive, I promise, she really is different. She’s not…y’know…”
“Still an asshole?”
I bite my tongue the second the words slip free. Tessa is a…delicate subject. Something we skirt around or avoid because the wound still feels fresh four years later. Obviously, I was way more pissed at Danny than I was at her, but I’m sure she knew that we were together. It was front-page news that someone on the illustrious baseball team—one of the better players at that—had decided to grace a nobody like me with his presence. According to Danny, the hookup had been Tessa’s suggestion. Granted, he’s a piece of hot garbage and I take his word with a grain of salt, but now just the thought of Tessa makes me feel uncomfortable. Like one wrong step could make me snap.
And I’m very close to snapping.
“Ive…” That’s the only thing Joaquin can think to say. My name. But he says it with those stupid expressive eyes and his stupid pouty face and even though I’m pissed, I can feel the ice around my heart begin to thaw.
“Sorry.” Uncrossing my arms is the first step. Followed by unclenching my jaw. The final piece, making it seem like I’m not about to explode, is too much to tackle yet. “So…you said”—you fell for the Wicked Witch of the West—“you guys ran into each other?”
The question is tense, my voice unsteady, but Joaquin lowers his guard. There’s a strange boyishness to him as he tugs at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt, the color in his cheeks fading from Flamin’ Hot Cheeto to bubblegum pink.
“Umm, yeah. On the first day. I was at the boardwalk and saw her just standing there. At first, I didn’t think it was her, since…well. She’s never by herself.”
It’s true. Tessa’s flanked by a minimum of two of her adoring fans around the clock. Her henchwomen probably take shifts guarding her while she sleeps.
“I thought she was lost, so I went over to ask if she needed help, and it was…freaky. She had makeup streaming down her face, and a bunch of tissues in her hands. At first I thought maybe someone had like…just died or something, so I started backing up before things could get awkward. But then she told me to stay…so I did.”
“And now you two are gonna run off to elope in Vegas like my mom and Dave?”
“Ha ha,” he replies with an eyeroll. “We’re saving that for the second date.”
“How chaste,” I grumble. “If you two are a thing now, does that mean she has to ride with us to school in the morning? Because she might break up with you as soon as she sees your back seat.”
“We’re not a thing.” He waves his hand dismissively. “Yet, I mean.”
“Did you kiss her?” I ask, even though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
He shrugs sheepishly. “No.”
“Did you try to kiss her?”
“No!” he replies while throwing his hands in the air. “I was respecting boundaries!”
Further proof that he’s an anomaly among our peers. A teen boy who thinks with his heart and not with his dick.
“I want to ask her to prom,” he says, sitting up straighter, his voice more confident. Like a general prepared to address his troops.
Except he’s asking for the impossible.
“You want to ask Tessa Hernandez to prom?”
It’s hard not to scoff. Prom season at Cordero High is sacred. The month after spring break is like a cotton candy sugar rush. Promposals in every hallway and empty classroom and rumors about who’s wearing what dress and how much they spent on it. Not to mention the school pep rally, which is less of an assembly and more of a school-wide rave, and senior skip day, then senior lock-in, two opportunities for us to get discreetly wasted on school grounds. But prom is the main event. Needless to say, it’s exhausting.
And with Tessa now officially on the market, she’s sure to be at the center of it.
“It can be romantic!” Joaquin says with genuine enthusiasm.
“Promposals? Romantic?” I reply skeptically. Promposals at Cordero High are lots of things. Over-the-top. Cringe-worthy. Capitalism in its purest form, as Anna would argue. But definitely not romantic.
“I know things usually get out of hand, but I have an idea!” Joaquin pauses to pull out his phone, opening the Notes app and scrolling through a list of items ranging from Write her name in the sky to Hire a flash mob. “Well, lots of ideas.”
Being a good friend means being supportive. And sometimes being supportive is saving your best friend from going bankrupt at eighteen over something that has a 90 percent failure rate.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask warily. Promposal season is cutthroat, high stakes. Stepping into the ring for Tessa’s hand in promtrimony means making enemies and an ass out of yourself.
“I do.” His voice is sincere, honest, and that’s even more terrifying. “When we were together at the beach, it was electric, Ive. Sparks, chemistry, all that stuff they talk about in those telenovelas you always made me watch.”
He made me watch them, but I don’t protest.
“But I can’t do this alone,” he continues. “Or, I could, but it would probably suck. But if I had help from the master of making magic happen behind the scenes…”
Oh no.
“N—”
“Please, Ive,” he begs before I can respond. He even takes it one step further, sliding onto his knees, hands clasped together in prayer to his almighty God: Ivelisse Santos. “I promise, promise, promise I’ll never ask you for anything else again. And I’ll buy you lunch for a week—two weeks!”
His sales pitch stalls long enough for him to inch closer to me, resting his chin on my knee, gazing up at me with those sweet bunny eyes. “Pretty please,” he says again, this time barely louder than a whisper.
For the second time in an hour, I feel an overwhelming urge to say no. But turning down your best friend is way harder than turning down someone from chem that you barely know. I’ve already disappointed Joaquin once this month by bailing on our trip. And every year after spring break, we hardly see each other. Baseball season goes into full swing—especially now that they’re moving on to the championships—and I’m usually tied up with running tech for the spring play—a fact he’d reminded me of by praising me as the “master of making magic happen behind the scenes.” Which is correct, but still a dirty move. With Joaquin and Isabella planning to spend this summer in Puerto Rico with their mom, these last few weeks of the year are starting to feel more like a ticking time bomb to goodbye than the most “carefree time of my life.”
Spring break was supposed to be our last hurrah. Neither of us said it, but it was always there in the fine print of the high school rulebook. Everything about us—where we are, who we are—is going to change in a few months.
This may not be the prom season I imagined, but Joaquin is still a part of it, and at the end of the day that’s the only thing that matters. Weathering the last couple of months of senior year with the person who’s been in my life since the beginning. Even if it means having to help him win over someone I can’t stand.
“Okay.”
Joaquin looks up from his prayer hands, lips parted in shock. “Wait, seriously?”
“Your lack of confidence in me is very insulting.”
Instead of replying, he leaps to his feet, pulling me into a hug tight enough to make me lose my breath.
“You’re the best friend ever, you know that, right?”
“I do,” I reply quietly, patting him on the back and hoping my kindness doesn’t backfire.