Chapter Three
elves snuck in over break. They’ve sprinkled glitter glue and confetti over every surface they could find. The halls are covered in crepe paper and neon posters advertising nominations for prom court and pre-prom limos that still need one more person to make the down payment. One very artful flyer outside the gym asks if anyone has access to a horse-drawn carriage. Somehow every room looks like the aftermath of a tsunami, though the real theatrics haven’t even begun.
By eight a.m. sharp, there’s a crowd forming in the hall outside the cafeteria seconds after the homeroom bell rings, everyone clamoring to get closer to the front.
“Did someone get caught with weed again?” I ask Joaquin as we linger in the back of the crowd. Fortunately, he’s tall enough for the both of us. He can get a bird’s-eye view of the action without even going on his tiptoes. Meanwhile, I have a fantastic view of the dandruff in the hair of the guy in front of me. Since I can’t see what’s going on anyway, I dig out my phone to refresh my email for the third time today, but my inbox is as empty as ever. No emails from Sarah Lawrence.
Joaquin’s fresh tan pales. “Shit…”
Before I can ask him what’s going on, the opening notes of a song I’ve only ever heard in laundry detergent commercials begins to blare over the intercom.
“I believe in miracles…”
Oh no.
I’m able to watch the horror unfold thanks to my dandruff-y friend holding up his phone to record the spectacle.
A boy I vaguely recognize from the basketball team is decked out in a lime-green tracksuit, holding a rose between his teeth and slowly making his way to the real center of attention: Tessa Hernandez.
“Where you from, you sexy thing,” he mouths along with the lyrics unironically, pulling the rose from between his teeth to give to Tessa. Gross.
There’s a smattering of giggles as Tessa accepts the rose with a tight smile before handing it off to one of her minions when he turns his back. The volume of the song dips as he spins back around with a poster board in hand, as glaringly neon green as his outfit. He two-steps his way back to Tessa before sinking down onto one knee, holding up the sign for the eager crowd to see.
I’LL BELIEVE IN MIRACLES IF YOU GO TO PROM WITH ME
The crowd eats it up, gasping and hooting as if we don’t already know how this is going to play out.
To his credit, he does get Tessa to laugh. Whether it’s from amusement or condescension is unclear, though, and in this case, ignorance is his bliss. The crowd leans in as she pushes her freshly highlighted, dark brown hair over her shoulder. Joaquin starts chewing on his thumbnail—a nasty habit I thought he shook off years ago. Even I can’t help holding my breath as Tessa takes a step toward her first suitor of the season. The hall goes completely silent, except for the closing notes of the song and the click of Tessa’s designer ankle boots tapping on the tiled floor. Even through a cracked phone screen I can tell that he’s started to shake as she peers down at him with her signature sly smirk.
“Keep dreaming.”
An outsider might think we’d just found out classes were canceled for the rest of the year with the way everyone loses their minds. Gossip moves faster than the speed of light here—anyone who didn’t see this stunt will know in approximately six seconds.
“This is a freakin’ nightmare,” Joaquin mutters around his chewed-up thumb. “I knew people were going to move fast, but I didn’t think they’d be this fast.”
“It should be illegal to stage a promposal at eight a.m.,” I reply, pulling him out of the path of a gang of hollering boys.
Joaquin doesn’t pay me any mind, so focused I wouldn’t be surprised if steam started coming out of his ears. “I need to think of something. ASAP.”
“Chill, Quin.” I give him a reassuring shoulder punch as we start heading toward our lockers. No one’s in a hurry to get to class even though the final bell just rang. There’s no such thing as time during prom season. “Tessa’s gonna get a million promposals. Just—”
“Hey, Joaquin,” the woman of the hour herself says as she glides through the crowd to stand between me and my best friend.
“H-hey!” Sweat beads on Joaquin’s forehead as he whips around to face Tessa, subtly readjusting his jacket to cover the protein powder stain on his T-shirt. “How was the rest of your break?”
“Not bad.” She smirks like she’s holding back a secret, her voice as smooth as silk. “See you in third period?”
I can hear him audibly gulp. “Y-yeah. Totally. Wouldn’t miss it.”
Tessa gives him one last parting smile before brushing past me and into a nearby classroom. I hate to say it, but she smells incredible. If luxury had a scent, it’d be her.
Around us, a new round of commotion breaks out over this latest development. Tessa turning down a promposal and gracing Cordero’s baseball golden boy with a conversation he didn’t initiate? Stop the presses.
Joaquin is in a Tessa-induced trance, practically floating as he gazes longingly at the classroom Tessa went into, not noticing me even after I nudge my arm against his.
“See, you don’t have anything to worry about. She’s totally—”
He takes off before I can finish, calling, “Gotta go think of ideas. I’ll talk to you later!” over his shoulder.
“O-okay, bye,” I reply weakly, even though I know he won’t hear me.
So much for weathering these last few weeks together.
“This prom shit is going to kill me,” Anna announces as she storms onto the auditorium stage, almost knocking over a bucket of paint sitting beside Emily R., one of our sophomore tech crew members.
“My bad.” Anna gives Emily R. a thumbs-up before carefully navigating through the sea of brushes and cans.
Anna’s covered in a fine layer of hot-pink glitter. It nicely complements her purple overalls and rose-gold septum ring. Like Joaquin, vacation seems to have rejuvenated her. Her dark brown skin is glowing—even without the glitter—thanks to the facial she got with her mom at the day spa they visited over break.
And I can’t say I disagree with her about prom. We’ve only been back for a day, and the chaos is already at a hundred. At some point last night, we were both added to a group chat with over three hundred of our classmates to post photos of our prom dresses to ensure no one wore the same one. By fourth period, all-out war had broken out over whether Yesenia Gordon’s midnight-purple dress was too similar to Casey Zosnowski’s deep-violet dress. Jury’s still out.
I hand Anna a paintbrush once she’s stored her stuff backstage and knelt down beside me. We only have a couple more minutes before the drama club finish their warm-ups and come wreak their usual havoc. Getting anything done set-design-wise is basically impossible when you have high school divas demanding you adjust their spotlight at the same time.
“Did Chris ask you out again?” I ask, not glancing up from the bush I’m working on solo. We still have to finish painting our Italian countryside, build multiple doors and windows, and construct an entire balcony before The Taming of the Shrew’s opening night. We may have more tech crew members now than we had freshman year—for a grand total of six, including me and Anna—but we’re still way behind schedule.
“No, thank God. Some guy in my English class dedicated the sonnet we were supposed to write over break to Tessa Hernandez’s ‘cerulean eyes.’ Except he (a) didn’t even write a sonnet; it was just a list of ten things he likes about her, and (b) her eyes aren’t even cerulean! They’re brown!”
I wave my paintbrush at the clump of glitter stuck to the bridge of her glasses. “And the glitter?”
She dabs her glasses, rolling her eyes when her fingers come back hot pink. “That was from lunch. Guy gave his girlfriend a box that was supposed to ‘lightly shower her with confetti’ but it wound up going off like a pressure cooker. Glitter everywhere. Landed him detention for the rest of the week.”
Anna pauses, stiffening halfway through pulling her locs out of her face with a banana-shaped clip. “Wait. How did you know about Chris?”
“Because he showed up at Casa Y Cocina on Sunday and asked me too.”
Her jaw drops as she lets go of her hair to lean in closer to me. “He didn’t.”
“He did.” I finally tear my eyes away from my half-finished shrub to wipe my hands on my painting jeans. “Even used the same sign. He took your name off and everything.”
That gets a deep belly laugh out of her. “Men are trash. Absolute trash.”
“Agreed,” Emily R. says with a groan.
“You should keep your options open, though,” Anna says once her laughter has died down. “Chris is obviously a no, but you can have my brother if you want,” she teases.
Cool, my options are Chris Pavlenko and Anna’s fourteen-year-old brother.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’m staying away from all things prom.”
For now, at least. I’ll need to figure something out eventually, since Joaquin is dead set on going with Tessa. Joaquin and I have been a package deal for every dance of our high school careers, but Tessa’s prom limo is as exclusive as a bougie sushi restaurant in Manhattan. There’s no way in hell she’s letting me take up one of those seats. Having Tío Tony drop me off at prom sounds mortifying, and Anna hates capitalism so deeply she probably won’t be going. I can’t say the thought of skipping doesn’t sound appealing. If promposal season alone is this mind-numbing, I can only imagine the event itself.
“I’m just saying, you have options,” Anna continues, delicately removing her star charm bracelet and tucking it safely into her pocket before getting to work on her own shrub. Her confidence in me is flattering, but we both know I don’t have a line of suitors knocking at my door. “I know you’re going with Joaquin, but you deserve a date that makes you feel special.”
Except Joaquin does make me feel special. He’s the only one who laughs at my jokes and entertains me when I’m panicking. He sits through horror movies with his head buried in a pillow because he knows they’re my favorite, even though he can’t sleep for a week afterward. He claims he hates reading, yet he’s devoured every single book I’ve ever recommended. When we realized Herbert didn’t have an AUX outlet, he burned dozens of CDs with my favorite songs just so I’d always have something to listen to.
He’s my favorite person on the planet. And he’s falling for a girl I can’t stand.
And even if he wasn’t, going with anyone else isn’t exactly a possibility for me. I’m less of a wallflower and more like a fly on the wall—unnoticed and swatted at by those who do. And it’s for the best. I’ve seen the way my classmates chew people up and spit them out. I have no interest in making nice with the same people who judged my appearance the second a popular guy expressed interest in me. Shit like that wrecks a fourteen-year-old’s confidence.
After the Danny fiasco, I decided romance had to be off the table until college—that is, if I wind up at Sarah Lawrence. Which, according to my empty-as-of-ten-minutes-ago-inbox, remains up in the air. Rutgers’ campus may be huge, but with my luck the only people I’ll be meeting my entire freshman year will be the same people who I’ve spent the past four years avoiding. In which case, I can put off dating until my mid-twenties.
Plus, most teenage boys stink. Why would I want to go out of my way to spend more time with them?
“We’re, um…not going together, actually,” I mumble, half hoping she won’t hear me and move on.
But of course she does. Anna has bat-level hearing when it comes to gossip. “What?!”
“We should hurry up. The drama kids wi—”
“No, hold up. You don’t get to change the subject.” She waves her brush dangerously close to my nose. “Since when are you not going to prom with each other? You two do everything together.”
This implication may not be off base, but it gets under my skin nonetheless. It’s in her tone, the way she makes it sound like it’s a bad thing to have a person you hang out with all the time. Joaquin and I are not codependent. Seriously. He has his baseball friends, and basically everyone at this school is under his spell, and I have Anna, Mami (when she’s actually around), Nurse Oatmeal, the tech crew…well, sometimes, and…
I guess that’s kind of it.
I shrug, trying to play nonchalant. “He’s not obligated to bring me. He’s gonna ask someone else.”
“Who?” She’s fully abandoned productivity at this point, crossing her arms and gesturing for me to hurry up and spill.
If Joaquin is as set on speeding up this plan as he seems, it won’t be a secret for long anyway. But Tessa and Anna have an…interesting past. The two of them were capital B best friends—matching jewelry sets, joint birthday parties, finishing each other’s sentences. Our entire class knew about Anna even though she went to a different middle school. Anna and Tessa were as much of a two-for-one deal as Joaquin and I are.
On our first day at Cordero, everyone waited for Anna and Tessa to roll up, pinkies linked, and take ownership of the halls. But Anna never took her place as Tessa’s right hand. They wouldn’t even so much as acknowledge each other in the cafeteria. Rumors came and went—Tessa tried to hook up with Anna’s older brother, Anna blew off Tessa’s birthday sleepover for someone else’s, gossip ad infinitum—but nothing really stuck. Being friends with Anna then meant taking sides in a feud no one understood. And in those first few days of freshman year, social currency was all that mattered. So, we found each other and formed our own little Reject Club.
The urge to ask what went down between them has sat on the tip of my tongue since Anna waltzed into the auditorium during our freshman year production of Seussical and asked if I needed help with my Truffula Trees. But just the mention of Tessa’s name makes her scoff.
Needless to say, she wouldn’t react well to Joaquin’s crush.
“It’s kind of a long—”
The door to the auditorium bursts open and I breathe a sigh of relief. For once, the drama club is coming to my rescue. Except it’s not the overcaffeinated thespians I’m used to. They typically break into show tunes immediately. I can’t quite make out who it is, their face completely hidden by enough bouquets of roses that the local florist could retire.
“Ive!” the walking centerpiece shouts from across the room.
Dear Lord.
“Hey,” I call back weakly, setting my brush aside to help Joaquin before he drops one of the bouquets. “You’ve been busy.”
The four other members of tech crew—all, strangely enough, named Emily—flock to the edge of the stage to greet the reason our membership has gone up.
“Hey, Joaquin,” Emily R. and Emily S. say in almost perfect synchronicity.
“Do you need help?” Emily W. offers.
“Those are so pretty!” Emily Z. adds.
Joaquin has been an unofficial member of the tech crew since I joined freshman year. From stopping by to paint whenever he doesn’t have baseball practice, to helping us on trips to Home Depot for plywood, if he can lend a hand, he will. His reserved seat in the front row of every show is both a thank-you and a time-honored tradition. One that his many admirers must have caught on to this year.
He gives the Emilys a “ ’sup” nod before turning his attention back to the roses.
“Went after last period to grab these before practice,” he pants, so out of breath he might as well have run a marathon. His forehead is dripping sweat, the roses pressed to his chest now damp and crumpled. “Tessa’s already turned down five promposals.” His phone pings, and he pauses to scan the text that just came in. “Shit, six.”
The devil works hard but Tessa Hernandez’s simps work harder.
“I figured something out,” he continues as he hands half of the bouquets to me. They’re piled so high I can barely see over the top of them. “But it’ll have to wait until before class tomorrow.”
I gesture for the Emilys to focus on painting the cobblestone wall while I help Joaquin with setting the roses down on the lip of the stage, the perfect excuse for me to avoid the confused looks Anna keeps sending my way. So much for keeping Joaquin’s plan under wraps.
“Think you could do me a favor?” he asks once the roses are out of harm’s way.
I’m starting to dread this question. “Y-yeah, sure.”
“I need to run to practice. Coach’ll kill me if I’m late, but would you mind holding on to these? Abuela’s allergies are a bitch this time of year, so I don’t want to upset her.”
“You didn’t think of that before buying all of these?” Anna snaps, wearing a frown that could pierce stone.
Joaquin is either immune or too good-natured to be fazed. “Gotta go big if you want a shot with Tessa Hernandez,” he says with a shrug.
There’s a collective sharp inhale from the Emilys as Joaquin wipes his face with the edge of his T-shirt, giving all of us a glimpse of his well-defined stomach muscles. My nose wrinkles—not at Joaquin, but the uneasy feeling in my gut. It’s not the first time someone has gawked at Joaquin in my presence, but knowing your best friend is one of the hottest guys in school hasn’t gotten any less weird over the past four years.
Now less sweaty, Joaquin taps his fist against my shoulder. “Thanks again, Ive. You’re the best.”
Before I can process how I’m going to get these back home in one piece, Joaquin’s taking off the way he came. As soon as the door closes behind him, Anna pounces.
“Are you seriously going to help him ask out Tessa?”
She makes it sound like I’m helping him rob a bank.
Behind her, the Emilys deflate—their Joaquin Romero dreams crushed.
“He’s not asking her out; he’s asking her to prom,” I correct, avoiding her gaze by moving the roses off the stage and into the wings where they’ll be safe from the drama club.
“Right, because people only want to ask Tessa to prom because she’s such delightful company.” Every word drips with sarcasm.
“She could be, I don’t know,” I reply, not taking her bait.
Anna hops off the stage and stands right in my path. The face she gives me is so intense it shakes me to my core.
“Fine, yes, he wants to ask her out. Whatever.”
“Did something happen between them?” she asks, her voice quieter. Likely to avoid spreading any gossip to the Emilys. “Like…did they hook up or something?”
“Not really.” I shrug. “They hung out over break and Joaquin thinks there’s something there. Nothing concrete.”
That seems to soothe Anna’s concerns. “You know he’s asking for public humiliation, right? And you’re helping him do it, Miss I Don’t Want Anything to Do with Prom.” She punctuates the statement by pointing her finger against my shoulder.
Sometimes I regret befriending someone as brilliant as Anna. At least Joaquin is too much of a himbo to ever call me out on my bullshit.
“This is different,” I insist, pushing her finger away and walking around her.
“Uh, no, it is not different.”
Groaning, I take a deep breath. “It’s like being in tech crew,” I say while gesturing to our still-in-progress set. “I stand in the back, make it look like the trees are swaying in the breeze, and let someone else be in the spotlight for two hours. Just because I helped make it happen doesn’t mean I want to be an actor.”
Building sets isn’t a meaningless extracurricular for either of us. Unlike me, Anna has a set-in-stone future and a one-way ticket to study drama at NYU. We both know there’s a distinct difference between the people behind the stage and the ones on it.
Even so, Anna doesn’t seem convinced.
Before either of us can say anything else, the drama kids come barreling into the auditorium in a flurry of iced coffees and show tunes. Neither of us moves at first, eyes locked on one another until the drama supervisor starts barking out orders.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Anna mumbles, leaving me to pick up the pieces of Joaquin’s mess.