In October, the high school’s hallways get covered with banners for the homecoming game and dance. This year’s had the same severe font as last year’s, which Luke, Will, and I had made fun of for making the dance seem like a mandatory military draft we planned to dodge. I wanted to make fun of the dance with them again, but I barely saw them outside of school anymore because they were at football practice all the time. I saw them pretty much all day during school, but they mainly talked about football and it just wasn’t the same.

At lunch they’d tell stories about what happened at practice the day before. They’d both experienced these events in real time, so I didn’t get why they were even telling the stories in the first place. I mostly just sat back and observed them while I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When the guys brought up that they were all going to the homecoming dance with some girls from Emma’s group, I almost choked. “Wait, what?”

They claimed they were all just going as friends. Since when were they friends with those girls? Did they talk online? Did they call each other on the phone? When was the orientation held where everyone announced it was time to start having friendships with girls outside of class projects?

Whatever. I didn’t care that I wasn’t roped into their new, generic posse of kids I barely knew. Something about them playing football made me even more removed, more distant, more certain that I was different from all of them. They were just normal, boring high-schoolers; every day with them was a rerun of a TV show I’d already seen. I was writing a movie. I was fixing my face with medicine strong enough to mutate a baby. I had a girl outside of school none of them knew about.

On Saturday afternoon Mom forced me to go over to Luke’s house, where their group was taking pictures before going to the homecoming dance, even though I wasn’t going. I had better things to do than awkwardly stand around the gymnasium floor on a Saturday night watching Sam and Patrick try to entertain a bunch of girls by acting like animals in heat.

When I’d said I was going to stay home, Mom had said, “Kevin!” and I’d shrugged. Then she’d said, “Honey, what do you think? He only gets one sophomore homecoming dance.”

Dad had bent down the corner of his newspaper and said, “Whatever he wants to do is fine. Do whatever makes you happy, Kevin.”

I’d drawn a blank. Lying flat on my bedroom carpet thinking about Alex would probably concern my parents, especially if I demonstrated the open-casket pose that was, honestly, just the most comfortable way to do that.

Mom said I could skip the dance if I went over to Luke’s for pictures, and she told me I should shave so I looked nice. My probably-below-average testosterone levels mean I shave about once every two months, and doing it with acne is like running a lawn mower over a pile of water balloons. I didn’t want to look at my face, so I shaved with my eyes focused on my bathroom sink and cut myself a dozen times and had to dab the cuts with toilet paper for fifteen minutes until they scabbed over. I covered my face in moisturizer and tried to think about how nice it would be when the afternoon was over and I could go back to my room by myself.

When I walked into Luke’s house, I saw Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick pretending to box each other and doing impressions of football coaches I didn’t know, plus four of the God Squad girls standing on the deck taking pictures of themselves. I knew who they were — Lauren Gordon, Jen Evans, Veronica Wesson, and Haley Jackson — since I’d gone to school with them since second grade, but I didn’t really know them at all. I probably wouldn’t be able to identify any signature trait or article of clothing if one of them got kidnapped. They were bland background characters defined only by their snobbish blond-haired suburban Christianity. I’d spent thousands of hours in the same building as them, and everything remotely interesting about them could be written on a gum wrapper: Lauren cried when she’d get a grade lower than 90, Jen played either soccer or volleyball, Veronica was obsessed with adding more recycling bins to the school even though it was clearly only about puffing up her college application, and there was a rumor that Haley’s dad was an extra in the rave scene of The Matrix Reloaded, but how was anyone supposed to verify that?

Seeing those girls outside of school felt wrong. I thought if I tried to touch them, my hand would pass right through.

Luke’s dad slapped my back and shook me out of the trance I was in. “Where’s your suit, Kev?”

“I’m gonna sit this one out,” I said.

“Just here for the free snacks? I like it. Smart strategy. Help yourself, since Mrs. Rossi made enough food for the navy. Then get in there with the guys and we’ll take some pictures.”

I nodded at the guys and they waved back at me. Patrick gave me a salute, and I think he did it unironically. What a jackass.

Mrs. Rossi was taking pictures with the flash on; plus it was bright outside; plus they had all the lights on in the house for some reason.

Nobody saw me walk down into the basement, where I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I looked at my face in the mirror for the first time in a while. Once I’d realized my face wouldn’t be immediately healed by Accutane, I’d started closing my eyes when I brushed my teeth and walking straight into the shower to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. But now there were cameras firing off from every angle upstairs, so I figured I might as well bite the bullet and see what I looked like.

It was bad. Even apart from all the shaving cuts. I don’t know if it was just a flare-up or stress or if the Accutane was still making it worse, but in addition to my usual epidermal nightmare, I had a bunch of cauliflower-looking whiteheads sprouting up around my nose. I knew I shouldn’t, but I squeezed them all out. It was so satisfying to drain every last bit of white goo out of them. Once I started I couldn’t stop, in the zone like a pro athlete, focusing entirely on cleaning out every pore. They all bled, and I dabbed my face with toilet paper until the wounds congealed and I looked like I’d been stung by forty bees.

The guys and those girls were laughing upstairs. I didn’t want to go back. I went over to Mr. Rossi’s DVD library and looked through for stuff that Alex and I might like. I found a couple of the other movies I wanted to see — The Virgin Suicides and Girl, Interrupted. I was sure Alex liked them, or if she’d never seen them, I could recommend them to her after I watched and analyzed them.

“Kevin? Yo, Kevin?” called Luke.

“Yeah?”

“Get up here. You need to get in the pictures.”

I brought the movies upstairs and stared at the floor, feeling and looking like a complete idiot. I was wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts beside a row of girls in colorful dresses and guys in suits. I looked like a little brother no one wanted around.

“Perfect,” said Mrs. Rossi, taking a picture every second. “Now the gang’s all there.”

I tried to smile, but I kept looking over at the guys and the flower thing pinned to their jackets that matched the color of their dates’ dresses. In the same spot I had little dots of blood on my T-shirt that matched the color of my molten face.

It was like wandering through a dream, like there was a force field between them and me. Sam put his arm around my shoulder and smiled for the camera and gave a big thumbs-up. I made a confused face at him and thought, Why is Sam putting his arm around me like we’re friends?

Jen Evans said, “Hey, Luke, did you hear Emma’s going with Kyle Hornchuck?”

“Yeah, it’s cool. I’m going to the dance with Haley, you know?”

He put his arm on Haley Jackson’s shoulder. Everyone laughed. I watched them the way a scientist observes spores in a petri dish.

“Kyle’s, like, such a dick,” said Veronica Wesson, smacking gum.

“If he’s mean to Emma, we’ll beat the shit out of him!” shouted Patrick. He’s the kind of cocky asshole who thinks he can cuss in front of adults.

They all cheered and laughed. Veronica said, “Dunk his head in a toilet for me.” She stood on her tiptoes to grab the back of Sam’s head and mimic drowning him in a toilet. Everyone went wild.

I moved over beside Will and tapped his arm. “Want to ditch this and watch movies at my house?” I whispered.

“No?” he said. “The dance is in twenty minutes. I already asked Lauren to go with me, bought the tickets, got this suit, and took all the pictures. I can’t . . . I can’t even tell if you’re serious.”

I shrugged. He walked out the front door to get into the cars with everyone else. Sam and Patrick had their licenses already and were driving. Once they’d all left, Mr. Rossi gave me a grocery bag to carry the movies in and I took it outside, dangled it over my handlebars, and pedaled my tiny bike out of their neighborhood and toward mine, the sack of DVDs knocking my knee.

While I rode, I thought about how Mr. Rossi had looked at me. It felt off, like he thought something was wrong with me. He didn’t ask why I wasn’t going to the dance. I kept wondering what Mr. Rossi thought about me, if he’d kept watch of me out the corner of his eye, worried I was some unhinged freak who might go nuts.

When I made it home, I tossed my bike into the wall of the garage, went up to my room, lay down, and thought about what Alex and I would do for homecoming if we went to the same school. We wouldn’t go. We’d have a night in for ourselves. We’d be such an established couple there’d be no need to perform for anyone, to put on a stupid public show of our relationship for our classmates. We’d have nothing to prove and we wouldn’t care about impressing anyone. We’d stay in my room wearing pajamas, building a fort, laughing at inside jokes we’d never tell anyone else.

Alex probably had plans to be at home in her room that night, too. Listening to introspective music and reading important novels, being quiet and thoughtful and alone, instead of at a school dance straining to hear some kid from chemistry scream over blaring pop music about which kid had been seen with a visible boner crease in his khakis and trying to avoid the sight of random kids from the cafeteria grinding their penises and butts together.

Her phone must have been right next to her. Mine was charging on my nightstand. All I needed was a ten-digit code to bring her voice into my room. It was like I was standing on the bank of a river and could just barely make out her shape across the water. I knew she was right there, and I knew she could see me, but not having her phone number — plus being fifteen and not having a license in a suburb where you have to drive everywhere — kept us apart. Next appointment, I’d ask her for her phone number. I’d get my act together. I had to.

I went to sleep wondering if she was thinking about me.