Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“I don’t really—”
“Just as friends. I promise. I have zero moves and a strong fear of disco balls.”
She almost laughed. It caught in her throat and came out softer, a half-sound that surprised her, because she hadn’t made a sound that wasn’t fine or okay or I’m going to bed in four days.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Just as friends.”
They danced. Or rather, they stood on the basketball court and swayed in the approximate rhythm of the music while Reid talked about California, which he’d just moved to, and his grandfather, who was a force of nature, and the chocolate fountain, which he was genuinely concerned about. He was easy to be around. He asked questions without pressing. He made her laugh twice, real laughs that felt foreign in her mouth, and he kept a respectful distance that told her he’d clocked the sadness and had decided to stand next to it without trying to fix it.
Midway through the second song, the gymnasium doors opened.
Katy didn’t register them at first. She was facing Reid, her back to the entrance, and the music was loud and the fog machine was working and the disco balls were throwing their scattered light across everything. She didn’t see the doors open, or the woman who walked through them in a black dress that cost more than every prom dress in the room combined, or the man beside her in a charcoal suit with his hand on the small of her back.
Reid did.
His focus went over Katy’s shoulder to the entrance, and his eyebrows rose. “Huh. Didn’t know we had more chaperones.”
She turned around.
The room lurched. The actual, physical room, the gymnasium floor with its painted lines and its scattered light, lurched under her feet, and she felt Reid’s hand close around her elbow, keeping her upright, and she heard him say her name maybe, but the sound was distant, underwater, because Julian Ventura was standing in the doorway of her high school prom with Dionne Gates on his arm.
He wore the suit like armor. Charcoal, fitted, tailoring that whispered money so softly you had to lean in to hear it. His dark hair was pushed back. His eyes caught the disco ball light and fractured it into cold sparks. He stood in the doorway with her sister beside him, and Dionne’s hand was curled around his forearm, proprietary, and her dark hair was perfect and her black dress was perfect and she was everything Katy was not: poised, expensive, belonging.
Katy’s green thrift-store dress. Katy’s red hair, loose and unpinned, the one thing she’d changed. Katy’s plastic cup of melted-crayon punch and her twelve-dollar cotton skirt and her heart, which she’d walked in here with in pieces and which was now dust.
He brought her sister to her prom.
The man who’d kissed her in a garden and put his hands on her skin and said I don’t know like it was a confession, the man who’d faced her across a white tablecloth four days ago and called her love a fixation and told her she was nothing. That man had put on a suit and walked into her high school gymnasium with her own sister on his arm. And Dionne was smiling. Not the warm, sisterly smile she’d worn at Haven. A different smile. A smile that said I won.
“Katy.” Reid’s voice was low, close to her ear. “Do you need to leave?”
She couldn’t speak. Her throat had closed. She stood on the basketball court in the scattered light and the tears that had been locked behind her ribs for four days began, finally, to rise.
“Katy. Right here.”
Reid’s brown eyes were serious when she met them, his hand still on her elbow, and she could tell he understood. Not the details. Not the history. But the shape of it. The girl in the cheap dress. The man in the expensive suit. The sister who’d brought him here like a trophy.
“I need air,” she managed.
“I’ll take you.”
JULIAN SPOTTED HER the moment he walked in.
Green dress. Red hair, loose, falling past her shoulders. He’d never seen it down. At Haven it was always pinned, the copper catching the three-fifteen light, and seeing it loose was encountering a different girl, one who existed outside the terrace and the polyester uniform and the three-week window of his life when he’d been stupid enough to let her close.
She was dancing with someone. A man. Tall, brown-haired, standing close to her with the easy confidence of someone who’d never had to earn a room’s attention. The man’s hand was on her waist, respectful, and Katy was tilted up toward him with an expression Julian couldn’t identify from across the room, but his body identified it, because his hands clenched at his sides and a surge of heat went through him that had nothing to do with the gymnasium’s broken ventilation.