to get to school and said school is, oh, fifteen minutes away, so we say our morning pleasantries on the road.
Annie begins to rage about the Homecoming game coming up as I pick up her coffee from the middle console and hand it to her. “Thank you—I mean can you believe my brother? He’s so stupid. Like, he knows he’s no match for the quarterback of this Friday’s Homecoming game, and yet he just bet fifty bucks on himself! That he’ll win!”
Quinn nods regally. “I hear the quarterback for this week’s team is massive,” they say.
“He’s only a junior! He’s the youngest first-string quarterback in that school’s history. His name is Milo something-or-another. Ugh, if only Redfair High didn’t have that doping scandal last year, we could actually play a local rival team. Instead, we’re paired with some team from Asheville and we’re gonna get pulverized.” Annie sighs and sips her iced latte. “No, correction: my brother is going to get pulverized.”
I frown. “Aren’t we supposed to play easy teams so we can win Homecoming games?”
“You’d think,” Quinn replies with a shrug. “I can’t spare the brainpower to worry about that. Garrett is still in the lead for Homecoming Overlord, and I’ve run out of ideas…”
And if Garrett wins Homecoming, then it’ll just make my life even worse, because I am not going to the dance with him with or without the title. But if I don’t, everyone will think I’m some kind of stuck-up snob. Is it too much to ask to go back to the days of when I was absolutely invisible?
In all honesty, I wouldn’t mind going to the Homecoming dance if I had someone—besides Garrett—to go with. Vance flashes in my head, and I wonder for a moment what he would look like in the Federation’s perfect shade of blue—
“Red light!” Quinn cries, and I slam on the brakes as the light changes.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
Annie, in the passenger seat, slowly releases her death hold on the oh-shit handle. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just have a lot on my mind.”
“Oh?” my friends ask.
The light turns green and I turn left onto the main drag that leads to the high school. “Well, Dad caught the apartment on fire and…I spent the weekend with Vance.” I try to make it sound nonchalant, because it’s not like anything happened. I just stayed in a house with a lot of rooms with my father and one of the most-hated guys on the internet. No biggie.
Just a normal weekend, right?
“WHAT?” they both cry.
“Dish,” Annie orders.
“You can’t hold out on us,” Quinn adds.
So as I turn in to the school, I tell them what happened. All of it. All of the boring bits—staying at his house, him asking me to read to him, the Saturday morning my dad and I taught Mr. Rodriguez how to make chocolate murder pancakes, the quiet afternoons when Vance would find me in the library while Dad was at the apartment overseeing the maintenance work and ask if he could join, the silence that settled between us that was warm and comforting, the night he took me home and I saw him—the real him, the him I remembered since the night of the ExcelsiCon Ball.
There you are, I had said.
I don’t tell them that part. Partly because it’s private, and partly because I don’t know what I meant. Did I mean that he finally had that curious look in his eyes that he had the night we first met, that half-cocked smile resting on the edge of his lips, the comfort between us where there may have been masks, but there were no secrets.
There you are, I had said, but what I meant was, I found you, finally.
When I finish the story, we’re way late to class, but Quinn and Annie haven’t budged from my car, and the parking lot attendant is making a beeline for us in his off-white golf cart.
My friends exchange a look—the same look—as if they’re in agreement.
“You’ve got it bad.” Annie breaks the news to me.
A blush creeps across my face. “What? No, of course not. Why would I?—”
Quinn puts a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got it really bad.”
My shoulders droop. “Oh balls. I do, don’t I?”
They nod severely. “And we need to get to class before we get written up again. I can’t go to Homecoming if I have after-school detention. Do you have the emergency bagel?”
“It’s a day old.” Annie nervously takes it out of her bookbag, but I grab