moment my mother’s back was turned, Mindy shoved her drink into my hand. “Ugh, I need to puke. Where’s the nearest toilet?”
Again, I didn’t know whether Mindy was serious or joking, so I pointed her toward the downstairs bathroom and then took the opportunity to run upstairs so that I could check my messages. Dre had apparently been busy and bored.
DreOfTheDead: where’d you go
DreOfTheDead: dean
DreOfTheDead: dean
DreOfTheDead: dean??!
DreOfTheDead: kidding
DreOfTheDead: i’m just bored
DreOfTheDead: im waiting for my dad to give his speech at the rally
DreOfTheDead: ive heard it SO MANY TIMES
PrezMamasBoy: Hi, Dre. It’s Dean.
PrezMamasBoy: Sorry. My parents are having a dinner party, and the Maguires brought their daughter, and I guess they expected me to entertain her.
DreOfTheDead: dean arnault: babysitter
PrezMamasBoy: She’s hardly a baby. She’s our age.
DreOfTheDead: . . .
DreOfTheDead: did anyone else bring their kids????
PrezMamasBoy: No.
DreOfTheDead: so your mom invited a girl your age to the dinner and you havent figured out shes trying to set you up yet?
PrezMamasBoy: It is not a setup.
PrezMamasBoy: Either way, I only have a minute, so to answer your questions in the order you asked them:
PrezMamasBoy: Star Wars.
PrezMamasBoy: Hufflepuff, obviously.
PrezMamasBoy: Before the party I would have said flight, but now I wouldn’t mind invisibility.
PrezMamasBoy: And I guess I don’t have a preference. I’d be happy with either or neither. It’s all the same to me.
PrezMamasBoy: I’ll talk to you soon.
PrezMamasBoy: ~Dean
Thinking about Dre, hoping I’d get to see him again, was the only thing that was going to get me through this party. I plastered my fake smile back on and reentered the fray.
Dre
MY DAD WAS a rock star. He stood on the stage in front of an audience of thousands—it didn’t matter what state or city we were in—and he owned them from his first word to his last. But speaking in front of crowds like that hadn’t come naturally to him. Anyone who’d followed his career might’ve thought otherwise because he’d come out of law school as the kind of lawyer all the top firms in the country wanted to hire and had started making a name for himself working with the Nevada attorney general’s office. But if someone went way, way back, they’d find a shy high school boy—the son of Mexican immigrants—with acne and a stutter, who wouldn’t have been caught dead speaking in front of five people, much less five thousand. Becoming a rock star had taken time.
My dad didn’t call himself a rock star when he told the story. I’m pretty sure he didn’t think of himself that way either. Instead, when he told his story, he talked about finding his voice. How he’d become part of a punk rock band in high school, which had helped him confront his fear of performing. How he’d joined the debate team and had learned how to use his voice to fight for the issues he believed in. How he’d been ashamed of his heritage because it had made him different, and how he’d learned to embrace it because our differences are what make us stronger. How he’d come from a family that hadn’t been able to afford to send him to college, so he’d worked through his undergraduate degree and then through law school. How, as a lawyer, he’d used his voice to fight for those who couldn’t.
I’d heard him give this speech so many times I could’ve given it myself. But it wasn’t me people loved, it was my dad. And I guess I couldn’t blame them because I loved him too. He was goofy and embarrassing, and I didn’t care how many bands he was in when he was my age, the man couldn’t sing, but he was still pretty great. Most of the time.
I sat backstage waiting for the reporter from Teen Vogue to show up. They’d asked for an interview and I’d been cool with it, and Dad had okayed it so long as Jose sat in. Probably more to protect the campaign from me than me from the reporter. Jose was standing nearby, talking on his phone, waving his hands like he was swatting flies. The man was stitched together from scraps of anxiety, and I wondered what he would do when the election was over and there was nothing left for him to freak out about. Who was I kidding? Jose was the master of finding problems to freak out about.
I used the downtime to see if Dean had answered my very important questions, and I grinned madly when I saw he had. Kissing