looked away from Dean. I hadn’t meant to look so guilty, but it was an instinctual reaction. And he saw it.
“Does Mel know? Did you already tell her? Dre?”
“She guessed, and I couldn’t lie because she knows when I’m lying!”
“Damn it, Dre! It’s probably her! You said she doesn’t like me. You said she thought I owed it to the community to come out. What if she’s doing this to force me?”
Mel was capable of a lot of shady shit, but there was no universe where I believed she would’ve outed my relationship with Dean, no matter how pissed at me she was or how much she hated Dean. “No,” I said. “Mel wouldn’t do that.”
Tears welled in Dean’s eyes. “Someone did!”
“Not Mel. We’ll figure out who did it, but it wasn’t Mel.”
Dean was shaking his head and the tears were falling down his cheeks. “We won’t do anything.” He scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “I can’t, Dre. I can’t do this.”
I refused to believe what I was hearing. The words coming out of his mouth weren’t real. Dean was just scared. He didn’t mean any of it. “This is gonna be fine, Dean, I promise. We’ll work it out.” I tried to take his hand, but he yanked it away. “Dean?”
“We can’t see each other anymore, Andre. I’m sorry. This is the way it has to be.”
It wasn’t what Dean was saying that finally broke me, it was the way he was saying it. Like I wasn’t the boy he’d been kissing hours earlier, like I was nobody. “Dean . . .”
“My mother has worked too hard to get here for me to risk ruining her chance.”
“What about us? What about ruining us?”
Dean looked right at me, his eyes cold and dry. “There is no us. I’m sorry.” He unlocked the car doors and then turned to look straight ahead.
Everything collapsed. My life, the world, the whole fucking universe. I don’t remember much about stumbling out of the car or getting into the hotel or into my room.
I don’t know how long I sobbed into my pillow, but when I finally looked up, my nose was stuffed and my head hurt and I felt sick to my stomach. It was a dream, a nightmare. Dean hadn’t broken up with me. He hadn’t broken my heart. This was all a mistake. He was upset, but I knew if we could talk it out, I could change his mind.
I got out my phone and opened Promethean, but when I tapped on PrezMamasBoy, the app returned .
Dean
MY FATHER HAD prepared linguini with asparagus, mushrooms, and a layer of crispy Parmesan for dinner, to which my mother had invited Nora and her fiancé. It was my favorite meal that my father prepared, but that night it tasted like ash.
It had been two days since I had broken off my relationship with Dre and deleted my Promethean account, and I hadn’t received any further communications from Pyrogue or anyone else. I hadn’t seen anything on the news either that indicated Pyrogue had leaked what they knew to the press, though I refused to let down my guard.
Breaking up with Dre had been for the best, even if he hadn’t been able to see it. The obstacles in our way were simply insurmountable. We lived too far from one another, our parents were ideological opposites, and the very act of our being together could have threatened to put a man in the White House who would, as Mindy had succinctly put it, burn the country down. I’d read numerous dire predictions about what kind of country a Jackson McMann presidency could turn the United States into, and I didn’t want to live in any of them. So, yes, it was better this way.
And, yet, my favorite meal still tasted like ash.
“How are your college applications coming along, Dean?” asked Patrick. Where Nora was a fierce type-A with a wry sense of humor and the ability to get anything done, her fiancé was a soft-spoken computer analyst who worked for an insurance company.
“Nearly done. I finished Yale, UPenn, and Stanford this week. I like having options.”
My mother sat at the head of the table, our stately matriarch. The debate prep for her rematch with McMann and Rosario had been consuming the majority of what little free time she had, but she managed to mask her exhaustion well. “Dean toured Harvard not so long ago.”
“Do you have any idea what