Afters After, Junior Year
AFTERS AFTER, JUNIOR YEAR
Theo
Everything changes his junior year, and it is so incredibly inconvenient, being in love with his best friend. He first felt it, the flutter of a crush, their first day back in the studio after summer break. Evelyn had just returned from a summer-long dance intensive with blue hair cut short, a tattoo on her rib cage, and a girlfriend. Talia. When she peeled off her tank top during the break, exposing a cluster of music notes just below her sports bra, Theo short-circuited.
Hot.
Evelyn is hot.
“Tattoo?”
She pushed her bangs—also new—out of her face with a headband. “It’s the opening notes of ‘Vienna.’”
Billy Joel.
Her favorite song.
Also—or, perhaps, even because—his mom’s favorite song.
“How?”
Evelyn showed Theo another new acquisition from her summer without him, a piece of plastic with her face on it and a false identity next to it. “Talia knows someone.”
“Oh.”
Tattoo? Oh? Had a summer apart fucked with his brain chemistry, rendered him no longer capable of speaking to his best friend in more than one-word sentences? Pull it together. Did he miss her? Yes. Did he love her? Of course. But not like that. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face until his heart calmed down. Then Evelyn took his hands in hers, guided them to her hips and talked him through new choreography that wasn’t theirs yet but would’ve been, could’ve been, had he not been distracted by how little she was wearing, by blue hair skimming her collarbone, by that fucking tattoo to learn any of it.
Such a cliché Theo Cohen had become.
Six months later, Evelyn is blue hair no more, her relationship with Talia is no more, but that flutter is ever present. It’s a soft whisper in his ear when he watches her dance, a quiet yelp when her freezing feet press against his warm skin during a movie night at the bungalow, a punch in the stomach when she stops by his house after school with a lavender latte, Lori’s favorite, just because. Currently, it’s the laugh that accompanies listening to Evelyn butcher the lyrics of “Ribs” as she drives them from the dance studio to Afters. She finds street parking and doesn’t cut the engine of Pep’s 2008 Honda Accord until the song reaches its climax and fades to a soft conclusion.
“I’ll order for us,” Evelyn says, walking ahead to the window.
Theo claims a picnic table and sets up Survivor on his phone and wonders, as he so often does, would it really be so terrible to acknowledge this all-consuming flutter? To ask if she feels it too? What if she says no?
What if she says yes ?
He isn’t sure if he’s ready for either answer, so he doesn’t ask.
Theo never asks.
Instead, he leans into his attraction to anyone, everyone else. Always, it is physical. Casual. A summer fling with Nicolette Moore, a rising senior who wrangled elementary school kiddos alongside Theo, both student teachers at SHDA’s dance camp. Late nights kissing Yaz Gonzales, his AP Bio lab partner, in the back of her orange Nissan Murano until their lips were swollen. Maya Jones, a sophomore in jazz company with him, asked him to homecoming. Violet Parker, the junior class president, invited him to the winter formal. Girls, plural , liked him, and he isn’t sure when it happened, when being a male dancer became cool —but who is he to question this rebrand?
Evelyn slides into the bench across from him, and when he looks up from his phone, he doesn’t find his usual—two scoops of ube brownie in a cup with a cone on top. In front of him is an aluminum tray with maybe the equivalent of those two scoops in compostable sample cups arranged to spell a one-word question:
PROM?
Theo is so thrown by this question—by Evelyn asking this question. “Prom?”
Whatever his reaction is, he knows it’s wrong by the way her cheeks tint pink before she says, “It’s dumb. I know. But I already bought a dress and… we should go! As friends, obviously. It could be fun? Unless…” Her eyes meet his and see the answer to the question she hasn’t even asked. “Caro?”
He picks up a taste of ube brownie, the tail of the question mark, and nods.
“I told you.”
“She literally just asked today. After the littles left.”
Theo student teaches with Caroline Shapiro-Huang every Wednesday before his studio time with Evelyn. He takes a city bus to the studio straight from school and hangs out with tiny dancers between the ages of six and ten, leading warm-ups and tying tap shoes alongside Caro—a former dance friend, current real friend, suddenly cute friend. Caro’s dad has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and it’s nice talking to someone who gets it, but also not talking to someone who gets it.
Not that Evelyn doesn’t get it.
She loves Lori, too.
But she can’t— won’t —speak the worst possible outcomes out loud.
What if her doctors missed something?
What if it comes back?
What if she dies?
Caro’s dark sense of humor about it all is disarming. So is her melodic laugh, her obsession with I Love Lucy , how she has a silly nickname for every tiny dancer. Goose. Joker. Roo. Stella pays student teachers in the form of a generous tuition discount, but it’s so fun , just being around Caro and the kids, that Theo would honestly do it for free if he didn’t need the discounts because cancer is expensive.
“Was it at least this cute?” Evelyn asks, then reaches for one of the ube brownie samples and throws it back like a shot.
“What?”
She takes another. “The promposal?”
Theo shrugs. “She just asked.”
In the parking lot, they confirmed plans to hang out later tonight, like they have been every week for the past month. She honked at him after he walked away, toward the studio, toward the next two hours with Evelyn, and he turned to find Caro hanging out the window of her Ford Bronco and shouting a question at him across the parking lot.
Do you have a prom date?
His response, Do I? , triggered her super-specific laugh.
You do now.
Evelyn nods. “Cool.”
She has almost finished the P . Unsure what to say next, Theo swallows and opts to hand her an earbud. She takes it and they watch Survivor in silence. Is she watching it? Theo’s not. He’s stuck on the promposal written in his favorite ice cream flavor that she’s currently scarfing down one letter at a time, so confused because she seems disappointed, so confused because he likes that she’s disappointed… and does that mean that he should’ve said no to Caro? Is this Evelyn’s way of asking him if he feels the flutter, too? Because the answer is yes .
Yes.
Yes.
Yes .
Evelyn pauses Survivor before Jeff even snuffs a torch and he wonders if this is it, the moment that two best friends acknowledge whatever this energy is between them and everything changes. But then she stands and he barely registers that she looks especially pale in the lamplight glow of Afters before she hurls into the trash can and the timing of this random Evelyn vom is impeccable, truly. Theo holds her hair back while she hurls, the once-blue tips now faded teal, and not even watching her vomit his favorite ice cream squashes the flutter. Concern creases his forehead because it’s been happening more often, the vomiting. So even when she insists that she’s fine after, as she always does, Theo drives her to the bungalow, where they watch The Lizzie McGuire Movie until she falls asleep on his shoulder.
It’s not too late to still hang out with Caro.
Theo cancels on Caro.