Chapter 5
THE GYMNASIUM SMELLED like fake fog and warm bodies and the particular chemical sweetness of a rented smoke machine working overtime. Katy stood near the punch table with a plastic cup in her hand and told herself she was fine.
She wasn’t fine. But the green dress was doing its job, and her hair was doing its job, and she was upright and present and not crying in a bathroom stall, so by the standards of the last four days, she was exceptional.
The theme was “Starlight Serenade,” which meant someone had stapled silver streamers to the ceiling and hung paper stars from fishing line and aimed three spotlights at a mirrored ball that sent scattered diamonds of light across the basketball court floor.
The DJ was playing a heavy bass line. A group of senior girls in sequined dresses were laughing near the photo booth.
Two boys from Katy’s English class were attempting a dance move that resembled a wrestling hold.
She sipped the punch. It was too sweet, the red kind that stained your teeth, and she held it against her chest like a prop because having something in her hands meant she didn’t have to figure out what to do with them.
“You look like you’re having a terrible time.”
The voice came from her left. She turned.
He was tall. Not Julian tall, not that specific height that had become her body’s calibration for every other man who walked into a room, but tall enough.
Brown hair, brown eyes, a face that was handsome in the easy, uncomplicated way of someone who’d grown up knowing he was handsome and hadn’t let it ruin him.
He wore a dark suit that fit too well for a high school prom, and he was gripping his own cup of red punch with the same careful, prop-like hold she was using.
“That obvious?” she asked.
“You’re standing at the punch table alone in a dress that’s too pretty for this gymnasium, and you haven’t moved in six minutes.” He smiled. It was a good smile, warm and unbothered, and it didn’t do a single thing to her nervous system. “I’m Reid.”
“Katy.”
“I know. You’re Dionne’s sister, right? I’ve seen you at Haven.”
She stiffened. Haven. The name struck her like a hand on a bruise, and she must have shown it, because his smile gentled.
“Sorry. Wrong topic?”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t fine. Nothing with the word Haven in it was fine. “I don’t work there anymore.”
“Got it. New topic.” He took a sip of his punch and made a face. “This tastes like melted crayons.”
“It really does.”
“Who authorized this?”
“The prom committee. They also authorized the fog machine, which I think is just a humidifier with ideas.”
His laugh was genuine, surprised, and she felt a loosening in her chest. Not warmth. Not attraction. Just the unclenching that happened when someone treated you like a person instead of a problem.
“Reid Jamieson,” he offered, extending his hand.
“Senator Jamieson’s grandson, if that matters to anyone here, which it shouldn’t but probably does.
I’m chaperoning. My grandfather’s on the school board and he volunteered me.
” He surveyed the dance floor with the amiable resignation of a man who’d been volunteered for things his entire life.
“I was promised there’d be a chocolate fountain. ”
“There is,” Katy said, and pointed to the far corner where the fountain was indeed gurgling, surrounded by a ring of strawberries and pretzels and one sophomore who was dangerously close to dipping his entire forearm. “Its structural integrity is questionable.”
“Everything about this event’s structural integrity is questionable.
” He was taking her in with a kindness she hadn’t expected, his brown eyes reading her face with an attentiveness that wasn’t hunger or heat but gentler.
Recognition, maybe. The expression of a person who’d learned to spot sadness in other people because he’d carried his own. “Do you want to dance?”
“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.
Katy was supposed to be alone. She was supposed to be miserable.
She was supposed to be the girl he’d left behind, the fixation he’d corrected, and instead she was standing on a basketball court in a green dress with her hair down and another man’s hand on her waist and she was laughing, and the sound of that laugh, even from forty feet away, even over the bass and the fog and the noise, struck him like a fist to the chest.
“Julian?” Dionne’s hand tightened on his arm. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he bit out.
“Oh.” Dionne had found her, too. “I didn’t know Katy would be here.”
This was her prom. Of course she’d be here. He turned to Dionne, and for the first time in their friendship, her face struck him as wrong. The concern too calibrated. The surprise too smooth.
He moved through the gymnasium with Dionne beside him, nodding at the school board rep who’d arranged the chaperone invitations, shaking a vice principal’s hand, doing the mechanical things a person does in a social setting while the person inside him stood at the edge of a cliff and felt the ground give way.