Chapter 24
Karaoke Night
With no dates required and no boys allowed, Toni declared the last Wednesday of April an official "girls' formal," which meant the three of them got dressed up in their nicest clothes, ordered an absurd amount of takeout, and spent the evening in Toni's apartment pretending they were at an actual gala, complete with a playlist Nina curated specifically for the occasion.
"To junior year," Toni said, raising her glass, the three of them crowded onto the small balcony despite the chill, "which none of us saw coming a year ago, in any of its current shapes."
"To Beck finally growing a spine about the whole email thing," Nina added, unable to resist. "Took him long enough, but he got there eventually, credit where it's due."
"To all of us actually," Tessa said, looking at both of them, feeling something full and warm settle in her chest. "I don't think I say this enough. I don't think I've fully told either of you what this year would have looked like without you both in it."
"You don't have to say it," Toni said, bumping her shoulder. "We know. We've been showing up specifically so you wouldn't have to say it, so it would just be obvious instead."
"I want to say it anyway." Tessa looked out at the campus lights spread below them, the lake catching the last of the sunset.
"A year ago I made this whole plan to build myself alone, out of nothing, because I thought that was the only safe way to survive losing everyone.
And instead I got the two of you insisting on staying anyway, refusing to let the plan work the way I'd designed it.
I don't think I ever properly thanked either of you for ruining my terrible plan. "
Nina wiped at her eyes, laughing. "Okay, we're not crying at girls' formal, that wasn't the assignment."
"We're absolutely crying at girls' formal," Toni said, already crying herself. "This was always going to end in crying, I set the whole thing up specifically for this."
They stayed out on the balcony long after the food went cold, three girls in formal dresses with nowhere fancy to actually go, laughing and crying in equal measure, and Tessa thought that if she could go back and tell the version of herself standing in a half-packed New Jersey bedroom exactly what the next year would hold, she wasn't sure that girl would have believed her.
Not the heartbreak, not the fight, not any of the hard parts — those, she might have expected.
But this. This specific, chosen, fiercely loyal kind of love, built out of nothing but two people who simply refused to leave.
The eighteen-year-old version of herself would never have believed it was still possible.
She was about to find out exactly how far that love could be pushed.
? ? ?
Not every hard conversation was a crisis, Tessa learned, somewhere in the stretch of ordinary weeks after the eleven days, after everything had settled into something steadier.
Some of them were just small, unremarkable disagreements, the kind healthy couples were apparently supposed to have regularly, and she found herself almost startled by how undramatic they could be when neither person was operating from old wounds.
Like the Tuesday in April when Beck forgot to tell her he'd made plans with the team the same night she'd mentioned, twice, wanting to see a movie together.
"I just wish you'd checked before committing to something else," she said, not raising her voice, not spiraling, just saying the actual thing.
"You're right. I should have checked my phone before I said yes to Jax.
I got excited about the plan and didn't think it through.
" He didn't get defensive, didn't turn it around on her the way old instinct might have predicted.
"Can we do the movie Thursday instead? I don't want to just brush past this. "
"Thursday works."
That was it. The whole conversation, over in under two minutes, no tears, no eleven-day silence, no old ghost dragged into the room to stand between them.
Tessa sat with that afterward, turning it over with something like wonder, and realized this was maybe the most healing thing that had happened all year — not the grand gesture, not the two a.m. sprint across campus, but this.
Proof that disagreement didn't have to mean disaster.
That love could be undramatic and still be real.
She mentioned it to Dr. Chen, the campus counselor she'd started seeing once a month that spring, mostly at Toni's gentle insistence, someone to help her keep untangling the older knots Tyler had left behind.
"That sounds like real progress," Dr. Chen said. "Being able to have a small disagreement without it triggering the full trauma response. That's not a small thing, even though it might feel small in the moment."
"It felt so anticlimactic. I kept waiting for it to turn into something bigger."
"That waiting is the old pattern talking. The absence of catastrophe isn't the same as something being wrong. Sometimes healing looks exactly like an ordinary Tuesday where nothing terrible happens."
Tessa thought about that walking back to her dorm afterward, the spring evening mild and easy around her. Not the absence of conflict. The presence of safety inside it. She was about to find out whether that safety could survive a conflict that actually mattered.
? ? ?
Jax's twenty-first birthday fell on a Thursday in March, which somehow escalated, through a chain of group-chat decisions nobody could later fully reconstruct or take responsibility for, into the entire friend group renting out the back room of a downtown karaoke bar for the night, complete with a laminated song book that had clearly seen better decades.
"Absolutely not," Tessa said, the second she heard the word karaoke, physically backing away from the door. "I don't sing. I have never sung in front of another human being in my life, not even in the shower, I hum."
"You're singing tonight," Nina said, already scrolling through the song list on the greasy touchscreen with the focused intensity of a general planning an invasion, not even looking up. "It's Jax's birthday. It's not optional. This is a rule of the friend group, established just now, by me."
It became, over the course of the night, one of the funniest evenings of Tessa's entire year, the kind she'd replay in her head for weeks afterward whenever she needed to laugh.
Jax opened with a devastatingly earnest, off-key rendition of a boy band ballad that had half the room in actual tears from laughing, one hand pressed to his heart with total sincerity throughout.
Toni and Nina performed a duet so dramatically overwrought, full of unnecessary key changes and interpretive gestures, that it earned a standing ovation from four exhausted hockey players who'd clearly never expected to be this entertained on a Thursday.
Beck, it turned out, could actually sing — a fact he'd apparently been hiding for months, deflecting every previous mention of it — and Tessa sat there stunned through an entire, surprisingly good performance of a song she recognized from one of their late-night text conversations back in October, one she'd once mentioned, in passing, as a favorite from high school.
"You remembered that too," she said, when he sat back down beside her, breathless and grinning, clearly pleased with the reaction.
"I told you. I remember everything you tell me. It's kind of my whole thing at this point, apparently." He nudged her with his shoulder. "Your turn now. No more stalling."
"No."
"Tessa."
"Absolutely not, I will not be doing that."
It took the entire table chanting her name, plus Nina physically pulling her up by both hands and half-dragging her toward the small stage area, before she finally relented, choosing the most forgiving, low-stakes song on the list and mumbling her way through it, red-faced, laughing too hard through half the verses to actually hit any notes with any accuracy.
Nobody cared, not remotely. The whole table cheered like she'd delivered a Grammy performance, Jax standing on his chair at one point, and Beck watched her the entire time with an expression so openly, helplessly fond that she nearly forgot to be embarrassed at all, forgot the microphone shaking slightly in her hand.
"See," he said, pulling her back down into the booth beside him after, still catching her breath, "that wasn't so bad, was it."
"It was mortifying. I will never recover from this."
"It was the best thing I've seen all year, and I watched Jax fall off a dock completely sober two weeks ago for no reason anyone could identify.
" He kissed her temple. "I like watching you do things that scare you, small things, low stakes things.
You're different after. Looser. Like you remembered, in your body, that you're allowed to be bad at things in front of people who love you anyway, no matter what. "
She thought about that on the walk home, tucked under his arm against the cold March night, the rest of the group trailing behind them singing badly and loudly into the empty downtown streets, Jax's voice carrying furthest of all.
A year ago, she would have found a reason to skip the karaoke bar entirely rather than risk being seen doing something imperfect in front of people, would have manufactured an excuse days in advance.
Somewhere in the last six months, without fully noticing the shift happen in real time, she'd stopped needing to be flawless in order to feel safe being witnessed, had let something soften that she hadn't even realized was rigid.
That felt like its own kind of grand gesture, she thought, walking through the cold with people who loved her badly-sung song anyway.
Smaller than a sprint across campus at two in the morning, quieter, less dramatic.
Just as important, maybe more so, because nobody had been watching except the people who already loved her completely.