by Lydia Sharp
“What, no corsage?” Nico says. “Did you forget, coglione, or are you just that cheap?”
“She didn’t want one,” I say at the same time Lucy says, “I told him I didn’t want one,” followed by rapid Italian and an expression I’m thankful isn’t directed at me. Lucy and I talked about the corsage, even if we didn’t discuss the dress. I can see now she picked and chose what to tell me and what to keep to herself so this moment, likely this whole night, would all go according to her plan. Of course she did. I wouldn’t expect, or want, anything less from her.
“JJ!” Signore Bellini exclaims as he reaches the bottom of the stairs. “You made it! Look at you, polpetto. He clean up nice, eh, Lucilla? And you …” He puts all his fingers to his lips, then kisses them and pulls them away, spreading them into the air. “Sopraffino.”
She rolls her eyes, as if his praise is just so cumbersome. But I know on the inside she thrives on it. She gets it double from him because he knows she gets zero from her mom.
“Papà,” she says, grabbing a small glittering purse the same midnight blue as her shoes, “we’re running late. Give JJ your talk so we can go.”
“What talk?” That sounds suspiciously parental and slightly terrifying.
Nico laughs as he heads upstairs, spouting off something in Italian so quickly I can’t pick out one familiar word. But judging by the glare Lucy gives his back, I’m sure it had something to do with the fact I probably look like I just messed my pants.
Signore Bellini ignores the whole exchange, leading me to the kitchen to give us some privacy. “Tonight is special,” he says, his voice low. “But don’t make it too special, capisce?”
“Sì.” Yes, I hear him loud and clear: Don’t do anything inappropriate with my daughter. Nothing to worry about there. Lucy and I aren’t like that. We never have been and we never will be. Our friendship is good. The best, even. At least it was, until …
Why try so hard to keep something together that’s always falling apart? We should cut this off now—
No. That was a fluke. A bad reaction to a bad situation. She doesn’t really want that.
“You almost an adult,” Signore Bellini goes on. “But not yet. Be a child tonight. Have fun. Make nice memories, dancing, laughing, those things. Plenty of time for other stuff later.”
“Papà, hurry up, we need to go!” Lucy shouts from the living room.
Her dad sighs. “Lucilla not so patient sometimes.”
“She’s not? I didn’t notice.”
He barks a laugh. “She just excited for tonight. She want it all to be perfect.” His smile lingers for a moment then he sobers. “If she not patient with you, you be patient with her. Then it all work out.”
“Right.” He said the same thing to me last night—the other tonight. “Got it.”
“Good talk.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Now, muoversi. Before she come over here and drag you out.”
“Going,” I say through a laugh. I take two steps away, then turn back to him. Give him a big bear hug and welcome the generous way he returns it. For a few dreadful moments last night, I’d thought I lost his presence in my life for good, too, by screwing things up with Lucy. Tonight isn’t just a second chance with her. It’s a second chance with him.
“Grazie, Papà.” I pull back before my gratitude for this man overwhelms me.
“For what?” he says.
“Everything.”
Lucy steps into the kitchen, pulling my attention away. “Ready now?” she says.
“Ready.” It’s quarter past eight. We should be at prom already, eating dinner. Playing our own geeked-up version of Trivial Pursuit, while Chaz and Marcos and Jenna, and whoever else has the misfortune of sitting with us, try to shift us into a normal conversation. Lucy has a very concrete idea of how it’s all supposed to go tonight. She has an itinerary in her head, and she just mentally checked off “picked up by JJ.” The next item on the list is “go to prom” followed closely by “eat.” She’s got to be as hungry as I am.
So I wait until we’re inside my car and buckled up before dropping my improvisation bomb on her. But then she speaks first.
“What’s that smell?” She sniffs the air. “Perfume. Was there a girl in here? I thought you said Jenna was getting a ride from someone else.”
“She did. You can smell that?”
“That sounds guilty,” she says with a laugh, then fiddles with the clasp on her purse. “So who is she, do I know her?”
“No.” Not yet, but you’re about to. “She goes to Whitman Academy.”
“Ooh, a rich girl. You’re stepping up in the world, Mr. Johnson.”
I shake my head. “It’s not like that. We’re friends. I mean barely. We just met. You know how I am.” Lucy’s one of the few people who doesn’t make me feel wrong for it, or who doesn’t try to force me to explain something I don’t totally understand about myself.
“I know,” she says. “I didn’t mean that you were dating already, but maybe, potentially, down the road … Anyway, whatever it’s like”—she places my right hand on the gear shift—“you can fill me in on the way.”
Subtle as a volcanic eruption. I put the car in reverse and back down her driveway. At the end, I turn onto the road in the opposite direction of our school.
“Wait—JJ—” Her face snaps toward me. “Where are you going?”
“We have to make a couple of stops first. The girl wearing that perfume might need our help.”
Lucy handled the news about as well as I could have expected—meaning not well at all—but after the ten minutes it took to drive from her house to Melody’s car, she agreed we were doing the right thing, despite the inconvenient change in plans. Once her anxiety over my improvising recedes, her logic returns, and no way would she just leave someone stranded in the dark.
Only a quickly vanishing blush is left on the horizon. I flip my headlights on as we near the bottom of Dead Man’s Curve, and Melody’s Bug comes into view. She’s sitting in the car. Good. And she closed the door this time.
I park alongside the ditch on the opposite side of the road as her car.
“Why didn’t she call a tow?” Lucy says, unbuckling her seat belt.
“She did.”
“Well, if it’s on its way, then—”
“It’s not on its way.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I mean I do know it’s not coming, but I don’t know how I know.”
She sighs a sigh that in Lucy Language means “you’re making a whole lot of zero sense.”
Whatever, I know what I meant. And besides: “Do you want to sit here all night waiting to see if I’m wrong?” Been there already and it ended in disaster. Not doing it again.
“No,” she concedes. “It’s just weird. Like you think you’re psychic or something.”
“I’m not psychic.” I also don’t have the words to explain any of this right now. I turn to look at her squarely and, with great effort, keep my eyes on her face and off that dress. That dress that I can still see in my peripheral. That dress that looks like a literal picture of heaven … What were we talking about?
“Why are you staring,” Lucy says, “do I have something on my face?”
“No. I was just thinking.” Think, JJ. Right. Melody. She’s waiting on a tow truck that isn’t coming. “Can you get out of the car with me?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Good idea.”
We exit the car and cross the road together. As we get closer, Melody steps out of her Bug. “JJ,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if it was you, it’s … getting dark. And my tow never showed up.”
“Yeah … I see that.” One side of my mouth lifts into a smirk, but I have no good reason to be this cocky. It wasn’t because of anything special or skillful I did that I knew her tow wouldn’t show up. Really I’m just glad she’s okay. Anything could have happened in the half hour I was gone, even in daylight. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Weirdos are everywhere.
“Yeah, you were right,” Melody concedes. “So now what?”
“We wait for the tow,” I say. “I mean the one I called. It’ll be here any minute. And then we can drive you to your prom. Unless you don’t want us to?”
“No, I …” Melody scratches at her brow. “I can take care of myself, but I can also admit when I could use some help.” Her gaze shifts to Lucy. “You must be the best friend. Lucy, right?” Lucy nods. “I’m Melody. But you can call me Mel.”
Lucy grins. “Mel, you’re lucky JJ found you and not some weirdo. Well, not luck. That doesn’t really exist. But, as a figure of speech. I just meant it was a good thing.”
“Maybe it was fate,” Melody suggests.
I watch them expectantly, wondering if this will lead to the same conversation Melody and I had last night. Wondering what Lucy would think of it, if she could be swayed like I was, even if only for a fraction of a smidgen of a second.
Lucy’s mouth twists. “It was a very well-timed coincidence that worked in your favor.”
That’s a no. And also a no surprise, followed by relief. I don’t want any surprises from Lucy tonight. I want her just the way she’s always been. No changing her mind about us.
“Are you thirsty?” Lucy asks Melody. “JJ keeps bottled water in his trunk.” She thrusts an open palm toward me, and I instinctively hand her my keys, then she and Melody cross the road together, toward my car, chatting away like old friends. In the growing dark and the distance yawning between us, they become fluid shadows.
Amber flashing lights approach from down the road. The tow truck. Yes. Lucy and Melody are sitting in my car, smiling, safe. This night is going much smoother than it did before. I didn’t mess anything up on purpose last time, but yeah, I screwed up. So tonight I improvised. And now, everything’s going to be okay.
“Okay, it should be the next driveway on the left,” Melody says, reading the map on her phone.
I turn left onto a smooth asphalt drive and we pass through an open set of metal-barred gates, then we’re greeted by a large stone building with the kind of landscaping that’s so perfect it has to be fake. Sculpted shrubbery, climbing vines, beds full of flowers in all different shapes and colors. I recognize the tulips and daffodils, but the rest I can’t name. Lilies maybe? An elegantly painted sign reads: FROST CENTER FOR FINE ENTERTAINING. The drive circles around close to the building, where I guess I’m supposed to drop Melody off, right by a giant fountain statue of a mermaid wearing a couple of shells for a top.
A mermaid. We’ve officially entered a fantasy world.
“Wow,” Lucy says, staring wide-eyed out her window. “This is so … bougie.”
My thoughts exactly. “I didn’t think places like this existed in Beaver Creek.”
From the back seat, Melody catches my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Technically, this is outside Beaver Creek city limits. And even more technically, Beaver Creek is not a city.”
Which reminds me we’re way out of our way here; we’ve got a bit of a drive to get back to Beaver Creek High. Probably twenty minutes, or more, because I am not speeding. So …
“I’m hungry,” I say. “Lucy, are you hungry?”
“Maybe.”
That’s a yes.
She turns her face slowly from the window to me. “Depends on why you’re asking.”
“By the time we get to our prom, they’ll have put the food away. Do you wanna … ?”
It takes all of one second for her to figure out where I’m going. “Eat here? Are you serious? We can’t just walk in there and ask for a plate. You have to have tickets for these things. And for a prom this fancy, you probably have to provide a birth certificate, show proof of US residency, and agree to a DNA test.”
“Not all that,” Melody says on a laugh, “but you do need tickets.” She glances at the building, where her prom has already started. We’re the only ones out here right now. “Once I’m in, I could meet you at a back door. There will be plenty of food here; Whitman doesn’t do anything small. No reason for perfectly good food to go to waste when you two are perfectly capable of eating it.”
Lucy turns to face her. “I can’t believe you’re encouraging this.”
“Encouraging what, being generous?”
“It feels more like stealing,” Lucy clarifies. “This isn’t our prom. People paid to get in here. It’s not right if we get in for free. If we get caught we’ll be in trouble.”
“We’ll just eat, then go,” I tell her. “I don’t want to miss our prom, so if anyone notices, we’ll be on our way out anyway. What kind of trouble do you think we’ll get into? No one from our school is here. No one even knows our names, except Mel.”
“And I’m not gonna out you,” Melody says. “Think of this as my way of paying you back for helping me. I owe you guys.”
The more I think about it, the more logical it sounds. The food here has got to be a zillion times better than what we’d be getting at our prom, and it’s for heck sure better than not eating at all if we get there too late. I’m not hitting Taco Bell two nights in a row, or my after-prom at the bluffs will be spent on a toilet instead. And maybe this is another part of my second chance, getting two proms in one night because I completely missed the original. The first prom here, and then another one later, at Beaver Creek High.
My mind is made up, and so is Melody’s. We’re in sync just like we were last night. Except tonight, everything’s clicking into place with Lucy here, too. And once I get to our prom, everything else will be as it should be, with all the right people. Melody gets out of the car and says, “I’ll meet you around back in a few minutes.”
After she’s disappeared through the front doors, I park the car and turn the key. The engine quiets. Lucy doesn’t move.
When I turn to look at her, her lips twibble, and that’s all it takes to unmake up my mind.
“If you really don’t want to,” I say, “we can leave. I won’t force you into something you feel that strongly about avoiding. I’ll go meet Mel just to tell her forget it.”
Her nostrils flare slightly as she forces air in and out of her nose, staring ahead into the dark lot full of cars and trucks and limos. Then her stomach gurgles, sounding like a couple of cats about to either fight to the death or make a litter of kittens … and she cracks a smile.
“I’ve been outvoted by my own body,” she says. “This is so typical of you, you know? Nothing can ever go according to plan with you; I don’t know why I even try.”
Why try so hard to keep something together that’s always falling apart?
“That’s why we’re good together, though,” I say, countering my memory of something she said that only I remember. “That’s what my parents said. We balance each other out.”
She shakes her head noncommittally, still smiling, and pulls out her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Letting Chaz know we’re running late. Well, more late.” She finishes the text and slides the phone back into her midnight-blue clutch purse that matches her shoes. “Let’s go.”
I meet her around the car and walk her across the lot, arm in arm, with that dress flowing behind her in the breeze. That dress she picked out for me. Her hip bumps against me softly with every step, and all I can smell is her shampoo. I don’t even know what to call its scent. It’s just “Lucy’s shampoo.” The same-scented shampoo she’s been using for as long as I’ve known her. Whenever I smell it, my whole body relaxes, because I can only smell it when I’m close to Lucy.
“You sure about this?”
She looks up at me with a dark-lipped smile, just before we slip around the side of the building. “I can be spontaneous, too, sometimes.”
Lucy from last night, the other tonight, would beg to differ. So which Lucy should I believe? The one who pushed me away for doing what I do best—improvising, going with the flow—or the one who just agreed to be my partner in crime?
All we ever do is stress each other out.
> No. She’s not thinking that now. She didn’t mean it before, either. She was just upset.
My brain keeps jumbling together what’s happening tonight and what happened the other tonight, making it all feel like a parallax. Viewing the same thing from the same vantage point but seeing it at two slightly different angles, like when you close one eye, then open it and close the other. You’re looking at the same thing, but it shifts. And when I put the two nights together, look at it with both eyes open, rather than having them blend into one fixed clear image, I’m left with a distorted memory of events and details that don’t add up.
“Another?” I ask Lucy as she sets an empty cupcake liner onto her plate sprinkled with chocolate crumbs.
“I think we’d better just go,” she says, though she’s eyeing the dessert table like a lioness about to pounce on a gazelle. “Or I might talk myself into staying here all night.”
“I might already be considering it. There are only four empty cupcake liners on my plate. If I don’t eat more, it’ll burn off too quick when I start dancing. I need my strength, Lucy.”
“No,” she says sternly but through a smile. “Chaz and Marcos are waiting for us. Jenna, too, for you,” she adds, her gaze dropping to her twiddling thumbs.
“Yeah. Jenna, too. I didn’t forget.” I also didn’t forget how Blair was holding her so protectively last night. How she leaned herself into him for support, even after she’d dumped him for plenty of good reasons. How he drove her home after she’d slapped me. How none of that would have happened if I’d been where I was supposed to be. I know we need to get going. Not just that; I want to leave. I want to go have fun at our prom with our friends.
But: “This place is just …”
“A dream, for people like us,” Lucy fills in. “I know.”
The food, as expected, was a glorious experience, in which I consumed a steak so perfect I swear I saw God with every bite. And the hums of pleasure coming from beside me were proof that Lucy’s chicken Florentine was just as heavenly. It’s an Italian dish, so of course she made a comment about how much she’s looking forward to eating at her new school. Italian food made in Italy—you can’t get more authentic than that.