She nods at Poppy, who pulls her hand out from behind her back and hands me a handmade red origami rose, complete with safety pin.
My heart swells.
“You’re the best.” I gather her into a hug.
I look at my family, pride and joy radiating off each and every one of them as they look back at me. Like my dance is their dance. My life is their life. And I wonder if all families have this. I kind of think they don’t.
I introduce Nico’s mom to my dad and siblings and we all traipse outside to take photos before the sun fades.
“You both look stunning,” Mrs. Noble says as she beams at us making our way down the front walk, then suddenly snaps a photo I wasn’t expecting. “It’s called journalistic photography,” she explains. “It’s about being in the moment instead of posing.”
My dad doesn’t take the same approach, and instead poses and props us in front of the tree in our yard “because the greenery is such a pretty backdrop.”
As dual cameras battle, and we’re not sure where to look, the mail carrier walks up with a stack of letters and bills. Instead of going to the front door to shove them through the slot, he hands everything to my mom.
My dad keeps taking photos and insists that Poppy and Sequoia join in. From the corner of my eye, I see my mom sifting silently through the mail.
Then she stops sifting.
Her forehead crinkles at the return address on one of the envelopes.
She opens it.
Reads.
Looks at me.
Looks at the letter.
Her smile drops.
“Over here, Junebug,” my dad says, but I’m too distracted by my mom to look at his camera.
He stops taking photos when my mom shoves the letter into his hand and turns her back to me.
Her shoulders shake.
“Mom?” I step forward.
She pivots. Points. “Don’t.”
Nico and his mom look confusedly at each other.
“Juniper,” my dad says, skimming the letter. “How could you?” His voice isn’t angry. It’s full of disbelief. Like I told him flaxseed causes cancer.
And then I know exactly what he’s reading. Laurel told me this letter would come. And while I tried to prepare the words in my head, I didn’t want to have to use them yet. Not tonight of all nights.
“What is it?” Sequoia says.
My dad clears his throat. “Your sister has apparently taken it upon herself to petition the court to get her vaccines. Apparently we can come if we want. It’s not an order. Just a suggestion.”
Nico’s mom stiffens.
“How gracious,” my mom snaps.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jade—” Nico attempts, but my dad interrupts him to address me.
“How long have you been planning this?” my dad asks.
“Since I got sick.”
“How did you even … Who’s helping you?”
I look at Mrs. Noble. “Nobody. It’s just me.”
“I find that hard to believe,” my dad says. “You can’t exactly just walk into court on your own when you’re sixteen.”
“I helped her,” Mrs. Noble blurts. “I have a friend. Her name is Laurel Ward. She’s an attorney, and she’s working pro bono for Juniper.”
“You helped our daughter?” my mom sputters. “We sat and drank tea together while your son was in the hospital.” She walks back and forth in our front yard. “There I was, trying to comfort you, mother to mother, and you knew all about this.”
“It’s not as if we were plotting against you,” Mrs. Noble says. “Juniper simply needed professional assistance, and I put her in touch with someone.”
“Well, you should mind your own business,” my dad says. “This town is unbelievable. Can’t anyone just let people live their lives?”
My mom steps forward to address Nico’s mom. “You played me for a fool, knowing all along what was going to happen to me. To us. To our family.”
“It’s not like that,” Nico says. “I asked my mom to help.”
“Well, isn’t that the nicest!” my mom shouts. “What a nice, supportive boyfriend you have, Juniper.”
“Hey,” Mrs. Noble says. “That’s enough.”
Nico looks at his feet.
“Don’t talk to him like that,” I say to my mom. I grab Nico’s hand to reassure him.
Poppy and Sequoia stand straight and still. Eyes wide.
“We will talk to the people who visit our home under false pretenses any way we damn well please,” my dad says through gritted teeth. And then directly to Mrs. Noble, “I think you should go.”
He wraps my mom in his arms, trying to comfort her.
I stand there, watching it all, in my dress and my shoes with my hair and my jewelry. On the outside, I probably look the most beautiful I’ve ever looked, but on the inside, I’ve never felt uglier.
I was expecting that letter to feel gross when it happened, but I’d forgotten about my mom meeting Nico’s mom. About tea and talking. Mom to mom. No wonder this moment feels deceptive.
“I feel so foolish,” my mom says, shaking her head and burying her face into my dad’s chest, letting out a dramatic sob.
“Melinda, please don’t feel that way,” Mrs. Noble says. “Maybe we can all talk about this together.”
“No,” my dad says. “We have nothing to say to you.”
“So foolish,” my mom says again.
“Mom, you’re not.” I put my hand to her back, but she won’t look at me.
Nico slumps in his dark suit, that little red paper flower the only spot of color. This has to feel as bad for him as it does for me. His mom is being made to take the fall here, and she shouldn’t. She did what she did because I asked Nico to ask her to help me. She introduced me to Laurel because I wanted her to.
“Mom,” I try again.
Nothing.
“Go to your dance, Juniper,” my dad finally says. “Just … go.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
I sit in stunned silence while we drop Nico’s mom at home and continue on to the Snow Ball. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know where to start. My face heats with shame. It was supposed to be a perfect night. Something I’ve wanted forever. And now it’s ruined.
“You okay?” Nico asks after we’ve driven a couple of blocks alone in the quiet car.
“No. Are you?” He shrugs. I twist my corsage around my wrist. “I’m sorry my mom said those things about your mom.”
“She was mad.”
“That doesn’t make it all right.”
“No. It doesn’t.” He looks at me. “But I get it. People say shitty things when they’re mad.”
“I think it makes them feel better to make someone else hurt, too.”
“Your mom made my mom sound like a mustache-twirling villain in a silent film.”
“Which film?”
“All of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize for your parents.”
We pull into a parking space in the lot of the old Victorian resort hotel in town where the dance is being held. Nico shuts off the car. Rests his hands on the steering wheel. I look at him, so handsome in his charcoal jacket. His tie has tiny dots on it, barely a shade darker than the pale gray underneath them.
“I know it feels like everything sucks right now,” he says. “But I hope we can still have fun tonight.” He smiles, but it’s not one of those smiles that lights up his whole face. I want to be happy like that. I want to forget about everything that happened back at my house. “We don’t have to go straight in. We could walk around. Check things out.”
“Be fashionably late?”
“Exactly.” He points up at the bright red turrets standing out against the night sky. “There’s supposedly a ghost that hangs out on that balcony up there.”
“Do you think we can find it?”
“We can try.” Nico opens his door and I reach for my own door handle. “Wait. Stay there.”
�
��Why?”
“Just wait.” He gets out and walks around and opens my door for me. “I’m trying to be chivalrous.”
I take his hand and let him help me out. “Better?”
“Yeah.” He shuts the door and clicks the lock as he stands back to look at me, really taking me in from head to toe. “I didn’t get to say it before, but you look really beautiful tonight. You’re Audrey-esque.”
“You recognized it.” I love making his celluloid world come to life.
“How could I not?”
We stroll through the massive courtyard, where Adirondack chairs are lined up like soldiers and perfectly trimmed topiary bushes are dotted with holiday lights. We squint our eyes at the turrets, trying to spy a ghost. But we only see the moon and stars. I shiver against the cold, and Nico pulls me closer. Rubs my bare arms to warm me.
“Let’s go inside.”
We continue into the lobby, where other Playa students wander around and the tallest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen takes up the entire center of the room, the top of it reaching a whole floor above us.
“It’s real,” I say, inhaling the crisp scent of pine. “I can smell the needles.”
“The sign says it’s twenty-five feet.”
“Can you imagine having that in your living room?”
“Only if I carve a hole in the roof.”
We stand at the base of the tree and look up to the sparkling golden star on top. Hotel guests and other Playa students in formal clothes collect along the railings of the wraparound balcony on the floor above us, taking photos against the backdrop of the top of the tree.
“We should take a picture,” I say.
Nico pulls his phone out, and I snuggle closer to him for a selfie. “We should get a real photo,” he says. “Let’s ask someone.”
I instantly remember the pumpkin patch and how nobody wanted to take our photo with my dad’s camera. “No, this is fine.” I reach for Nico’s phone to hold it out for us.
He pulls it away. “Juniper, it’s not a big deal.”
He stops a woman passing by, and I wait for her to refuse. But she doesn’t. Maybe because she’s a tourist who couldn’t possibly know who I am. She counts to three while we stand in front of the tree, our arms wrapped around each other like Christmas ribbon. We both thank her as she hands the phone back. Nico scrolls through the photos.
“Damn, we’re a good-looking couple,” he says, and I laugh. “Should we keep walking?”
“Yeah.”
We pass through a door on the other side of the lobby, which takes us to the beach side of the hotel and down a corridor where the sweet smell of freshly baked waffle cones drifts through the air from the ice-cream parlor. At the end of the corridor, a pathway weaves its way down to the beach, where there’s a seasonal outdoor ice-skating rink mere steps from the sand.
“Whoa,” I say.
“Pretty cool, huh? My mom used to bring Matteo and me here every Christmas Eve when we were kids. We’d skate. See Santa. It was a whole thing.”
We pass a cart selling hot cocoa with candy cane garnishes and burrow our way into an empty spot along the outside of the rink, where we can stand and watch the skaters. Some are seasoned pros, while others hold tightly to the side railing, taking tentative baby steps around the ice.
“I want to bring Poppy and Sequoia here.”
“Oh, they’d love it.”
“Yeah. But will they love it with me?”
“It’ll get better. Your mom and dad just have to get over their own shit.”
“I just don’t want it to suck forever.”
“It won’t.”
“Promise?”
“If it does, you can come live in my tree house.”
I laugh. “Okay. Deal.”
He kisses my temple. “So what do you think? Should we go to the dance now?”
“Yeah. We should.”
“Then we shall.”
We wander back through the hotel, passing other students as we go. Nico never lets go of my hand. When we finally enter the double doors into the dance, I can’t believe what I see.
The ballroom is beautiful, with ornate chandeliers dripping from the mile-high ceiling. Everything else sparkles in winter white. There are starched table linens and pale blue crystal goblets that look like glaciers. There are hand-cut snowflakes and intricate ice sculptures decorating a long banquet table down the center of the room, while twinkle lights adorn the outer columns. And the entire back wall is floor-to-ceiling windows that look out to the beach and the ice-skating rink. I feel like I’ve walked into another world.
“Everything looks too pretty to be real,” I say. “I’m afraid to touch it.”
“It’s something,” Nico says, practically turning circles to see everything, like he’s setting up shots for a movie. “I guess school dances aren’t as bad as I thought they were.”
“Thank you for bringing me,” I say.
“Thanks for coming.”
Someone calls out Nico’s name, and we turn to see an excited girl in a long royal-blue dress, with hair to match, waving us over to her table.
“Do you want to sit at the film club table?” he asks me.
“Sure. It’ll be like sitting together in the cafeteria.”
“Right.” He shakes his head, laughing. “You’re in for some real disappointment if you think the cafeteria is anything like this.”
When we get to the table, he tells his friends my name.
I already know Jared, but Nico introduces me to everyone else by going around and pairing each name with that person’s favorite film. Tess—Lady Bird—Nakamura, the one who waved us over, insists I sit next to her.
“I need to meet the girl who saved Nico’s life,” she says as we take our seats and her blue hair falls over her shoulders.
“I didn’t … it wasn’t like that.”
“Part of me wants to make you tell me all the gory details, because it sounds like it was all very cinematic and I should put it in a screenplay, but the other part of me can’t handle hearing it because I know him. So can I just say thank you instead?”
“I did what anyone would do.”
She props her elbow up on the table and leans against her hand, studying me. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I would’ve passed out from fear. The paramedics would’ve thought I was the one in anaphylactic shock.”
I set my clutch down. “No, you wouldn’t have. You would’ve done what you had to do because there was no other choice. But I hope you never have to find that out in person.”
“Right?” She takes a sip from her crystal goblet, and I notice every finger on her hand has a ring on it, some more than one. They clink against the glass as she clutches it, and then she looks at Nico. “We give him a hard time, but we all know there’d be no film club without him.” She looks back at me. “I’m so glad you were there.”
“Me too,” I say.
“Okay. So on to other things. Did your parents name you after a My Little Pony on purpose? Because that’s amazing.”
“Um, no? What?”
“Your name. It’s the same as a My Little Pony character.”
“It is?” How are my parents so out of it? How am I? “That’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Actually, I think it’s really cool.” She waves her hand in the air, and her rings sparkle as they catch the light. “So don’t worry about it.”
“Okay. I won’t.”
“Good. So anyway. Your whole look is drop-dead Audrey, and I think we need to go dance right now so you can show it off.” She stands up and holds her hand out to me. “Right?”
“Um, yeah, okay.”
“I’m stealing your girlfriend,” she says to Nico. “You can come if you want.”
Nico stands up. “I’m ready.”
Tess, Nico, and I walk to the dance floor, and our whole table follows. We form a big film-club circle, and everyone dances together instead of pairing off. I love that. It feels dependable. Protective
. Real.
I don’t actually know all the songs the DJ plays, but everyone else seems to, because they’re singing along at the top of their lungs. Others jump with their hands in the air, pumping their fists. The wooden dance floor literally sinks down and springs back up with the movement of two hundred teenagers dancing. I can feel the vibration of the music come up through the floor, into my feet, until it hits every nerve ending in my body. Between that and the music and the lights and Nico, I can’t help but jump up and down, too. It’s impossible to hold on to anything other than what’s happening right here.
THIRTY-NINE
The whole house smells like butter and cinnamon the next morning. Warm. Cozy. Home. Everyone was asleep when I got back from the dance, so I tiptoed upstairs, hung up my dress, pulled on pajamas, and crawled into bed.
As I head downstairs, I hear the low murmur of voices. Poppy’s giggle. Sequoia humming to himself. The gentle scrape of forks against dishes. I enter the kitchen, the corners of my mouth turning up hesitantly.
But my parents don’t greet me.
There isn’t a place set for me at the table.
There isn’t a juice cup or silverware or a napkin or a plate.
Poppy slides her eyes to me as she gulps down her OJ. She watches as I take a step forward, then turns her head to watch my parents.
Waiting.
I wait, too. I wait to see if they’ll say anything.
But they don’t.
Not even hello.
I walk to the cupboard and pull out a plate for myself. But the dish that usually holds a pile of pancakes for all of us is nothing but crumbs and a few smashed blueberries. Fine. I’ll make toast instead. I rummage through the bread basket and pull out a slice of homemade honey wheat. I slide it into the toaster, lean against the counter, and wait.
“Hi,” I say, my voice an echo. Distant.
“Hey,” Sequoia says without looking up.
Nobody else responds.
“Hi,” I say again.
My dad looks at my mom. “As I was saying, that’s the deadline, so I’ll need to work today even though it’s Sunday.”
“Um, hello,” I say. “I’m here. I exist. You could’ve left me some pancakes.”
“Oh,” my mom says, looking up at me like she just realized I exist. “We thought you might rather go to Starbucks. You don’t seem to want to be a part of this family or our ways anymore, so we just figured we’d let you do you.”
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