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He didn’t want to come.
He didn’t want to pay for the stupid, overpriced suit that ten other dudes had worn before him (even if he did look dope), and he didn’t want to step foot again in the same stupid, stifling country club that had fired him last month (especially because he had to use up a good chunk of his last paycheck just to rent said suit). But most of all, he didn’t want to waste his Saturday night in this stuffy ballroom listening to the inane loop of top 40 songs that he could swear were all the same (Elizabeth could try and convince him otherwise, but he wasn’t buying it).
Basically, prom was the last place he wanted to be. Elizabeth had asked, though, and he’d never been good at telling Elizabeth no, had he?
He should have this time, he thinks, lifting up on the balls of his feet to scan the crowd, the shiny dresses and mousse-stiff hair, because Elizabeth only dragged him here get back at her dumbass ex who had bought the tickets two days before he’d been caught at a party in a back bedroom making out with some twiggy blonde freshman cheerleader.
She’d wanted to prove a point, she’d said, and Rio was the best person to prove that point with because Dean had always been suspicious of their friendship—jealous every time Rio dropped around Elizabeth’s house to study or raid her kitchen for snacks, even though he’d been doing it since she moved into the neighborhood, long before Dean Boland had even been in the picture.
When Elizabeth had withheld a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies from Rio only to produce the tickets and slide them across her yellow laminate countertop, he’d thought about saying no. He’d even gone as far as visibly hesitating this time, the reactions of his grandmother, his best friend—even his ex-girl—all running through his head, the knowing looks and pursed lips like splinters under his skin.
But when he’d reached to try and push the tickets back toward her, his neck twisting to shake a decisive nuh, Elizabeth had stopped him. Her hand locked over his; his finger twitched under hers. Steely-eyed, she’d stared at him, waiting until he broke his focus away from her small hand like a vice around his wrist to say, “I can’t let him win.” Her tone was so serious she’d sounded like a lunatic, and that had always been his favorite version of her, the one that latched onto an idea and powered through like a bulldozer. He knew then that even if he wanted to, he’d never get away with refusing.
So here he was in the rented tux, in the same room he was canned, listening to what could only sort of be described as something resembling music, all so Elizabeth could prove her point.
The problem was that whatever point Elizabeth had wanted to make had apparently disappeared in a puff of smoke the moment another sentimental slow song started playing and Boland had entered the room with the teenybopper hanging off his arm. One second she was standing next to Rio near the punch bowl while he was tugging on his skinny black tie and wondering if she expected him to ask her to dance, and the next, she was gone.
There are a lot of blondes in the crowd. A lot of emerald dresses, too. But they’re shorter than Elizabeth’s, tighter, with skimpier straps and sparkling necklaces dipping down in the curves of their glitter-dusted cleavage. Rio notes this as he weaves through the bodies, his gaze lingering only briefly even as a part of him thinks that if he was going to get dragged to prom, maybe he should’ve let one of these girls in these dresses drag him instead—then he might actually have had a chance of getting his hand up their skirt in the backseat of his car.
Instead, his backseat was still occupied with Elizabeth’s purple, flowery backpack and oversized science diorama from when he dropped her at her place after school yesterday.
Even if it wasn’t, though—
Rio grits his teeth.
Whatever, he thinks, half-remembering a few mediocre backseat hookups that had made Rio feel like there was an itch deep inside of him he just couldn’t fuckin’ scratch, and which news of had made Elizabeth’s lips narrow into the thinnest, most judgmental line he’d ever seen.
He quashes another image he never lets himself think about—not ever—and instead forces himself to remember that he’s only here because Elizabeth had wanted to make Dean Boland jealous.
Jostling shoulders with someone, Rio doesn’t bother to stop until he hears his name.
“Rio?”
He twists to see Dylan in a shimmering silver dress, staring at him in disbelief. Her friends stop dancing to eye her, to eye him, their expressions heated with annoyance. Rio runs a hand across his jaw.
“Did hell freeze over? Am I really seeing you at prom?”
Rio shrugs like it’s not a big deal, like they didn’t fight about going to every school dance each time one came up while they were on in their long-winded on-and-off-again relationship. At least one of those fights had been the deciding factor to go back off, he knows, though he can’t remember if that was the break-up just before he met Elizabeth or the next one after he’d started hanging around her.
(All he knows is that they fell into orbit during a period of off, and sometimes he half-wonders what things would be like if there had never been another on.)
“Who are you here with?” Dylan asks, and he can hear the curiosity mingled with irritation at the edge of her voice.
It’s not like it matters. She’s not his girlfriend anymore, hasn’t been for four months at least (the longest stretch they’ve ever gone, and one he intends to keep permanent). She has no valid reason to be upset about it now, but he still hesitates to say. For so long, he’d denied every accusation she’d ever thrown at him about Elizabeth, and even though they were just here as friends—even though that’s all they’ve ever been (and all they were ever gonna be)—he still felt like admitting to coming here with her would cause one of those old fights to bubble up like no time had passed at all. Like it would be pulling on some sort of string and then unravel a knot that was still tangled up in his head.
Dylan’s eyes narrow. Maybe she’s still stuck in those old fights, making assumptions. Maybe she heard about Boland’s backroom tryst and connected the dots. Or maybe she can read it on his face. Whatever it is, he knows she knows, but what he knows even more is that he doesn’t want to be here, and that he doesn’t owe her anything.
“I gotta go,” he says, tapping Dylan on the shoulder and then disappearing between the bodies without registering her reaction.
He escapes to the edge of the dance floor where people mingle in more scattered groups. There’s still no sign of Elizabeth, so he pushes on the heavy oak double doors and finds himself back in the foyer.
The music dies and the throbbing in Rio’s head softens. To his left, a bored mother sits behind a plastic table serving as a makeshift coat check. Engrossed in her phone, she doesn’t even look up at him.
Behind her stretches a hallway with the bathrooms, one Rio can be sure is full of giggling girls taking selfies in the elongated mirrors he always hated cleaning, and Rio knows he won’t find Elizabeth there. Nah, upset like this, she’d go someplace where she could be alone—like that time her mom got drunk at the neighborhood block party and he’d found her at the abandoned elementary school playground, sitting on top of the monkey bars in the cool blue twilight. Or the time at the assembly when she’d been poised to be crowned class president, only they’d called out Denise Dalton’s name instead. Afterward, she hadn’t appeared in biology, and he’d asked to go to the bathroom and taken an entire lap around the school before he found her out in the JV baseball field’s visitor dugout kicking up dust.
(Trish Pape had spent most of the period tapping her foot and waiting for Rio to bring back the hall pass until Ms. Stone had finally caved and allowed her to duck out, too, which is how she’d spotted Rio and Elizabeth coming back into the school—although her version of the story had had a certain flair for embellishments, the way he’d heard it from Dylan.
That fight had ended in a breakup too, and Rio had meant for it to be the last one, only then he’d heard that Elizabeth and Dean had made it to third base, and the next thing Rio knew, he and Dylan were skipping class together to duck into that dugout and round some bases of their own.)
The hallway to Rio’s right—the one leading to the country club bar—is blocked off with a red velvet rope and a small, tasteful NO ENTRANCE sign, one of the ones he was sometimes responsible for dragging out and setting up during cotillion lunches or movie nights on the green. With a last glance at the engrossed mother to confirm her face is still slack and illuminated by the light of her phone, Rio ducks under the rope and disappears down the hall.
At first, the room seems empty. But he finds Elizabeth behind the bar, sitting on the floor in the near-dark, her spine pressed against the cabinet.
He looks down at his suit. Thinks about what kind of nasty floor gunk might glom onto these rented slacks. What kinda charge he might rack up if he tries to return them with a stain. And then he sits down next to her, settles in close enough that he can feel the warmth radiating off her body, but far enough away that they don’t touch. (Much.)
He nudges her with his elbow. “‘Ey.”
She doesn’t look over at him.
“Hey.”
He watches her slide her hands over the chiffon of her dress, and Rio’s fingers twitch, remembering the puckered, coarse feel of it from earlier this evening when his grandmother had wrangled the two of them to pose together in front of the cherry blossom tree in the front yard, and his hand had briefly wrapped around the soft curve of her hip. Rosa had wanted to take a hundred pictures, but feeling heady from the overwhelming scent of Elizabeth’s vanilla perfume, Rio had stopped her after five.
“What happened to proving a point, huh?”
“I don’t care about that,” she says, but she’s a known liar and Rio doesn’t trust it for a second.
“Nah? Thought you wanted to make him jealous.” With me, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it for some reason, even though the detail makes him run his tongue along the sharp edges of his teeth.
She’s quiet for a long time, and Rio looks down the barrel of the bar, outside the floor-length windows to the patio of the pool, where he can see the shimmer of the water in the dying light. It’s beautiful, but not in the way that makes his stomach hurt. Just beautiful in the way where he could blink and then move on, like glitter on a sternum.
Not like Elizabeth, even if she was wearing a dress that didn’t reveal a single suggestive inch of bare skin, wrapped in a rough fabric that says do not touch.
“You don’t want to be here.”
That’s what she finally settles on as a response, and Rio looks back at her profile silhouetted by the glimmering lights and thinks:
She’s wrong.
He doesn’t want to be there, back in that ballroom with those people. He doesn’t mind being here, though, sitting on a grimy floor in the dark next to her. Even if he thinks they’d be having more fun back in the dull fluorescent light of her kitchen or sneaking onto the roof of her kid sister’s elementary school, or fuck—doing any of the things they do on any random Tuesday instead of wearing strange clothes and pretending to be something that they’re not.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” she says, and suddenly the tie feels too tight at Rio’s throat. Suffocating. “Back to the place where you were fired.”
Rio loosens the tie, takes a breath, and shrugs. “It’s whatever.”
“You never told me why.”
“Why what?”
For a second, he thinks she might say: Why you said yes.
“Why Dave fired you.”
“Oh.”
“When I asked, you got all weird. I assumed…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe…”
“What?” he asks again, an edge to his voice this time.
(When she imagined the worst of him, what did she imagine?)
“That maybe you got caught with a girl.” She lets the words hang in the air, hunches her shoulder into a half-shrug. “Like Dylan and the dugout.”
He didn’t know she knew about that. They didn’t talk about it. In fact, they didn’t talk about sex at all.
It wasn’t off-limits, exactly. It was just weird whenever it came up. She was prudish like that—had blushed crimson early on whenever he’d alluded to what he got up to with Dylan, so he’d stopped mentioning it entirely. And then she’d never told him about taking that step with Boland. And it wasn’t like he was going to ask. The closest they’d ever gotten to the subject was when she’d heard about the backseat girls through the grapevine. And she’d proved that she was as much of a prude about the topic as she’d ever been, despite the fact that he’d heard—
“No,” he says, cutting off that particular train of thought. “Nothin’ like that.”
“Then what?”
Scratching the back of his head, Rio squeezes an eye shut. “Dave’s an asshole, that’s what.”
Elizabeth hums, considering.
It’s true that Dave is an asshole—some middle-management type with beady eyes and a beer paunch, the type that loved to point fingers at everyone else’s wrongdoings even though they all knew what he was up to on company time with Henry the cater waiter (and that his wife didn’t have a clue)—but Rio knows that’s not exactly why he was fired. Knew it was probably going to happen before it did. He’d had enough warnings for coming late to shifts from the boxing gym but had done it again, anyway. Had missed most of the shift, actually.
It’s just that he’d avoided telling Elizabeth about it.
If he’d left his boxing match right after it was over, he’d probably have only been ten minutes late, max. But it was the first one that Elizabeth had ever shown up to (the first Friday night she’d finally been free, not having to show up to the icy cold football field or stuffy gym or windy bleachers of whatever sports game Dean was playing in that season—the first Friday she was single in over a year). And Rio should’ve rushed off afterward, but he didn’t know she’d be there, and Elizabeth didn’t know about the shift, so when he’d come out of the ring sweaty and exhausted and she’d surprised him by standing there near the locker room in that flowery dress looking all sweet and pink-cheeked, asking if she could take him out for ice cream to celebrate his win—
And, well, he’d never been good at telling her no.
“Do you want to go back to the dance?”
She shakes her head. “Not really.”
“Do you want to be alone?”
She looks at him. Finally. In the low light, her eyes look darker. A tendril of her hair hangs in her face. His eyes flick across it, considering.
“No.”
“Okay,” he says, and some tangle loosens in him.
“We should leave,” she suggests, dusting herself off and standing. She reaches a hand out to him to help him off the floor. “Do you want to leave?”
Her hand is small and soft, engulfed in his.
This time, he doesn’t even think of saying anything but yes.
They drive. For a long time, they drive. First, Rio insists on a cleansing ritual—namely, playing something that could actually be considered music—but after a while, Elizabeth convinces him to allow her to prove to him that he did not, in fact, hear one long fifty-seven-minute song created by a combination of autotune and a deal with the devil.
Only she doesn’t prove jack shit. She does, however, loosen up—the mood from the dance seeming to sluice off of her with each mile they drive further away.
“This is garbage,” Rio insists, reaching over to snatch his iPhone off of her lap after the third song.
“That’s only because you’re a pretentious asshole,” she counters, swatting his hand away.
“You’re gonna make me wreck.”
“And a bad driver,” she adds.
Rio rolls his eyes. “Not my fault you’re a shitty copilot.”
“Copilot? We’re not even going anywhere. There’s nowhere for me to pilot.”
“Well, where do you wanna go?” he challenges.
“Where do you want to take me?” she lobs back.
He thinks, Everywhere.
But he looks over at her in the passenger seat of his car, the way he’s looked at her a hundred times—a thousand times—except tonight she’s in a gown and he’s in a suit, too fancy against the backdrop of the faded, outdated brown leather of his grandpa's old caddy, but he thinks it doesn’t matter. None of it matters—where they go, what they do. As long as he’s with her, anything is good.
They end up at a dark, deserted park on the outskirts of the city sitting on the hood of his car and sharing a bag of french fries that they dip in ice cream—salted caramel for her, mint chocolate chip for him. The soundtrack to the night is the song of crickets and the whistle of a northern mockingbird hidden somewhere in the trees, and above them, the sky is streaked with stars. Elizabeth’s pale skin practically glows in the light of the full moon.
“I can’t believe I saved up two months of paychecks at Dairy Queen to buy this dress only to sit in a parking lot and eat a two dollar ice cream,” Elizabeth says, but when she dunks the fry into her dessert, she doesn’t look like she minds it too much.
“Oh, c’mon,” Rio says, nudging against her shoulder. “Be f’real with me. What’s more fun—me, or prom?”
“You were my prom date, you know.”
“Yeah, but not really.”
She squints. “No, I’m pretty sure that was you standing next to me and scowling at the DJ.”
“Yeah, but I wasn't exactly your date. I was only there so you could get back at Boland.”
As soon as he says it, he wishes he didn’t, because he feels more than sees Elizabeth stiffen beside him.
Stupid, he thinks. Bringing up Boland. Reminding her of the guy she wishes she were with instead.
Rio runs his tongue along the inside of his lip.
“Yeah, well, I don’t think seeing us standing around next to the punch bowl was really going to do much.”
Glancing at her, the thought flickers again: should he have asked her to dance?
Something sours in his gut, but he doesn’t know if it’s because he wishes he had or if he’s mad she expected it. Wasn’t it bad enough that he was just some prop this whole night? Was he supposed to hold her in his arms until, what, a red-faced Boland came stomping over and stole her back—count it as some sort of a victory?
He focuses hard on jabbing his spoon into his ice cream. “What is it about this guy, anyway?”
He doesn’t get it. Boland had never deserved her. Had never even understood her. He’d tease her for being an overachieving tryhard—never seeming to grasp that Elizabeth worked as hard as she did because she saw it as her ticket out. When she lost the election, he told her she should go out for the cheerleading squad instead. Like that was the same. Like she’d even be interested in it at all.
Fuck, he even called her Bethie, never noticing the way it made her eye twitch.
(Rio wouldn’t call her Elizabeth if he didn’t know she liked it so much. He knew most people called her Beth, but that Ruby called her "B" and that Annie hadn't yet outgrown "Sissy." He'd wanted a name for himself, too. Something special. So he'd told her once that Elizabeth fit her—that it sounded all regal and shit—and she’d laughed and told him she didn’t think she could pull it off. Only then she did, glowing every time he said it. She'd even signed it in his yearbook.)
“Dean cheated on me.”
“Right. So why do you want him back?”
“What?” She looks at him in utter confusion, her brow furrowed deeply. “I don’t.”
“Isn’t that what this whole thing was? You wanted to make him jealous—make him fight for you?”
“No, that wasn't it—”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know—originally I just wanted to piss him off, I guess. Or make him regret what he did. Show him I was over it. Take your pick. I just knew I wasn’t going to sit home alone on prom night and let him think I wasn’t there because of him.”
“But you dipped as soon as he showed up. They didn’t even see you.” Rio doesn’t say it like a question, but it is.
“What can I say? I guess I stopped caring what he thinks.”
Rio frowns. If she wasn’t twisted up over seeing them all over each other… then what had she been triggered her flight from the ballroom?
“Look, let’s just drop it, okay? No more talking about Dean or Amber or prom or—any of it.”
“Cool, yeah. It’s dropped,” Rio says, holding up his hands in surrender, but for some reason, he’s stuck on a single solitary thought.
Should he have asked her to dance?
Had she… wanted him to?
If it hadn’t been a ruse to lure back her dumbass ex… the idea doesn’t sound so bad.
His hands at the dip of her spine… hers head resting against his chest. The smell of vanilla… everywhere.
Even with the garbage music in the background, it would’ve been… nice, he thinks. More than nice.
“What?” Elizabeth asks, suddenly self-conscious.
“What?” he repeats dumbly.
She swipes at her face, searching for stray flecks of ice cream. “You’re looking at me all funny.”
He blinks. Was that true?
Luckily, he’s saved from casting about for an explanation when suddenly Elizabeth shivers, teeth chattering.
“Here,” he offers, shrugging out of his jacket.
She stares at him blankly.
“But won’t you be cold?”
Her cheeks are pink, her skin not hidden by her lace sleeves covered in puckered goosebumps.
“Nah, I’m good. Promise.”
Wordlessly, Elizabeth sets down her ice cream and accepts the jacket, sliding her arms into the sleeves and delicately pulling her wrist free and checking that she hasn’t damaged the red rose corsage he gave her—carefully handmade by his grandma with a flower picked from their garden. One of her fingers glazes lightly over the silky petals.
Then she looks up at him and smiles. “Thanks.”
Rio wets his lips, tasting the remnants of mint chocolate.
It’s not his jacket, only a rental, but he likes the look of her in it—easily replacing the image to one of her in his hoodie, ringside at his match, in the front seat of his car, sitting cross-legged on his bed.
The thought makes him half-dizzy. He exhales, leaning back against the windshield. He needs to get a fuckin’ grip.
He’d trained himself a long time ago not to think of her like this—to cut off every stray thought at the root, strangle them of sunlight, withhold water and cultivation. But they didn’t need much tending. Like a weed, they kept coming back, the roots growing deeper, thicker, more tangled up inside him. It got worse when he ended things with Dylan for good, but she’d still been still with Dean—and then, after she wasn’t, seemingly hung up on him—so he’d still razed down each thought of her soft skin, her pink lips…
Now if Dean really wasn’t in the picture, it was going to be hard not to let his thoughts go wild.
Especially when the next thing Elizabeth does is lay back next to him on the windshield, resting her head on his chest.
“You keep me warm, I keep you warm,” she says lightly. Like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
Her body is angled away from his, but her hand lands on his stomach not far above his belt.
Rio closes his eyes. Tries to focus on breathing.
“Your heart is beating so fast,” she whispers.
From the trees, the mockingbird trills.
“Elizabeth.”
“Yeah?”
He feels her shift her cheek against his chest to glance at his face, but he can’t look at her. He only looks at the stars, and he knows that they’re millions of miles away, but they look close enough to pluck right out of the sky.
“Did you want me to ask you to dance at prom?”
She’s quiet for so long that he thinks maybe he didn’t say anything at all. Then:
“Did you… want to ask me to dance?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“But I might’ve,” he says softly, “if I knew it wasn’t to help you try and get Boland back.”
“Right.”
They let this linger, each of them, he thinks, imagining what the night might've been.
“I kind of wish I’d told you, then.”
Rio swallows thickly, and he’s sure she can tell his heart starts beating even faster. It feels like it might explode.
“One thing I can’t figure out, though… If that’s why you thought I wanted you there, then… why did you say yes?”
Rio shrugs, jostling her a bit. “‘Cause you asked.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
She mulls this.
“What else would you say yes to?”
He looks down at her, his eyes scanning over her face, from the tiny scar hidden in her hairline to the dimple in her chin. She’s so pretty it makes his chest hurt.
“What do you wanna ask, Elizabeth?”
Her finger twitches against his abdomen.
“I want to ask if—" She pauses, then steels herself in that way he loves. "I want to ask if you ever think about kissing me.”
He nods. “Yes.”
“Did you—want to kiss me tonight?”
“Yes.”
They’re inching closer, he realizes. It’s slow, nearly imperceptible, but her mouth is closer to his than it’s ever been, and blood rushes through his ears so loud that he almost misses what she asks next.
“Will you kiss me—now?”
This time, he doesn’t say yes. Instead, he tips her dimpled chin up and then he hesitates, suspended between what was and what will be, between one perfect moment and the next. Then her eyes flutter shut and he lowers his mouth onto hers.
She tastes like salt and caramel and french fries and fruit punch, like prom night with his best friend. His hand finds her cheek and his fingers glide through her hair, and he rolls her over because he can, because she’ll let him, because she seems to want him as badly as he wants her—
And then she pulls away and half-laughs.
“What?” he asks, brushing a piece of hair out of her face.
“I think we rolled over onto my cup.”
She lifts a shoulder to show him a glob of caramel and white ice cream staining the suit jacket.
“Shit, that was a rental,” he says, but he finds he can't seem to care all that much.
“Oops. Well, I guess it’s yours now.”
“Yeah?” Rio asks, squeezing her hip. “And what about the girl wearing it?”
“Her, too,” Elizabeth says, beaming. "She's yours, too."
And then she yanks on his tie and kisses him again.