His eyebrow shoot up. “It was Rosie?”

I nod, and find myself twisting my fingers nervously. “Um—you know me better than anyone, so I was wondering…how do…how…” I scrub the back of my neck, pursing my lips. Get it together. You aren’t like this.

“You’ve dated a lot of people, I’m sure you don’t need my expert coaching,” Elias fills in with a shrug.

My stomach turns. “She said no.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t sound so shocked, please.”

“Well, I just—I’m not, really,” he replies. “I honestly can’t blame her.”

“Thanks.”

He cocks his head. “Well, c’mon, you’re going to help me make enchiladas tonight. You said you wanted to learn how, yes?”

I swallow the knot in my throat, and nod. “I’m terrible at cooking.”

“And that is why we practice and say to the god of burnt food—not today.”

Not today.

As I follow him back into the house to start the enchiladas, I catch my reflection in the sliding glass door. My T-shirt is still damp from the rainstorm, and my sweatpants hang on me heavily, and my orange-ish hair is wild and curling out from the sides of my head. I don’t look like a prince of Hollywood right now. I am so used to having to entertain people. To use them. To be used. Dates with paparazzi, with scheduled outings and scripted meet-cutes.

But when I was with Rosie in the pool house, for the briefest moment I felt like—

Like she didn’t want anything of me at all, not a piece, not a part, broken off to be hoarded and sold to the highest bidder. She was just there, and she was nice when she had absolute no reason to be.

It was a gift I wasn’t expecting, and her no was an answer that had been coming for a long, long time.

ANNIE, QUINN, AND I MEET FOR BREAKFAST at the diner as we usually do. Quinn is trying to write out their Homecoming PSA for this afternoon, but they keep on crossing out everything they start. How do you write a thirty-second speech about why the student body should vote for you in a popularity contest? For anyone who isn’t self-involved or rolled a twenty on Charisma when they were born, it’s pretty tough, I imagine.

I’m still a little distracted by yesterday. The rainstorm, the conversation, me actually turning down the Vance Reigns. I must be absolutely out of my mind. Any girl would die to date him, but in the moment…

He ticked me off, honestly.

I wouldn’t want to go out pretending to be anyone else, and when he adopted that accent—the accent I met him in—everything sort of just fell into place. He wouldn’t mind going out with me as long as he wasn’t himself when he did.

Like we couldn’t be a match if he was his true self.

I shouldn’t be surprised.

I’m not a heroine in a rom-com, and guys like that don’t fall for girls like me. Besides, he’s so infuriating I sort of want to smother him between my thighs and not in the sexy way. Like literally smother him.

Maybe I can write that as my college essay. Which is what I’m trying to work on right now, staring mindlessly at a blank Word document, but my mind is still stuck in the pool house, my thoughts still damp and my heart beating like a thunderstorm.

“…Okay, but what if I don’t do a speech at all and just do, I don’t know, an interpretive dance?” Quinn asks.

Annie gives them a pointed look and spears one of her eggs. “Too avant-garde for the viewership. Ugh, if only there was a way to be really flash and extra.”

“They’re holding auditions for the mascot again after Bradley broke his leg diving off a bleacher,” they muse. “Maybe I should audition…”

Annie rolls her eyes. “Ugh, who wants to be a mascot?”

“I mean, I would.”

“Don’t—Rosie, tell Quinn not to ruin their senior year.”

I snap out of my thoughts. “What?”

“Have you really not been paying attention?”

“Um…”

Annie throws her hands up. “What has been up with you today? You’re disassociating hard.” She leans over the table to glance at my laptop screen. “And you haven’t even written a word in your essay!”

“It’s hard,” I mumble in reply, and then I frown, because that’s not quite the truth of it, and I need to tell someone about what happened yesterday. If I keep it bottled up, I feel like it’ll just become this gnarled, tangled mess. “Vance asked me out yesterday.”

Both of my friends sit at attention.

“Excuse me?” Annie gasps.

“When’s the wedding?” Quinn adds.

Oh, good. This is going to go fantastically. I shift uncomfortably in the booth, closing my laptop. “I…sort of turned him down.”

“YOU DID WHAT?” they cry.

The other occupants in the diner whirl around to look at us. I sink lower in my booth. “I know! I know. I just…” I frown and look down into my half-eaten breakfast of pancakes and bacon. I guess I should finally tell them. Rip off the Band-Aid. It’s not exactly my dream anymore, or a story to keep me company at night. “Remember at ExcelsiCon, when I disappeared for that night?”

“Yeah,” Annie fills in.

“Well…I met a Sond cosplayer that night, and we went out and…had an amazing night. The best night of my life, really. I’m sorry I kept it from you. I just felt like…it was mine, for a while.”

Quinn gives me a narrow look. “But not anymore?”

“Oh, please don’t tell me you’re holding out for him,” Annie adds.

“No, because I found him.” I take a deep breath and say, “It was Vance.”

Quinn about chokes on their coffee. “Come again?”

“The cosplayer was Vance,” I repeat with a shrug. “I know, it’s kind of bonkers and really weird but—we found out a few days ago when I sprained my ankle.”

Annie squints at me. “So did you or did you not fall off a bookcase?”

“…Not.”

And I explain to them what actually happened. I tell them about going to look for a missing book, and being annoyingly curious (“Yeah, that’s your MO,” Quinn says, and nods in agreement), and finding the mask instead. The same mask that Sond wore that night. I explain the miscommunication between us—how I thought he didn’t tell me who he was because he was ashamed it was me, and how he didn’t want to tell me because he was afraid I would be ashamed that it was him, and how I accidentally took a tumble down the last few stairs, and then yesterday how we got locked out of the house and caught in the rain and hid in the pool house.

When I recount it, the entire ordeal sounds like a fanfic in the making, right up until I say, “He asked me out and said we could go on dates as other people, but I met him as someone I wasn’t and as someone he wasn’t, and I…don’t want that. I want someone who wants to take me out as himself, you know?”

Quinn and Annie don’t respond at first.

“…Is that weird?”

Quinn puts their napkin over their plate and slides across the booth to me. They wrap their arms around my shoulders and squeeze tightly. “No,” they reply quietly, as Annie slips underneath the booth and pops up on the other side and puts her arms around me, too.

“You deserve better,” she adds.

I melt into my best friends’ hug, and finally for the first time since turning Vance down, I feel okay. “Thank you.”

* * *

—

  IF THIS MORNING VINDICATED MY CHOICE to turn down Vance, the special afternoon Homecoming announcement does the exact opposite. It makes me question everything I have every done up to this point in my life. It makes me wonder if I should join a convent and pledge myself to baby Jesus and forget about this whole love thing to begin with.

The Homecoming announcement starts out innocuously enough. I do feel bad about not helping Quinn with their speech, but I can’t even write my own college application essay. How the hell could I write a speech that would make the student body vote for them and not, well—

“First up is William Wu,” says the Not Another News Show news anchor—I forget her name—as the camera pans over to a strikingly stocky guy with a shock of black spiky hair. He’s the high school’s football captain, so he’s popular, which’ll give him a few votes at least.

“ ’Sup, guys,” he starts, giving the camera a bro-nod. “You should vote for me, because these babies are illegal in forty-nine states.” Then he raises his arms and flexes to an astounding degree.

And that’s how it begins.

I find myself trying to make a list of worthwhile college essays as some of the other students running for Homecoming King—Overlord—make their cases. It’s not like running for student body president—they can’t enact change, and they can’t promise less homework or to bring Pizza Friday back—but they can show off their ridiculous pecs and their popular talents.

And then it’s my best friend’s turn.

“Hello there, my name is Quinn Holland,” they begin in their unmistakable monotonous voice, reading from a small neon-pink note card, “and I think you should vote for me because I am diligent and hardworking, and none of that matters.”