Oh.

This feels like one of those dating sims that I play often, where the game prompts you to make a decision you can’t come back from.

What will you do?

I…

The words slip out of my mouth. “I’m going to go find her, and I’m going to grovel an apology.”

“Wow, I didn’t expect you to admit that—”

“Thank God!” Another—male—voice says from the side of the house before the owner of said voice crawls his way out of the bushes with a suit in a black bag. Ethan. Imogen’s boyfriend. He picks the twigs out of his hair and shakes them off the bag.

I stare at him, not quite believing my eyes. “You too?”

“Listen, we’re going to make sure you’re doing this the right way,” he replies, and holds up the suit bag. “We didn’t get a hotel for the night just to watch you go up in smoke.”

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED that if you are the daughter of a librarian who was also the president of your kindergarten’s PTA, your father will volunteer to be a chaperone to the Homecoming Dance just to destroy any prospects you might have for a good time.

“Get! Pumped! Get! Pumped!” Dad cheers as he sashays out of his room in a silver sequined jacket that catches the living room lights and throws stars against the walls. “Are you ready to—Rosebud, why aren’t you dressed?”

Oh, I guess I never gave him the memo.

I sit on the couch with my two best friends on either side of me and slowly sink into the cushions. I don’t meet his gaze.

“She won’t come,” Quinn fills in for me.

Dad gives a start. “But it’s your last Homecoming! You can’t all be sitting it out! You’re going to be crowned, aren’t you, Quinn?”

Annie throws up her arms. “That’s what I’m saying!”

“It’s just a crown,” Quinn replies, “and it might not go to me.”

Dad pouts. “But Vance! You asked him to the—”

“He’s not going,” I say. If I could melt into the cushions and live among the dropped food crumbs and lost pennies, I would. “Sometimes things just don’t work out.”

Because sometimes you’re fooled not once, not twice, but three times by a selfish asshole who thinks that you leaked that footage. I wouldn’t even know how to leak it—who would I send the video to? How would I do it? With a sassy subject line reading I REIGNED VANCE IN? It’s ridiculous.

I thought he knew me—or at least trusted me.

But apparently not.

“Oh, Rosebud, I’m so sorry. I would stay home with you, but…I can’t. They’re expecting me to chaperone.”

“It’s okay, Dad. You can go and tell me how it is,” I reply.

He finishes tying his bow tie and comes to sit on the coffee table in front of me. “Okay, but I just want to give you a little piece of advice first.”

“I really don’t need any.”

“I know, but humor me?”

“Ooh, Space Dad has advice!” Annie says, clapping her hands. “This has to be good!”

“Speak wisdom to us,” Quinn agrees.

Why are my friends like this?

Dad leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and says, “Amara up, Rosebud.” Then he stands, grabs his keys from the bowl on the end table, and leaves. When he’s gone, the apartment is quiet, until he starts up his beat-up Ford and it chugs out of the complex. Quinn and Annie exchange a confused look. “Amara up?”

“Princess Amara, maybe?”

Amara up, Rosebud.

Mom used to say that to me all the time when I was afraid to do something. She would kneel down to me, tap me on the nose, and say in that gravelly voice of hers, “Amara up,” every time I tried to let my what-ifs and anxieties get in the way.

Amara wouldn’t sit at home, dateless and alone, instead of going to a dance. She’s the princess of the Noxian Empire, the purveyor of justice, the hope of a dying star. She wouldn’t cower, and she wouldn’t hide. She would go—alone, if she had to.

What am I doing, letting Vance Reigns dictate how I live my life? So he pissed me off, so he blames me, so he’s making me go to this dance alone—this is my Homecoming Dance. And my best friend is going to be crowned Homecoming Overlord and they’re thinking of staying home with my sorry ass and—

I push myself to my feet and turn back to my two friends on the couch. “We’re going.” I force the words out.

Annie and Quinn blink up at me.

“Wait, what?” Annie asks. “But I thought—”

“We were going to stay here and watch Starfield reruns,” Quinn finishes.

“Sure, we can do that—after I see Garrett’s face when you take the crown from him,” I reply, and march off toward my room to squeeze into my dress and sharpen my eyeliner to kill—because I’m going out.

I TIE MY TIE—THE PERFECT SHADE OF BLUE, reminding me too much of Darien’s Carmindor uniform—at my throat in the car mirror. My hands are shaking. The night is cool but I am sweating so badly I keep tugging at my collar to make sure it’s not sticking. “I don’t even know if she’s going to be there. What if she doesn’t come?”

“She’ll be there,” Imogen replies, and resituates herself in the car. “It’s us who might not get there,” she adds under her breath, and slams on the horn again. We’re stuck in traffic a mile from the gymnasium, at least per Google, and it doesn’t seem to be moving at all. We’re sitting, at a standstill, in the middle of town, to the point where people are beginning to park and walk to Homecoming from here. In the back seat, her boyfriend, Ethan, is lying down over the seats, tapping his phone mercilessly because the gas station beside us is a Pokémon gym and he is relentless, if not predictable.

I give her a sidelong look. “But how do you know?”

“That we won’t get there? Well, the traffic—”

“No, Rosie.”

“I have it on good faith.”

“Good faith?” I frown. “Is this the same good faith that told you where I lived?”

“No, that was TMZ,” she replies, and mutters something heated under her breath. She lays on the horn again. “C’mon! What’s the holdup?”

I would rather wait in this traffic for eternity, but I know that’s only an option for cowards and Vance-of-a-month-ago, which in a Venn diagram is a circle. I smooth out the front of my tuxedo, trying to keep my patience.

Rosie won’t stay at the dance the whole night. She hates dances.

This feels like another choice in my dating sim app—

  You are stuck on the main road in and out of town, and time is of the essence. The girl who has made you feel more human than anyone else you’ve ever met is waiting there, but she may be gone by the time you arrive. What do you do?

→ See what the traffic jam is.

→ Wait. Because if you miss her at Homecoming, then it was fate that you didn’t deserve her to begin with.

→ Get out of the car and run to her, you bloody prat!

“Maybe if I—Vance, where are you going?” Imogen asks as I open the door and get out. The autos aren’t moving, and I doubt they will for a while. I don’t have time to sit here in this traffic, on the only road in and out of town.

I loosen my tie. “I’ll get there from here,” I say, and lean back into the car to add, “Thanks—for everything.”

Ethan sits up in the back seat. “Did Vance just thank us?”

“Write that down, Ethan, it’s a miracle—”

I close the door before I can hear the rest of Imogen’s smart comment and begin to jog down the middle lane between the autos. But what if Rosie’s already there? What if she’s leaving? She asked me to Homecoming, and I never gave her an answer. I should have—

I shouldn’t have doubted her.

My feet begin to move faster.

I shouldn’t have thought the worst.

I trip, but I right myself. I start taking longer strides.

She deserves better than that.

She deserves better.

I don’t realize that I’m running until my lungs begin to burn and sweat prickles my forehead, but I don’t stop. I’ve run for the last month around this minuscule town. I always ran while she was there, I ran to get away, I ran so I wouldn’t have to deal with her.

I know the irony now that I’m running toward her.

I don’t want to miss her—I can’t. There are so many things I have done wrong in my life so far, and so many things I never bothered to apologize for, or fix. But I want to start.

At the next cross street, I find her school. When I think of American high schools, I imagine something along the lines of Riverdale or Gossip Girl or—I hate to admit it—Seaside Cove.

Rosie’s high school is nothing of the sort. It is a sprawling brick building with trailers out back for more classrooms, I suspect, and a breezeway that links to the local technology center. The gymnasium is near the back of the campus, towering like some blocky colossal god, the mural of a pouncing wildcat painted on its front, but tonight there is a banner blocking most of the mural, fluttering above the entrance to the gym, that reads GARDEN OF MEMORIES, which, I suppose, is this year’s theme.