“Are you sure they’re not gonna let you go?” he asks.

“Pretty damn positive. You heard my presentation, and I just couldn’t bring myself to write the essay.” For a second I feel like crying. I was on the fence about going before, what with my dad and everything, but now that I can’t go, it feels like I’ve been cut out of my whole future, or at least any hope of a future that resembles anyone else’s. Above us the balloon sways back and forth before making up its mind to occupy one little random piece of space close to the ceiling.

“Well, all the more reason to go to prom, then,” Brendan says, nodding toward his car parked in the driveway. “This might be the last time except for graduation that you ever see these people. Unless you go to State,” he adds thoughtfully.

At that my eyes start dribbling. I wipe them quickly, but it’s too late. He’s already seen.

“Oh no,” he says gently. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s not you,” I sniffle, wiping my face and engaging the floor in a staring contest.

“I didn’t know you wanted to go to Nicaragua so badly,” he says.

I run my fingers through some of the ruffles. “I don’t really.” I lean my forehead against the doorway. “It’s just everything. Everyone’s moving on and going to college and whatever while I’m stuck here in limbo. If I go to prom, I’m just going to feel even more like a freshly hatched alien. Everyone else is in that world, and I’m in this world. And they can’t wait for me, and I can’t catch up with them.”

Brendan looks at me steadily. “How about this: We go to prom and convince Mr. Garcia to let you go to Nicaragua. Then at least you’ll have a little bit longer to be part of everything.”

I wipe my nose. I guess I could go, but not because I want to. Me going is kind of a selfless act to appease my friends, my parents, and, okay, future Cham, who might find herself a true idiot for not going.

“Okay.” I tug on a particularly egregious ruffle at my hip. “We just have to make one stop first.”

According to the hours posted online, Willa’s Closet is open for another fifteen minutes. Luckily, our town is small enough that you’re never more than ten minutes away from where you want to go, even when the traffic is particularly “heavy.”

“Here?” Brendan asks as he slows through the center of town and stops between the pizza place and the bank.

“Yep, perfect.” I dash out of the car, blue ruffles of my dress swishing together. “There you are,” I whisper. My darling white dress is front-and-center in the fingerprint-smudged window, waiting for somebody. My body to be exact. As fun as it sounds to go through life pissed about the only As I ever got, maybe if I fake it ’til I make it, my boobs will actually grow on me one day (not literally, although that’d be some great karma). I open the door to find—Iggy? Izzy? Izzy.—looking very intently at her laptop, where a sticker says PROUD TO BE A COLLEGE DROPOUT next to one that says NACHO PROBLEM.