“Is she trying to look like a boy or what?” Cara asks with a snort, sidling up next to me and catching me staring. “God, it’s so sad.”

“So sad,” I agree, though I’m not talking about Jack when I say it. “I still can’t believe your parents let you wear that nightgown to school.”

“I mean, I was wearing leggings underneath when you picked me up this morning,” she reminds me, curtsying. “That helped.”

“So sneaky.” I tug on one of the thin pink ribbons around the neckline. Cara’s parents really do dream of keeping their oldest daughter seven years old forever. But they also have five other kids and a congregation to keep their eyes on, and the more successful her father gets, the more Cara seems to get away with. When I think about how she’s managed to get everywhere from Midnight Breakfast to Zach Sawyer’s party so far this semester with no problem, it gets easier and easier to picture how she engineered secretly dating Robbie.

“We don’t all have moms who literally hand over their own lingerie and tell us to go to town,” Cara says with a snort.

“That happened once.” But it was admittedly hilarious, a desperate move freshman year when I slept in baggy T-shirts every night and all my babysitting money was going into the household gas fund, leaving me nothing for new clothes. My mom managed to dig up some old satin nightie that was wildly inappropriate but sort of passed for acceptable over a T-shirt, and from then on, a pair of cute pajamas became one of my annual Christmas presents so I’d never miss out.

I glance up at Jack again, and this time I catch her eye and she gives me a little smile. It’s so hard to keep my face straight (no pun intended), I think I might explode, but Cara’s eyes are firmly on me, so I have no choice. At least I know Jack understands, even when she visibly sighs and walks toward her next class.

There’s an opening to talk to Jack about coming out now, about coming clean to everyone and just being a couple, the way Crystal and Calvin Jordan got to be, and Taylor and Matt get to be, and Diana … well, the way Diana wants her and Aidan Manos to be. With the obstacle of Miguel’s closet residence out of the way, that just leaves Jack’s and mine, and she wouldn’t exactly drop any jaws if she announced she wasn’t itching to get into the guys’ locker room.