My breath lodges in my throat. That’s almost…exactly what the Voice said. Wasn’t it?

No. I’m not thinking about what happened, remember? And I’m certainly not going to draw parallels where none exist. Voice who?

“I promise I’ll never speak to him again.” It’s a small concession for the girl who gets up an hour early on the weekends to make pastries people will actually eat for me to photograph. “Happy?”

Her lips twitch. “Drama queen.”

“Enough about me,” I say, vowing to forget that I ever knew a boy named Bandit. I peer at my best friend. There’s a dullness to her expression. A sheen of…sadness overlaying her features. “Lalana, are you okay? You seem a little down. Is this about Reggie?”

She straightens, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Nah. Just some family stuff I can’t really talk about.”

“O-kay,” I say slowly. “But I’m here for you. You know that, right? Any time at all.”

She smirks. “Even two thirty in the morning?”

I grin. “Even then.” In eighth grade, I snuck out my window at two thirty a.m. with a box of mochi under my arm because Lalana was convinced she couldn’t survive the night without the green-tea ice cream. Made perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, I slipped and broke my arm in two places. It did not make sense to my father.

“I made something for you,” I continue.

She wrinkles her nose. “Please tell me you didn’t bake.”

“Ugh, no.” I shudder. I measure ingredients by, you know, scooping up a bunch of flour and dumping it into a bowl. Who knew that in baking, a cup isn’t really a cup? Instead, it’s this precisely measured amount that involves scraping a knife across the top to get rid of the two excess grains. Who has that kind of time?

I cross to the drawer and pull out the masterpiece I created this afternoon. “Ta-da!”

A printout of Chris Hemsworth’s face is taped to the end of a chopstick, with a cartoon bubble coming out of his mouth that says, “Will you go to prom with me?”

Lalana cracks up. “Oh, Alice,” she gasps, holding onto her belly. “I can’t even.”

I smile like a proud parent. “Who needs to go to prom with Reggie when you’ve got Thor?”

“Who’s going to prom with whom?” A male voice drifts into the room. Lalana and I both freeze.

Before we can recover, a tall African-American boy with a disarming smile strolls into the room. Zeke, a prodigy whose genius rivals my brother’s—and my brother’s only friend outside of me.

“Nobody,” I say. I didn’t know Zeke was here, even though I’m secretly glad he is. Archie needed this. “We were just goofing around.”

Lalana picks up the Chris Hemsworth replica and strokes his cheeks possessively.