I glance toward the parking lot. Danielle is here now, with Ava, and she looks like someone you’d want to paint, her gown the color of red wine with a slit practically up to her neck. Ryder is behind them, not very discreetly drinking out of a flask. Even though he and Ava are here together, they’re Not Together as dates; Ava wanted to go stag. Chase walks up to them then, his arm around Cecilia.

When your school is small, in the end it’s all just one big game of spin the bottle.

I start to move toward the group, but Andrew holds out a hand to stop me.

“Wait,” he says. “Before we . . . I mean.” He lowers his voice so our parents can’t hear, but they’re not paying much attention anyway, too busy looking through the pictures in the digital camera. “About last night,” he says. “I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I did mean to, I wanted to, I just . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I was about eighty percent made of tequila by that point, so—”

“I know,” he says. His voice is so quiet, and he’s leaning close to me so our parents can’t hear, and it hurts because his lips are only about three inches away from mine. It’s funny how something can be so close but actually so far away. “I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

“I kissed you back,” I say, my voice catching.

“But you were drunk.”

“So were you.” It’s like we’re talking in circles. “Let’s just forget it happened, okay? All of it.” And then I walk away from him and over to the parking lot. When I turn around, I’m surprised to see he hasn’t followed. He’s just standing there, scuffing one of his nice shoes into the grass. Then he nods and moves past me right to Danielle. She smiles when she sees him and wraps her arms around his neck, pulling him into her body so they’re plastered together. It feels a bit like someone is stabbing me repeatedly with a blunt knife.

There’s the rumbling of an engine and then a motorcycle peels into the parking lot, and thank God, it’s Dean. He looks good—better than good. It’s like he’s straight out of an action movie in his black tuxedo. He’s not James Dean anymore. He’s James Bond.

I make my way over to him just as he’s stepping off the bike, and I can feel his eyes sizing me up, his gaze slowly traveling down the length of my body, lingering in all the places that are a bit more exposed than usual.

“You clean up nice, Prom Date.” He tries to reach for me, to kiss me in front of everyone, but I back away from him because I know my parents are watching.