“I won’t,” I said, distracted, as Ada grabbed her water bottle and followed Laney out. I bounced on my toes and avoided looking at Margot and the group of seniors on the stage again. I wasn’t quite ready to talk to them yet, not in front of all these people. Instead, I looked around for Diya. She was sitting on the piano bench at the opposite end of the stage, studying her music.

“Hey,” I said, climbing up to join her. I sat on the floor beside the bench and started stretching.

Diya gave me a knowing smile. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks for talking to Mrs. Sorenson. You were right about having major sway with her. I thought I’d be groveling a lot longer.”

She shrugged. “Like I said, I owed you.” We fell into an easy silence, me stretching, her paging through her music.

“How’s the worm coming?” I asked a minute later.

“Bad. I got a rug burn on my chin.”

I snorted.

“No, seriously,” she said, lifting her head and pointing to a mark on the underside of her chin. “My brother thought it was a”—she lowered her voice—“a hickey and interrogated me for an hour.”

I laughed. “That seems like a weird place for a hickey.”

“That’s what I said!”

Our laughter echoed. I stopped abruptly, because the auditorium had gotten strangely quiet. I looked around and saw the senior group onstage staring at us. Margot looked away quickly, putting her headphones back on. Ethan gave me a What are you doing? look. Jude just seemed confused. A knot formed in my stomach. I didn’t want to make things worse between us.

I’d turned back to Diya, trying to figure out something to say, when someone coughed behind us. I whipped around, a little on edge. It was a freshman girl in the chorus. She put her hands out instinctively. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

The auditorium filled back up with the usual noises, so I calmed down a little. “You’re fine,” I said. The girl smiled, playing with the zipper on her pink hoodie. “I heard about what you said to Paul Manley. My sister’s in that class? Anyway, I wanted to say thanks.”

Geez, Ethan was right. Word traveled fast. “It was, um, my pleasure.” I smiled. Because it kind of was. “What’s your name?”

“Marin.”

“Wait wait, what did you say to Paul?” Diya raised an eyebrow.

When I hesitated, Marin jumped in. “Oh my God, it was amazing. I mean, I assume it was. But basically…” She told Diya the whole story, starting with Paul and Jake’s perpetual assholery and ending with my Negative Correlation of Dicks Speech. There was a short pause, and then Diya threw her head back and laughed, almost as hard as she had when we were dancing in her room. “That is hilarious,” she finally got out.