“I’m gonna—” I say, gesturing vaguely in the direction I came from. He’s worrying his lip again, and this isn’t going how I expected, so it seems safer to just melt back into the crowd, preserving his piano fingers and stolen glances for my music and not having them spoiled by the reality of the boy behind them.

I turn and dance my way toward where I last saw Jayla. She was singing along with a group of girls on the edge of the stage, flexing her ability to build a squad from scratch in five seconds flat. She’s not where I left her, though, and I stop quick to reorient myself in the crowd. Someone thumps against me and I nearly tip over, thanks to these damn shoes. I spin around to shout . . . but it’s Bats standing sheepishly behind me. I crinkle my forehead. I’m usually a better judge of character than this, and now he’s thrown me twice in the span of three minutes. He shrugs and flashes a shy smile behind his mask, a single dimple appearing and disappearing on his left cheek. It shouldn’t work but it does.

There’s a break in the music then, DJs switching out or something, and the room goes eerily quiet before bursting with conversations. Finally, we can hear each other. Sort of.

“Can we just—?” He gestures toward the exit, and I raise my eyebrows.

“Are you trying to get me alone?”

“Yes,” he says, completely serious. “I hate crowds.”

“If you hate crowds, why did you come to prom?” I ask, but then the music picks up again. People crowd all around us, jostling us with their dancing. He looks exceptionally uncomfortable. “Fine.”

I nab the edge of his sleeve and pull him along behind me. He stiffens at first but relaxes into it when I shift our path over to the door. I let my fingers slip lower, smiling when we link our hands.

“No reentry,” the bouncer says, lifting his foot up across the aisle, and okay, there goes my plan to come back and dance, I guess. I glance behind me and see Jayla, but she’s talking and laughing with a group of cosplayers we met today. It’ll be faster to just text her when I get out in the hall.

“Got it,” I say, shifting past.

Bats drops my hand once we’re out of the room. His kind of hovers for half a second, like he doesn’t know what to do with it, before he shoves it into his pocket. I walk a little farther down the hall, but now we’re almost to the lobby, which is nearly as busy and loud as where we just left.

“This way.” He tilts his head toward a nearby hallway.