We wrap our arms around each other’s bare shoulders, shivering a little in the overcool air-conditioning inside the hall, and smile through our goose bumps.
“One more!” she cries, folding one slim, perfectly spray-tanned arm around the back of my neck and the other around my waist to dip me. I lift my lacy black kitten heel off the floor like I’m so flustered by the butterflies of love, I can’t keep both feet on the ground.
The flash pops. “Okay, okay,” the photographer dismisses us.
We head into the main hall, where Exhibit B: a plush red carpet stretches from the entrance across the parquet dance floor to the buffet table in back of the long room. Over the table a Welcome, Sugarbrook High banner hangs from the ceiling, midnight blue, painted with planets.
Puzzling theme decorations aside, Crystal Peak is actually beautiful. Set away from the road on a wooded hill off Acorn Drive, it’s surrounded on all sides by towering pin oaks, and the sun slanting through the trees casts green leaf light through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Out back is a patio where kids are taking pictures. “Want to go see?” I ask. We make our way across the dance floor, still sparsely populated because it’s early. Jessa pauses to say hello to loads of people—mostly drooling boys—and I wave to a few of them. I even accept a hug from Katie Rodriguez in her sparkly, sky-blue ball gown.
“You’re like an Urban Outfitters model, Imogene!” she assures me.
“You too, definitely. But prettier.”
“Oh my god, that’s so sweet!”
I don’t really know her. I don’t know many of them, even after twelve years in the same small schools, twelve years of going to the same pizza parties and joining the same extracurriculars. But I kind of love them in the fuzzy, glowing, Barbara Walters camera filter of graduation and permanent good-byes. I wish I’d known it would be like this. I wish I’d gotten to know them, let them get to know me.
I’ll do better at college, I promise myself. I’ll have to—at the end of August, while I’m moving into my dorm room at Emerson College in Boston, Jessa will set out for the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. She hasn’t picked a discipline yet, but she’ll figure it out. She’s her own kind of genius, my best friend.
Stopping at the buffet to grab plastic flutes of “champagne” that tastes spot-on for ginger ale, we slide open the glass patio doors and go into the flushed early June air. Flattening our dresses under our butts, we perch on a bench facing west, where the evening sun bobs pink and orange over the silhouetted treetops.
A few yards away, Lee Jung and his sophomore girlfriend, Cassidy Meyer, lean against the railing, holding their phones with outstretched arms and snapping pictures of themselves kissing with the sunset behind them. Her hair is braided in a stiff, bejeweled halo; his is gelled into a black slick. Between tonguing and posing, Lee catches sight of me. He flushes, looks away, and hurries Cassidy back inside.
“Like, there but for the grace of god goes you,” Jessa snickers.
“He was nice. Sweaty hands, though. No taste in music. He put Chris Brown on my mix CDs.”
Shaking our heads, we gulp our champale.
My cell phone vibrates inside the impractically small and beautifully beaded clutch Lindy gave me. One of the conditions of my freedom is I have to check in frequently. I don’t really mind. I mean, I know I’m supposed to think it’s annoying and overprotective, but Lindy says family isn’t blood, necessarily; it’s a thousand little choices we make every day. We choose to trust each other and forgive each other and go to the pasta place for dinner even though some of us would rather eat sushi. Dad didn’t choose to be sick, but he chose to go back to therapy and take his meds and to be there for us. And maybe I didn’t choose to have an around-the-corner-from-average family, or to get a new stepmother when I was in high school, but I can choose to stick by her while Dad’s getting better. I’m trying to let her in, like I know she wants me to. When I opened the door of the Tiki Motel room to see Lindy standing there, I thought she’d run straight to Dad. She loves him, after all. But the first thing she did was pull me in and crush me against her for a long moment, muttering into my ear, “If you ever scare me like that again, Imogene Mei Scott, I will have you surgically attached to me.”
I’m glad she and Dad have each other.
The text is a picture message from Dad, clearly taken by Lindy. He sits in his big red armchair, toasting with a wineglass full of fruit punch (the carton is clearly visible beside him). Below is the caption: Enjoy your big night, Immy. Be smart. Tell the boys you’re saving all your dances for Jesus.
I text back: Safe at the prom. Enjoy your Hitchcock marathon, party animals. Love you.
Jessa leans in to read over my shoulder. “Aww!”
“Yeah, we’re precious. What’s Jeremy doing tonight?”