Markos shook his head. “Too Frankenspelled.”
“Half the girls here have had a spell touch-up. Who cares?”
“Most of them looked fine before. You remember Kay’s old face . . .” He twisted his own into a sour expression.
“You are such an ass.”
“I’m honest. Not my fault if people can’t handle the truth.”
“I’d say Diana, but then Ari would kill you.”
“Plus I require a bare minimum of a personality.” He laughed and checked his watch.
“Oh no,” I said.
“What?” His eyes opened wide, as if that might make him look innocent.
“Please tell me you didn’t plan something.”
Markos grinned. “I’ve got a legacy to uphold.”
Markos’s older brothers had been telling us for years about their Homecoming pranks. Brian brought a goat in a tuxedo as his “date,” Dev rigged the basketball hoop with a laser light projector that spelled out insults onto one of the walls, and Cal replaced all of the DJ’s music with the Jackson 5’s “ABC.”
“Didn’t they do theirs senior year?”
Markos tapped the side of his nose. “The admin will be watching me like a hawk senior year. This is all about the element of surprise.”
He peered into the crowd intently, and I watched the dancing, trying to see what he saw. Everyone seemed normal and happy to me. They all belonged exactly where they were. When I turned back to Markos, he’d gone. I thought about trying to find him but figured it would ruin the surprise, so I took a deep breath and elbowed my way into the crowd to join Ari. She shouted “Win!” and tucked her arm into mine, still dancing. I shuffled back and forth, trying not to step on her.
She had on a strapless blue dress, longer in the back than the front. I’d seen her bare, slightly freckly shoulders before—in her performances—and maybe that’s why I pictured her being lifted up overhead, arching her back and soaring. I couldn’t do that for her, so I shuffled.
When a slow song came on, she turned to face me, putting her hands on my shoulders. I placed mine on her waist and swayed back and forth. The blue material of her dress was warm from her body but so shiny I thought my hands might slide off. I was afraid to hold her too tight—not that I thought I’d hurt her, because I knew she was way stronger than me, but because it might give away how much I wanted to hold her, and she’d have to pull back, and it would become clear that she didn’t want me as much as I wanted her. Our dancing—our relationship—balanced on a seesaw. If I put my full weight into it, I’d go crashing down and she’d fly away.
“Feel the music in your core,” Ari said in a European accent—her “ballet master” voice. “What does the music say to you?”
I listened. “It says, ‘I am a boy-band ballad with nonsensical lyrics.’”
Ari laughed. “How dare you. I’m thinking of getting these lyrics tattooed on my butt.”
“‘Waking this spire for you’?”
“It’s ‘quaking desire for you,’ actually.”
“Well, of course when you say it, it’s poetry.”
She smiled at me, a welcome kick in the ribs. Before I could chicken out I leaned in and gave her a kiss. She was still smiling when I pulled back, and maybe her cheeks were redder than before.
“You’re kind of the best, Win Tillman,” she said.
That was it—I was going to say something that would make it obvious how much I liked her, and the seesaw would come crashing down. I could feel words coming up my chest and I didn’t know how to stop them, or if I wanted to.
Something wet and sudsy dripped from the ceiling into my eyes. I let go of Ari to wipe it away, and that’s when the shouting started. When my eyes were clear, I could see Ari staring up toward the dark gym ceiling, laughing. Big soapy drips plopped from the ceiling vents. Around us, girls tried to shield their updos, and guys slipped in their formal shoes.
“I love it, but I don’t get it,” Ari said. “Where’s Markos?”
I grabbed her hand and we slip-n-slided to the doors to the gym. People were mostly streaming out to the parking lot, so we turned the other direction, heading deeper into the dark school. At a fork in the hallway we paused until we heard voices.
Down the hall to the right, Markos had his back against a locker, his arms crossed over his chest. A cop stood in front of him.
“. . . lucky it was me and not someone else assigned to the school. This is so unbelievably stupid, Markos,” the cop was saying, and I knew before we got close enough to see that it was Markos’s oldest brother, Brian. I hurried the last thirty feet to them, Ari close at my heels. Brian turned to us. “Win, get back to the dance.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Markos put bubble machines in the heating vents.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Markos said.