A Prom to Remember(66)

Lizzie gave her friend a thumbs-up and watched as Madison crawled over to the table and carefully extracted her purse from underneath. She stood quickly and nearly fell again as she stumbled back to dry land.

Lizzie grabbed Madison’s hand and ran for the door with the rest of the crowd, unable to stop laughing even though they were both soaking wet.

After avoiding her phone for hours, Lizzie finally checked it again as she and Madison were being evacuated from the hotel.

She had a missed text from Jacinta.



Lizzie stared at the phone.

The text was from over an hour ago.

What on earth kind of surprise could Jacinta have for Lizzie? What was going on?




Lizzie prayed that Jacinta would check her texts sooner than Lizzie had.




The three little dots that indicated someone was writing a message popped up and then went away, popped up and went away.

And then nothing. Jacinta didn’t say anything else.

Lizzie showed Madison the texts, and they started looking for Jacinta in the parking lot. They were going to find her.

“Ugh, couldn’t she drop a pin or something?” Madison asked. But it was hard to see among the crowd of people being evacuated from the hotel.

And then, to make everything a little more dramatic, the power went out.

“We should split up,” Lizzie said, flicking on the flashlight on her phone.

“Yeah, I should probably try to find Otis and Luke, too,” Madison said, squinting into the semidarkness around them and walking toward the evacuating crowd.

Lizzie looked back toward the hotel entrance and followed the instructions that Jacinta had texted, walking a perfectly straight line through the parking lot.

Headlights flashed up ahead.

And in front of them stood a boy in perfect silhouette.

Cameron

Cameron stood in front of Jacinta’s car and watched the mass of people pour from every set of doors of the hotel. They came from emergency exits, side entrances, and the revolving door at the front of the hotel. There was no way to know which direction Laptop Girl would come from.

“Do you see her?” Cameron asked Jacinta.

She shook her head.

“Can you text her and ask which direction she’s coming from?”

If only he could text her himself. If only he could walk into the crowd and find her, but Jacinta had this whole grand reveal planned.

“I did. She didn’t respond. It’s probably better to stay in one place rather than all of us getting lost in the crowd,” she said, as if able to read his thoughts.

Jacinta slipped off her shoes and shimmied onto the roof of her car to get a better look.

“You probably shouldn’t stand up there,” Cameron said. “You might dent it. And I don’t mean that as a dig. Car roofs should not be stood on.”

“Excellent point,” she said, and then the power went out in the hotel and the parking lot around them.

The streetlight above them flipped off, making it all the more difficult to find anyone, or anything. Jacinta slipped her keys into the ignition and put her headlights on, but all that did was make Cameron feel completely blind.

“Maybe if you would tell me who she is, I’d have a better chance of actually finding her.”

“I told her where we were. I’m sure she’s coming.”

Couples, groups, and families continued to pour from the hotel exits.

“She’ll never find us,” Cameron muttered.

“Not with that attitude. I’ll try to text better instructions.”

Before Jacinta could text again, a girl was standing there in her dripping wet prom dress, her shoes in her hands, and her hair falling in her face. She had a lime green ribbon around her neck.

Cameron smiled because he didn’t know what else to do. He wasn’t even sure she could see him in the brightness of the headlights.

The girl held a hand up to her face. “Jacinta, could you turn off the headlights?”

“Oh god, yeah,” Jacinta said, pulling her key from the ignition. “Sorry about that.”

“Hey, Cameron,” Lizzie said, a smile lighting up her face even in the dark parking lot.

“Hey, Lizzie.” Cameron felt shyer than he would have expected. But she knew who he was and didn’t run away screaming. That could only bode well for him.

Lizzie stepped up to Cameron. “So, you’re Mystery Boy.”

“If that’s what you call me.” His face was growing warm for no particular reason. “I called you Laptop Girl.”

“We’re, like, generic dollar-store superheroes.”

Cameron laughed, a little maniacally thanks to his nerves.

“Like what the heck would Laptop Girl’s powers even be? I can leap over laptops in a single bound?”

Cameron shrugged. “Apparently I solve mysteries.” He swallowed and tried to ignore the way his heart was thumping in his chest.

“That’s cooler than jumping over laptops.” She looked at him from head to toe. “I like your lime green shirt.”

He looked down at it. “The guy at the tuxedo place called it chartreuse.”

“Yeah, that’s the same thing.”

“I like your, um, thing,” he said, reaching up to touch the ribbon at her neck, then pulling his hand away quickly, still unsure of himself.