Shuffle, Repeat(73)

“Have you even mentioned it? Did you tell him the date?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Why do you care? It’s not like you’re going.” Shaun slides a look at me. “Unless maybe you are…?”

“Don’t change the subject. You should at least ask him. You’re not giving him a chance to say yes or no. You’re not giving him a choice.”

Shaun is silent the rest of the drive. When he pulls up in front of my house, he turns to look at me. “Oliver doesn’t have a date.”

“Oliver hates me,” I tell him. “Thanks for the ride.”

? ? ?

Lily and I had plans to go to the mall after school so I could help her find accessories to go with her prom dress. She said she wanted something that straddled the line between cute and ironic, so we were hoping to find skull earrings decorated with rhinestones.

Sadly, I’ll never know what treasures awaited us at our local retailers, because instead, Lily and I are in the shadows underneath the bleachers, and she’s sobbing against me. “Why?” she keeps asking.

“I don’t know.” I stroke her dreadlocks. “It’s not fair.”

Lily’s punk boy broke up with her today…in a text message while she was in chemistry class. A week before prom. It definitely is not fair.

“Did he give an explanation?” I ask when Lily is finally wiping the tears from her face.

“I called him during sixth.” It surprises me, because that’s when she has private violin practice, which she never, ever skips. “I said I had a migraine.”

Apparently that’s what we do when we have boy problems.

“What did he say?”

“That he needs to be free. That Juilliard girls are too entrenched in their prescribed world. That we’re too rigid. Too—” She breaks off, then gets control of herself again. “Too focused. He says he wants anarchy in love. What does that even mean?”

It means he’s an ass. I don’t say it with my mouth, but my face must be expressive enough, because Lily starts crying again. I pat her. After a second, she pops her head up. “Do you think I shouldn’t go to Juilliard?”

“No!”

“But I could play violin somewhere here. Like kids’ birthday parties or something.”

“Lily, you can’t help it if a boy changes you, but you don’t let him change your plans.” I neglect to mention that kids don’t want violinists at their parties. “You are going to Juilliard and you will be an amazing famous violinist, because now you have suffered for your art.” I look into her dark, sad eyes. “That stupid punk-ass boy hurt you and that sucks, but years from now, you will be in a giant stadium, and thousands of people will be shattered by your playing, because your music will be so full of truth and heartbreak and mystery and…What?”

Lily is smiling at me through her tears. “Violinists don’t play in stadiums.”

“Where, then?”

“Concert halls. Symphony spaces. Auditoriums.”

“Then those,” I tell her. “You’ll play in those and you’ll kill it.”

She considers. Nods. “I just want to fast-forward to that part,” she says. “The part where it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I do, too.”





All anyone can freaking talk about is how prom is tomorrow. In homeroom, it’s Shaun and Lily. He convinced her that the best way to deal with a broken heart is to occupy herself with other things, so now she’s going to prom with him. Lily says she might only stay for an hour, but at least she won’t go through life wondering how things might be different if she’d attended her senior prom. When she says it, she and Shaun both turn and give me pointed looks.

I roll my eyes at them. “Subtle. Very subtle.”

“Just come,” says Lily. “We’ll dance together.”

“I’ll let you pick songs,” Shaun adds.

“Nope.” I can’t explain how prom sounds like an exercise in agony. Like a special kind of torture chamber where you have to pretend the pain isn’t happening.

? ? ?

It was Se?ora Fairchild’s fault. I was on my way to the bleachers when she rushed past me, hugging a giant pile of folders against her pregnant belly. We greeted each other with “hola,” and that’s where it should have ended, except one of her folders slid out from her arms, creating an avalanche situation, and I ended up on my knees beside her, helping shuffle them all back together. “Gracias,” she said. “Can I ask you for a favor?”

Since a teacher’s “asking” is in actuality a command, of course I said yes.

“Come to my room at the end of lunch,” she told me. “I have more things that need to be taken to the office. I’ll give you extra credit.”

“I already have an A.”

“Right,” she said. “Bueno.”

That’s why I hustled to finish eating, and why I’m hurrying through the center of campus while everyone else is still having lunch, and why I see what’s happening at the sundial. I stop to stare, because it’s so entirely weird.

The usual Beautiful People are hanging out, eating and chattering and laughing. That’s not the weird part. That’s totally normal. What’s strange—no, what makes absolutely no sense in my brain whatsoever—is that among them are Ainsley and Theo and Oliver.