My anxiety kicks back up a few notches as Peak gets closer to the exit. “She’s leaving, Gray.” I shouldn’t feel so disappointed, but I do.
dosomethingdosomethingdosomethingdosomething
Gray cranes her neck, leaning over the table to see better. “I don’t think she is.”
The balloon disappears, and now I’m standing up and leaning too. I watch Peak take a Sharpie from the bouncer and scribble something on it, and then she looks over at me and smiles.
I turn toward my sister, my eyes going wide. “What else did you say to her? Jesus, Gray, what did you do?”
“Okay, okay, I may have also mentioned that you could probably use a little encouragement.” She scrunches up her shoulders. “Sorry?”
“I’m gonna kill you.”
“Are you, though? Look.”
I follow her gaze to where Peak stands. Over her head bobs the bright yellow balloon again . . . only now there’s a crudely drawn bat in the center of it.
“What the hell is she doing?”
“Flashing you the Bat-Signal, dumbass. And it’s friggin’ cute.” My sister laughs, giving me a shove. I stumble a little, my heart pounding in my chest, in my feet, in my tongue. The music isn’t helping. Not at all.
“Go,” my sister shouts behind me, and I do.
I do.
CHAPTER THREE
Jubilee
I FEEL RIDICULOUS holding this balloon, especially when it looks like he’s desperate for an escape hatch, but there’s less than twenty-four hours left at this con, and as much as I’ve been trying to “push my boundaries,” I’m still con-crushless.
As a chronic overachiever, I will not be satisfied unless I check off every box on Jayla’s list. As a chronic worrier, I don’t want to leave any stone unturned on the off chance everyone’s right and my music can be cured by a weekend of costumes, crushes, and tasting food I didn’t even know existed before now.
For a second, Jayla was all “nope, no way, not this one, you can do way better than a skinny white kid in a crappy mask,” but she got on board fast when his sister came over trying to talk him up. Jayla has a soft spot for awkward nerds, even if this one does happen to be a boy.
Plus, Bats is the only person in this entire place who’s made my heart do a somersault. Also, bonus points to him for being bashful.
I pull at a little piece of my hair that came loose and wait for him to make his move. After an eternity, he comes over, practically destroying his lip with his teeth. The fact that he’s so flighty somehow makes this whole interaction seem like more of an accomplishment than it probably should, but I like it.
I say hi, and he says something I can’t hear over the music. I laugh and say, “What?”
He leans in even closer. “I said, ‘Nice balloon.’”
And the way his breath brushes against my neck sends a little spark down to my toes. He smells like clean skin and soap and expensive deodorant that probably doesn’t use half-naked women in its ads. He leans back, and I’m standing there slightly flushed over this good-smelling boy in a cheesy Batman mask. It’s kind of ridiculous. I get a little dizzy off the whiteness of his teeth when he smiles, and all my plans go out the window, replaced by a song instead.
“Dance with me?” I say, or shout, really, over the music. He shakes his head, and I arch an eyebrow, surprised and a little confused. He stares down at his shoes, Checkerboard Old Skool Vans that look brand-new. He doesn’t say anything else, and an awkwardness settles over us until I can’t take it anymore.
“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.
“I’m not going to your room,” I say, because away from the music and the lights, it’s becoming clear that—pushing the boundaries or not—this was not my best idea. Flirting in a relatively supervised crowded room is one thing; disappearing into a casino with a stranger in a mask is another.
“I’m not asking you to,” he says. “There’s this lounge thing around the corner. It’s usually pretty empty.”
Empty. Empty is a double-edged sword for any girl. I mean, on the one hand, it lowers the risk of my parents seeing me—let’s be honest, if they walk by right now, I’m toast—but also, I don’t know this guy. Like at all.