Annie and I lean close to Quinn, hoping, praying—
“Garrett Taylor and Myrella Johnson!” she reads, and she sounds a little disappointed. My stomach feels like a lead rock in my toes. Somewhere in the crowd, I hear Garrett crow and make his way up to the stage.
Annie and I press our cheeks onto Quinn’s shoulders. They sigh. “Well, we tried.”
“I just want to thank you for voting for me,” Garrett says, before the Homecoming Queen takes the microphone out of his hands.
“This is a dream come true, thank you so much,” Myrella cries into the microphone, and honestly I’m relieved she won. “My mother took this crown, and I’m so happy that I get to have it, too. I can’t wait to tell her.” There is a commotion near the back of the gym, and I glance over my shoulder to see what’s wrong, but I’m cursed with shortness and I can’t see beyond the sea of heads. “And I just want to thank our King tonight, Garrett Taylor—”
“Congrats, you deserve it.” Garrett takes the microphone from her again, ignoring her professed love, which is a little awkward, honestly. He hops down off the stage and makes his way toward me. “Rosie, may I have this dance?” he asks, and outstretches his hand.
My skin prickles as all eyes turn to me.
No one else knows that he leaked that video of Vance from my phone, but I don’t think pointing that out will do anything. He just won’t quit, will he? I open my mouth to tell him just where he can shove that date of his—
“Thorne!”
The voice cuts through the crowd. I know it. Deep, crackly at the edges, with the softest hint of a British accent. No, it can’t be.
My heart slams against the side of my rib cage.
I turn around, and there he is in the sea of people, dressed in a blue tux that’s a little bit too small for him, but he makes it work in a way that makes my stomach twist. I swallow the knot in my throat. His hair is wild, pushed back out of his face, his tie loose and suit disheveled. His chest heaves, as if he ran to get here. I always thought he was beautiful, but it just now hits me—like a ton of bricks. It hits me after I resigned myself to never seeing him again in person, to him leaving on a jet plane back to his life, leaving me here in the middle of nowhere.
But here he is.
In nowhere.
For me.
“Vance Reigns?” Garrett laughs into the microphone.
“Vance Reigns?” someone else whispers.
“…the Vance Reigns?”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Isn’t that Sond?”
Garrett grins, and it’s the kind of shit-eating grin I want to punch off his smug face. “What are you doing here, buddy? Here to ruin our night, too?”
A dangerous look flickers across Vance’s cornflower eyes. He begins to roll up his sleeves. “I assume you’re Garrett?”
“Yeah, and you aren’t supposed to be here—aah!” He dodges the first swing and scurries away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What I should’ve done back in the diner when I first met you,” he grinds out, trying to grapple for him again. Wait—at the diner? So they’ve met before? I stare, gape-mouthed, at them as they, well—I guess you would call it fighting? But this is less like a fight and more like…well. They’re trying to kick and punch each other but they don’t want to get hit so they’re definitely not landing any blows and it just looks very anticlimactic.
And kind of pathetic.
Two guys are fighting over me, and I’m not even impressed.
“All right, all right, just gimme a moment,” Garrett says, pushing Vance off him. Vance eases back a little, smoothing back his hair. “You know, you surprised me. I didn’t think you’d be here.”
“I surprised myself, too.”
“Then maybe you should leave!” Garrett leaps at him, again catching him off-guard, and grabs Vance by the hair. They go spiraling toward the refreshment table, slam into the side of it, and flip over it, taking the catering with them. The chaperones are clawing their way through the students watching, but none of them will get here in time.
“Should we stop it?” Annie asks.
“I don’t know. I’m sort of rooting for Vance,” Quinn replies thoughtfully. “He likes Rosie the way she is and he gave her a freaking library.”
“Yes, but he apparently doesn’t trust her.”
“But Garrett thinks negging is flirting,” Quinn replies.
“Oof, this is a hard one to call.”
I look to the rafters. “This is ridiculous,” I mutter, and pry Annie and Quinn’s arms from around me. Then I step up and grab Garrett by the shoulder as he rises to stand again. “Hey, asshole.”
He spins around, his face crumbling into anger. There is a mini-donut stuck to the front of his tux. He says, “I can’t believe he has the nerve to show up here and—”
My dad taught me a lot of things. He taught me how to ride my first bike. He taught me how to rhyme in iambic pentameter. He taught me how to put books back where they belong on the library shelves.
But my mother taught me how to punch. Thumb out, fingers curled in, reel back with your body weight and—
To be fair, I probably should’ve warned him before I postmarked his nose to the North Pole, but I don’t like him enough to bat an eye at his future in modeling. I just send my fist flying into his face. He stumbles back as his nose starts gushing blood all down the front of his stark white tuxedo.
I shake my hand out, hissing in pain. Mom never told me how much punching actually hurts.
He holds his nose, cursing. He glares at me, then at Vance, disheveled, beside me. “What does he have that I don’t?” he asks.
“The ability to take no for an answer,” I reply, and then I steel myself, and I turn around and I face the boy who broke my heart. “But he better have a good reason to interrupt my Homecoming.”
PANIC CLAWS UP MY THROAT. She’s absolutely frightening when she’s angry. The way her eyebrows furrow, crinkling the skin between them, her bowlike lips turned down into the most disdainful frown. I should leave, I think, but as I turn around to escape out the side exit I came in from—preferably not running—Rosie turns to me, in that golden dress as beautiful as a sun—the same color, I imagine, Amara would have worn on page three hundred forty-seven of The Starless Throne.
My throat tightens, but I force out, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
“You keep saying that. You know I didn’t release that video. I wouldn’t.”