That’s why it was fate.
And we had to admit, we were even a little jealous.
Doesn’t everyone want to be loved like that?
Alec Nye was the last Balladeer to draw. By then the whole thing had the feel of anticlimax.
Then Alec Nye plucked a raffle ticket and read the winner into the microphone.
“Lucy Vale,” he said and flipped the ticket around in his fingers to face the audience. And even though her name was way too small to see from even a few feet away, he stood there holding it up to the crowd—as if he knew somehow that proof would be important.
Lucy didn’t want to join Alec onstage.
“I didn’t enter the raffle,” she kept saying as a bunch of us were trying to steer her toward the stage. “Someone must have put my name in.”
“Uh huh.” Savannah Savage gave Lucy a nudge toward the stage. Even she didn’t believe it. How could she?Someone must have put my name inwas a punchline, a meme, likeasking for a friend.
The Student Council had already whisked away the drawing table. Now we were all waiting for Lucy. Coach Radner took the microphone again and gestured for the raffle ticket Alec Nye was holding.
“Lucy Vale,” he said, “come on up.” A few people echoed him, shouting for Lucy.
“I didn’t enter,” Lucy said, raising her voice a little louder. The crowd opened up and then gobbled Lucy up, a physical pressure of bodies that kept her moving toward the stage. “Someone must have put my name in.” Weirdly, the fact that she kept saying it seemed like proof it wasn’t true—like someone loudly claiming an alibi for a murder that hadn’t yet been discovered. Or the first person to sniff a fart and declare a culprit.
Lucy reached the stage just as the other Balladeers took to the dance floor with their dates. Briefly we saw her argue first with Alec Nye and then with Coach Radner, who made it clear with a hand gesture that the issue was below his pay grade. By then the DJ was softening the mood with the first chords of the night’s final slow song. We saw Lucy shaking her head and Alec Nye’s smile growing tighter and tighter, like it was stretched over a balloon.
At first we figured she was just embarrassed; she’d been claiming for weeks that she had no interest in Alec Nye. Or maybe she’d been hoping to dance withanotherswimmer—possibly Noah Landry. But the more Lucy argued, the more we wondered whether she really hadn’t put her name in for the raffle. Maybe someone elsehadbought her a ticket.
Either way, she wasn’t caving. Alec Nye’s face was dark with anger as he followed her off the stage. Lucy tried to skirt the dance floor, hemming close to the bleachers where some of us were standing around, trying to make it look like we didn’t care we had no one to dance with.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not so fast.” Nye caught up and stepped in front of Lucy. “You owe me a dance.”
“I don’t dance,” Lucy said. She started to turn away again. This time when he caught her arm, he held it there.
“Come on, Lucy. Don’t embarrass me.” He was so much bigger than her, he had to bend over to get close. He looked like the wolf trying to convince Little Red Riding Hood to stay. “You’re the one who put your name in the raffle.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Alec Nye’s smile looked sharp. “It’s mandatory, Vale. No objections.”
“I don’t want to dance.” She wrenched away from him.
It was maybe the first time in Alec Nye’s life a girl had turned him down. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we just didn’t hear about it. Maybe he wore them down. Maybe it wasmandatory.
So this time when she turned again, Nye slid up behind her and put an arm around her chest so he could talk right into her ear. So she was pinned to his body. So that if we didn’t know what he was saying—which we didn’t until the following year—it would have looked like they were really close, like they knew each other, like this was normal. Thatiswhat it looked like.
Lucy said, “Let go of me.”
Nye said, “Only if we can dance.”
“Fine,” Lucy said. “Fine.”
“I mean it, Vale,” Alec said. “I’m trusting you.”
“I’ll fucking dance with you,” she said. “Just let me go.”
He did. But he grabbed her hand immediately. “Come on,” he said. “Relax. You might even enjoy yourself.”
We couldn’t tell what she was thinking while he led her toward the dance floor. She didn’t look angry, or sad, or happy, or upset. She looked totally blank. Like the silhouette a painting leaves after it’s been removed from a wall.
