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“Music is a universal language,” Juliette said.

“See?” Will said, holding a hand out. “She gets it. Y’all are outnumbered.”

“Three versus, what, six?” Matt asked. “You call that outnumbered?”

Juliette looked to her left. “Lara? Niamh?”

Niamh, who’d been staring into the distance and propping her head up with one hand as though to keep it from falling into her milkshake, jumped and refocused. “Hmm?”

“Come on, Lara,” Matt wheedled.

“Hey, I stand with my girls,” Lara said. “If Juliette thinks music class is cool, then music class is cool. End of discussion.”

Will shared a mischievous look with me, and I couldn’t help but grin at him. Under the table I sent him a text.

Apology accepted.

16

From that point on, I guess Will and I were kind of seeing each other. I say “kind of,” because we never labeled it. That, and the fact that it was still a bigger secret than the aliens the government have locked in a warehouse somewhere. And let’s be honest, the government definitely has aliens locked in a warehouse somewhere. The government is just being coy about it.

And that’s what Will and I were doing. We were being coy.

Because coy meant “texting someone all day every day, calling each other to hear their voice, and making out in secret whenever possible, all the while pretending to be acquaintances,” right?

Right. Yeah. We were totally being coy, then.

This year was probably the first time it’d actually been a letdown to go on winter break. I’d gotten used to seeing Will in the halls, in the cafeteria, in Music Appreciation. Suddenly, all I had was social media, texting, and the onceor twice a week we met up to go for a drive somewhere private.

That’s why, when he messaged me out of the blue asking if I was free one Friday night, I found myself calling Aunt Linda for permission for him to join me babysitting.

He arrived at the door armed with Twinkies, Doritos, and Pop-Tarts.

“What’s this?” I asked as he came in.

“Mom would kill me if I came around without bringing anything. And I thought the kids might like some junk food.”

“They’re in bed, thank God,” I said. “If you gave them any of that now they’d be up until six in the morning rolling around on the floor screaming nursery rhymes.”

“Oh. Well, how do you feel about eating all this ourselves, then?”

“Extremely positive, obviously.”

“Great. Also, they’re sort of celebratory, too.”

I paused by the door. “What are we celebrating?”

He shifted on the spot to readjust his hold on the junk food bounty. “I applied for the nursing program at the University of North Carolina.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I was tossing it around, but after we talked about it on Thanksgiving I decided I was gonna do it.”

He looked hopeful. Hopeful and soft.

“Well,” I said. “They’d be out of their minds not to accept you.”

We decided to put on a horror movie—with the volume on as low as we could get away with—and I laid the junk food out on the coffee table while Will kicked his shoes off and set up on the couch under the blanket Aunt Linda kept there.