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“I get it,” I said. “Cassie's changed, you and Coop have changed. We've all changed. It's called growing up.” I heard the
muffled sound of Cassie's voice from somewhere inside. “Listen, if Cassie hates her life, if she's bored and looking for a change, then I might just be the change she's looking for.”

Coop put his hand on my shoulder. “Good luck, Simon.” It was all he said. But I heard the words he didn't say. I heard him wish me luck because I was going to need it. I was going to need more than luck. I was going to need every ounce of karma that I'd managed to earn over the course of my life; I was going to need the sympathy of saints, some divine miracle.

Turning water into wine was a pathetic parlor trick compared to what I was going to attempt.

But Cassie had liked me once. Liked me enough to go on a date with me. Now I only had to convince her that I was worthy of so much more.

After I found a way to convince myself.

Ben banged on the door, and Cassie opened it right away like she'd been waiting for us, watching for us through the peephole. “Ben!” she squealed, and threw her arms around his neck. I was so close to them both that I could smell her mango shampoo and the bright scent of limes that clung to her skin. She wore a thigh-length black dress that exposed a dangerous amount of her frontal assets and moved at the bottom like she carried her own breeze wherever she went.

Cassie wasn't a ten. They hadn't invented a scale that could rate how beautiful she was. She was an eclipse, the dark shadow of the moon blotting out the sun, and I couldn't stop staring at her, even it if meant burning out my retinas.

“Have you started drinking already, Sy?” Cassie asked, using my nickname. Her voice made me melt. Every time.

“What? Yeah.” Then I shook my head. “I mean, no. What's up? Awesome party.” I heard the words coming out of my mouth and begged my brain to stop them. Stupid tongue and its infernal word diarrhea.

Cassie laughed. She has this monster laugh that surprises me every time I hear it. You'd look at Cassie and expect a china doll giggle, but she inherited her rowdy laugh from her father. He's Cuban and her mother is black. Cassie calls herself Cubrican. I call her perfect.

“You're such a goof, Sy.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “You gonna let us in or what, Castillo?”

Cassie crossed her arms over her chest and jutted her hip out to the left, blocking the doorway with her body. There were some other guys starting to crowd behind us, but I didn't give a shit about them. They could wait. “It's a barter party, boys. Nothing's free tonight.”

Coop dug into his pocket and pulled out a ratty sheet of paper. “I have the answers to Keating's killer chemistry final.” He dangled the paper in Cassie's face.

“Tempting, Super Cooper, but I'm exempt from the final due to my utterly perfect attendance.” Cassie smiled. “But hold on to that, because I'm pretty certain you could trade the underwear off half the soccer team for it.”

Ben snatched the cheat sheet out of Coop's hand. “I'll take that.”

I started rummaging around in my backpack, but before I could find anything that I thought Cassie would want, she said, “I'll let you in if you do shots with me.” Without waiting for us to accept her offer, Cassie took off down the hallway toward the back of the house.

Cassie's parents had done some redecorating since the last time I'd been there. The house was bare, stripped down. I hadn't been given the grand tour the night I'd picked Cassie up for our date, but I remember that the hallway was lined with pictures and paintings and these African masks that Cassie's mother loved nearly as much as her flowers. Cassie had probably taken them all down and stashed them to keep them from being broken, but it made the house feel empty.

The party was in its infancy, but DJ Leo was already in the groove, punishing our ears with remixes of songs I hadn't liked in their original incarnations.

Coop and Ben and I chased Cassie down the hall, past a spiral staircase in the foyer that led upstairs, something to the left that might have been a library, and a room to the right that looked like the kind of fancy sitting room that no one actually sits in. Cassie was already in the kitchen when we got there, lining up four shot glasses into which she sloshed a generous amount of clear, thick tequila. She was chattering about who she thought was going to show, and how Sia Marcus, queen bee of the drama club, was hanging out around the pool doing something dodgy, and how she'd put her mom's favorite couch out on the patio so that people could use the living room for beer pong.

“I'm not really a tequila man,” I said when Cassie stopped talking long enough for someone to wedge a word in.

“Then you're not really a man,” Cassie said.

Coop said, “Ouch,” while Ben cracked up so hard that I thought he was going to suffocate. I could only hope.

There was nothing I could say. No witty comeback that would suffice. Without waiting for my supposed best friends or the girl I was insanely infatuated with, I slugged back that shot, slammed the glass down, and said, “My man parts and I agree: That tastes like ass.”

I fully expected Ben to fire off a smartass comment that would make me want to clobber him. Instead he and Cassie drained their shots.

Coop held out his hands. “I'm the DD. No liquor shall pass these lips tonight.”

Cassie shrugged and gulped his shot too.

“Isn't it customary for the hostess to at least maintain the illusion of sobriety?” Ben asked. He was trying to make it sound like a joke, but I heard the concern.

“Isn't it customary for guests to keep their opinions to themselves?” Cassie said. I thought we were going to spend the rest of the night suspended in that awkward moment, but Cassie clapped her hands and said, “I love this song! Let's dance!” Ben shot me an “I told you she was nuts” look that I ignored.

I assumed that Cassie's dance invitation was directed at Coop or Ben. On the rare occasions in the past that she'd uncoupled from Eli long enough to dance, it had always been with one of her
gays. But neither Coop nor Ben made a move to join Cassie, and I realized that they were both staring at me.

Duh.

This was the ideal opportunity. I was so perfectly conditioned to expect that Cassie didn't want anything to do with me that when she flat out invited me to dance, it hadn't registered.

“If I dance with you,” I said, “what're you going to trade me?” I tried to keep my voice loose and easy. It was more difficult than the time I'd tried to eat an entire box of jelly-filled doughnuts in one sitting.

“Trade you?” Cassie asked.

“It is a barter party, Cass. Nothing's free tonight.”

Cassie rolled her eyes when I used her own words against her. Her every gesture was overly dramatic and I couldn't decide whether she was playing or intoxicated. The shot of tequila I'd taken was warm pancake syrup, coating my insides and making me feel good. In fact, I was certain that I owed my burst of confidence to Jose Cuervo. If I got out of this party alive, I made a mental note to send the company a nice thank-you letter. But it certainly wasn't enough to make me drunk.

“You should be giving
me
something, mister,” Cassie said. She absently put her tongue behind the gap between her teeth, toying with the space, making me lose all sense of time or place.

“You're right,” I said, still trying to play it cool. I glanced at Coop for help, but he was watching me with a bemused expression that would have fit Ben's face better. I dug around in my backpack, looking for something I could trade Cassie for two
sweaty minutes in her presence, but I didn't have anything worthy. I panicked. If I didn't have anything worth trading for a dance, what the hell was I going to give her for a kiss?

I pulled a small velvet sack out of my bag. “I have these dice my mom brought me from Vegas.” When Cassie didn't look impressed, I said, “No, huh?” and dropped the dice into my backpack. “What do you want, then?”

Cassie tapped her chin with the tip of her finger. “Find me a pair of Muet Chaüssures, size eight, and I'll do more than dance.” She punctuated the end of that sentence with the most indecent wink I'd ever seen outside of a porno, obliterating the last vestiges of control I'd managed to maintain over my spastic hormones.

“Let's dance,” Coop said, clearly disgusted. Not that I cared. I was floating on air. I was a delicate butterfly flapping my wings on winds made of Cassie's sweet breath. Briefly, I worried that the Cassie who had just brazenly and openly flirted with me was some imposter, an alien wearing Cassie's perfect skin, but I let those fears go, because I was on fire. I was in the zone. The Cassie zone. And not even Coop could bring me down.

Ben elbowed Coop in the side. “We have other plans,” he said as tactfully as Ben was able.

“Gross!” Cassie said. Then she grabbed my sweaty hand and Ben's hand and pulled us into the family room, a large, friendly space that looked out onto the patio. All the furniture had been pushed against the walls, creating an open area where people who had shown up even earlier than us were already dancing. There weren't many people yet, but the house was filling rapidly,
and I knew it was only a matter of time before I wouldn't be able to move without disturbing someone else's air. But it could have been wall-to-wall and I wouldn't have cared. Hanging with my best buds, dancing with Cassie—I was right where I wanted to be.

Normally, I'm not a dancing fool. My mom had forced me to take ballroom dancing lessons when I was in the eighth grade. I'd stepped on Margie Bondar's foot so hard that I broke three of her toes, and our instructor—a British eccentric who twirled around and rambled on like he was the product of an unholy union between Nathan Lane and Robin Williams—branded me unteachable and refunded my fee.

Except, with Cassie and my friends, I danced. Expelling all the fear and anxiety that had lain dusty in my lungs for so long that it felt like the first time I'd been able to breathe in years. Cassie smiled at me and laughed at nothing in particular, and I laughed back. Coop and Ben had their arms around each other, and soon we were all sweaty, lost in the music, all but Coop fueled by the tequila that had been our price of admission. We were all blissfully tangled up in this perfect moment.

Others crowded into the house, glomming on to us like we were the coolest cats in the entire universe, despite my dancing. DJ Leo was smooth, moving from one song to another in a continuous flow that was carrying all the Rendview students along with it. Making us the same. Making us equal.

In that moment, I didn't know how I'd ever gotten it into my head that Cassie was out of my reach. I couldn't fathom how I'd botched my opportunity to kiss her. Maybe it was because back
then I'd been little more than a boy. I'd needed time to mature. To become a man. Fully grown and in control of my destiny.

And right now, my destiny was shaking her awesome booty like it was the last night on planet Earth.

When I couldn't dance anymore, I moved to the fringes of the floor. There were more people crammed into Cassie's house than I could count. Popular kids and dorks and in-betweeners, all mingling together, homogenized by the booze and bass and freedom of the night.

But I saw only Cassie. She was the only person for me.

While I watched Cassie dance, my mind wandered back to the day I'd asked her out. I'd been an infant among giants. Even Coop and Ben had seemed so much bigger back then. We'd graduated eighth grade together, but when we hit the halls of Rendview High, they grew up and left me behind. They'd fit in in ways I never would, never could. Until I met Cassie.

We sat next to each other in anatomy. It was the one and only time that alphabetical seating had worked in my favor.

The first time I saw her, the first time that I walked into Mrs. Grimauld's classroom and laid my lucky eyes on Cassie, I knew she was the one. In those days, she'd had short hair that clung to her round cheeks, framing her smooth skin. When I'd realized I was going to have to sit next to her for the entire year, I panicked. There was no way I was going make it through the entire hour, let alone two semesters, without a permaboner.

Yet somehow I survived. Freshman year was the year I developed a sudden and intense aversion to tucking in my shirts.

The thing about Cassie was that she was funny and smart and never talked down to me. The other girls treated me like I was their little brother. Or, worse, like I didn't exist at all. But Cassie talked to me. She saw me for what I could be, not what I was.

I'm not sure what possessed me the day I grabbed destiny by the cojones. While we were dissecting our worm—a long sucker Cassie had named Wormy Worthington the Third—I asked Cassie to go out with me. The words were all smooshed together like the letters had linked arms and formed a long chain. I didn't know where the question had come from. It had bubbled up out of me spontaneously. Sure, I'd fantasized about asking Cassie out, but never seriously. I was a nobody. It was absurd to think that Cassie would go out with me.

I waited for the blowback. The laugh. The sympathetic smile. The words that would banish me irrevocably to that frigid nightmare world whispered of among guys with the deepest shades of dread: the Friend Zone.

But Cassie had said yes. She'd smiled warmly at me and changed my life. “Sy, you're so adorable. Of course I'll go out with you.”

Those words were seared onto my brain. When I died, they'd be etched on my grave marker. I think everyone has a couple of moments that truly change their life. Those words changed mine.

Cassie still smiled at me like that. She saw me standing on the edge of the dance floor and waved me over. The shot of tequila that had been in my system was soaked into my shirt now. I saw everything with perfect clarity. Past, present, future. All mine. All open.