“Where?” Jack asked.
“Here.” When we all just looked at her, she sighed. “What? I’m on the party committee at my sorority. All weneed is some lights and music.”
“You want to throw a dance in my house?” Roo asked. “Have you forgotten how small it is inside?”
“We’ll move the furniture,” she told him.
“Where?” Jack asked again.
“Outside,” she replied, sounding annoyed. “Look, our friend is sad and this will make her happy. Saylor, too.”
“I’m not really sad,” I pointed out.
“But you are all dressed up for a magical night, and you should get one,” April told me. She clapped her hands, grinning. “Okay, I love this idea. It’s perfect.”
“Perfect would be us over there, where we’re supposed to be,” Bailey said morosely. “And anyway, I’m not in the mood.”
“But youarein a dress,” Jack said. “What else are you going to do?”
“Drink away my sorrows,” she replied.
“You can still do that while you’re pushing the couch outside,” April told her. “Follow me.”
When Taylor arrived a little later, I was nervous, considering our first face-to-face encounter had almost ended with her kicking my ass. But her apology had obviously been for real. So far, she was being perfectly nice.
“Okay, who needs a corsage?” she asked from the small kitchen table where she was sitting, bent over a bowl of gardenia blossoms and some stickpins. “If you don’t look too closely, they’re actually not bad.”
“If this was a real dance—” April said.
“It’s not,” Bailey told her from the couch, which she’d only left long enough for the guys to move it outside to the front porch. The house was tiny, though, and the door open, so she might as well have been inside.
“—then we wouldn’t be putting on our own corsages,” April finished. “The boys would do it for us.”
We all looked out at the deck, where Jack, Vincent, and Roo were still all gathered around the cooler. “I am not,” Bailey said, “going to let my brother pin a corsage on me for this fake dance. It would be even more humiliating than anything else that’s happened so far. Which is really saying something.”
“Jack’s with me, remember?” Taylor told her. “So you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Great.” Bailey took a gulp of her beer. “Now I don’t even have a fake date to the fake dance.”
April raised an eyebrow. “Slow down with those beers over there. The night is young.”
“This night sucks,” Bailey replied.
Taylor, piercing a stem with a pin, sighed. “Fine. Be that way.”
I actually felt kind of bad for her. “I’ll take one,” I said. “If that’s okay.”
She looked up at me. “Sure! Whichever you want, although the smaller ones are holding together better.”
I went over to the table, where she had laid out three little bundles of gardenias and stems so far, each pierced with a pin. The tiny kitchen smelled of nothing but their scent.I picked one from the middle, holding it up to the strap of my dress.
“Too small,” Taylor said, handing me a larger one. “Try this.”
“I wish I’d known I was going to a formal tonight,” April said. “I would have worn something else.”
“You could run home and change,” Taylor suggested, bent over the flowers again.
“No, I like the DIY aspect of this. Making do with what we have.” April, her hands on her hips, surveyed the room. “Okay, so we have the lights up—”
