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“Isn’t it supposed to be, like, the best night of our lives or something?” Rory asked.

“I thought that was supposed to be your wedding,” Melanie mused.

“No way,” Vanessa cut in. “The best night of my life is when I launch my first video game and it immediately becomes a cult favorite and causes a bunch of nerds to stream it on Twitch. I refuse to let my best night be defined by a dress. Or a man.”

Rory gave Vanessa a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “I knew I liked you.”

“Looks like Jay has his work cut out for him, then,” Melanie teased.

Vanessa rolled her eyes, but Rory caught a hint of a smirk on her friend’s lips. “He tried talking to me last night through our stream.”

“And?” Rory asked, nudging Vanessa’s shoulder.

Vanessa shrugged, eyes still on her laptop, like she wasn’t giving him a second thought. “I told him he’s going to have to try harder than that.”

Melanie laughed. “Oh, that’s going to do wonders for his ego.”

Vanessa frowned. “Why?”

“Let’s just say…Jay hasn’t always had to work too hard for a female before.”

“Hey!” Rory shouted, giving Melanie a death glare.

Melanie rolled her eyes. “He barely had to work for you. You were smitten.”

Vanessa looked up at Rory, a silent question in her glance. Still smitten?

Rory shook her head. “I realized pretty quickly that he wasn’t for me,” she admitted, her heart sinking slightly at the thought of hurting him. But she reminded herself of their conversation at Scoops, about how a lot of what he felt was fear of the unknown for what his future would hold. If she was honest with herself, she felt the same way.

She’d officially accepted her offer to Baybrook, but she still had no idea if Tyler had accepted his offer for North Texas. He told her he would always be there for her, that they would always be family. But would he still feel that way hundreds of miles away? Or would their friendship simply fade into a distant memory?

“Should we start sifting through these?” Vanessa asked.

Rory reached over to the laptop and scrolled through what was already available in the shared drive. “Yeah, maybe we decide which ones we like and put them in a separate folder? Then at the end of the night, we choose which of those for the final spreads?”

“Sounds fantabulous,” Vanessa said.

“Oh my god,” Melanie said with a mouthful of empanada. “This is probably the most insane thing I’ve ever eaten.”

“I’ve watched my mamá make them hundreds of times, and I’m still convinced she uses some kind of voodoo magic when I’m not looking to make them taste like that,” Vanessa responded.

Rory’s phone pinged at the other side of the room. She snatched an empanada and took a bite as she walked over, tapping the screen.

She frowned. “Walker just sent me a Snapchat.”

As soon as she said it, Melanie’s phone pinged, then Vanessa’s immediately after.

“Holy crap,” Vanessa whispered, looking at her screen.

Rory opened up Snapchat and clicked on the image Walker just sent.

It was slightly blurry, but clear enough to notice two girls hidden in a secluded corner outside of the ballroom at prom. They were kissing.

Rory scanned the caption Walker sent with it.

Maybe we should add this to the yearbook

“Rory,” Melanie said softly, padding across the room toward her.