At first it’s chaos – shoes slipping, skirts tangling, everyone bumping into each other. I get swept from partner to partner, laughing despite myself, until I lose track of who I started with. A boy in a harlequin mask twirls me out, and just as I’m finding the rhythm, someone taps him on the shoulder.
I assume it’s just another swap.
But the moment harlequin boy steps back, I know it isn’t.
Recognition jolts through me. Even though the boy waiting to take his place is in full costume, I already know it’s Leo.
Only, not Leo exactly.
He’s wearing the mask he made at the workshop. And now I get why he didn’t care about the paint I spilt on it. The blue matches the colour misted across half his face in his Art Exchange avatar – the way mycostume mirrors my own.
The girl from the loch. The boy from the lagoon.
Our online selves, face to face.
You came.’
The words tumble out, glaringly obvious, but I’d stopped believing – in tonight, in Leo, in Rebel. I’d been so sure the boy behind the screen wasn’t the boy in front of me that I slammed every door between us … without even letting him knock … or callpope oeeee.
Someone bumps into my shoulder. Leo and I are just standing in the middle of the dance floor staring at each other, dumbstruck, totally in the way.
‘Your dad will be glad to see you. He’s been telling everyone you’re helping out at a gallery tonight.’
Leo rolls his eyes, then turns serious. ‘What about you? Are you glad?’
The question catches me off guard and I hesitate.
‘Because I didn’t come here for the party,’ he says quietly. ‘I came for you.’
Standing with him here, dressed as Rebel, is like … I don’t know, catching a selkie pulling on its skin, the human and the seal suddenly the same being, like Leoand his online self.
My heart’s still trying to catch up when he says, ‘I was thinking we could get out of here … I have a surprise for you.’
‘Sure you don’t want to tell your parents you’re here? Your dad—’
He doesn’t let me finish.
‘My dad will parade me around and involve me in stuff I don’t want.’
I bite my lip. ‘It’s just … my bag’s on my seat. And people will notice if I suddenly disappear. Nadia and Alessandra …’
‘The girl who fooled her school, her parents and the InterSTEAM organizers can’t come up with an excuse to leave a party?’
I gasp. ‘I can’t believe you called me out on that.’
He grins. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist. Tell them you’re coming down with the same bug I have.’ He leans in, voice dropping. ‘Then go to the back of the palazzo on the ground floor. Through the archway on the left, past the stone wellhead … I’ll wait for you there.’
Then he’s gone, melting into the crowd like a proper Venetian mask-wearer, leaving me staring after him, wondering what a stone wellhead even is.
I tell my friends I’m leaving first.
‘And this has nothing to do with the boy in thepaint-splattered mask?’
Nadia definitely has an eyebrow raised behind her mask.
‘Nope,’ I say, suddenly very grateful for my own.
‘Mmh.’ Alessandra taps her chin. ‘Looked familiar, that’s all … just call if you need us, OK?’ There’s nothing in her tone but genuine concern, and I decide to add goodbye cheek-kissing to the hellos.
