For a few minutes, she feels like a regular girl at a basketball game with a regular guy.
“That,” she says, “is extremely sweet.”
And then something terrible happens: the first raw notes of “Never Be Prom Queen” echo through the arena.
Ramona digs her nails into her thigh. Urges herself to breathe. God, she sounds soyoungon this recording. And obviously, she was only seventeen. There was always an irony to this song—she’d never be prom queen, it was true, because she’d never go to high school. Yet it was instantly relatable, turning her from a kids’ TV star into someone legitimately famous.
His Clippers reverie burst, Nick gives her a concerned look. “You okay?” he asks in a low, even voice, as though the whole bathroom scenario is flashing through his mind.
“We never really intended for this song to be a woo-go-sports track.” A tight smile, a long slurp of her Diet Coke. “Yeah. I’m fine. I can handle three and a half minutes of nostalgia.”
The Diet Coke suddenly tastes like acid in her mouth. She’s never really liked it, but it’s another holdover from the Before, something ingrained in her by her mother. If she’s going to have soda, though she probably shouldn’t, it should be diet, sugar-free, flavorless. How many things like this does she still do without thinking?
The chorus blares around them, this insistent phantom from her old life, and some people are singing along. Completely unaware that she’s in their midst.
Ditched class and torched the football field
Sold answers to the highest bidder
Don’t you know I did it all for you
I guess I’ll never be prom queen now
“It must be strange, hearing your music in public,” Nick says, and she’s grateful that he’s talking over her angry vocals. “If someone got on the speaker and started narrating one of my books or playing one of my lectures, I’d probably need to go into witness protection.”
“It’s this weird kind of dissociation, actually. I know it’s me singing, but I can’t get into the mindset of who I was back then. I don’t remember being in the studio for every single song, because most of the time I was exhausted or not eating enough.” She fidgets with the end of her ponytail. “Sometimes I wondered how much people could tell that my heart wasn’t always in it.”
“When I went to that show…” He shakes his head, drifting back in thought. “I already told you—you were electric.”
“I believemagneticwas the word you used.”
This earns her areally?lift of his eyebrows. “That too. And of course, everyone there was half in love with you and I didn’t want to be a creep, but…” He flushes a deep pink, and it strikes her that if shewerein fact debating which color her next album cover should be, it would be that one. “You were twenty-two, I think? I, uh, checked afterward to make sure I wasn’t a complete perv.”
Ramona just stares at him for a long moment, unable tobelieve he’s telling her this. Maybe he just wants to distract her from the song—and it’s certainly working.
“You had a crush,” she says, biting back a grin, deeply amused by this revelation.
They’re in the final chorus now, with the key change where she switches the lyrics tosold my heart to the highest bidder.
He waves this off. “How many people had crushes on you? I was one of a thousand, easy. Too common to be noteworthy.”
Sure, he isn’t wrong. But something about this feels different from the anonymous men with their countdown websites. She tries to imagine him watching her onstage from a seat way in the back. The short tight skirts she used to wear, her long hair flowing. The suggestive lyrics.
She likes it. She likes it quite a bit, thinking of him watching her like that.
—
The game starts with theintroduction of players on each team before the tip-off. Ramona is both shocked and thrilled to discover that there’s actualbooingof the visiting team. She thought there’d be more, well, sportsmanship, but that doesn’t prevent her from booing at the top of her lungs.
Without a doubt, though, the best part is how into it Nick gets. During tense moments, he balances his elbows on his knees, head bent low like he’s praying.
“Come on come on come on,” he says quietly, eyes locked on the court. He never yells at his team, doesn’t throw out insults like some of the surrounding fans.
“Beautiful!” he says after a spectacular three-pointer, clapping his hands, and his intensity is infectious. Ramona’s neverbeen so invested in the outcome of a sporting event, especially when he turns to her for a high five. It’s brief, that touch of palm to palm, but it’s enough to send her heart up into her throat.
She has to get ahold of herself. She cannot experience heart palpitations just because his palm touched hers.
When the buzzer sounds for halftime, the Clippers are only down 51–38. There’s a flurry around them as people head for concessions and bathrooms.
