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“It is.” I shook my hand at my side but the feeling lingered. “You can only do so much, Sam.”

“Ha. Look who’s talking.” He grinned.

“I’m just usually in the right place at the right time.”

“Or they wait until you’re around to ask you for help. Like Eve did this morning with her plumbing issue.”

How did he hear about that? “I was there with Uncle Gabe and Hal when they installed that sink!”

“So why didn’t she call them?” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Because…” Did his forearms always do that when he rolled his sleeves up? I blinked fast. “Because…she knew I was coming in for my Tuesday morning peppermint latte. Okay. Okay, she waited for me.”

He smiled like he’d won whatever standoff we were in before the classroom door flew open. In skipped a group of basketball players dressed in their jerseys, elf shoes, and those little elf hats with the fake pointy ears.

“Oh great, another one,” Sam mumbled, running his hand down the side of his face. “I just don’t understand it.”

“The big gestures?” I asked.

“Big gestures I get.” He pulled the goggles off his head. “But the whole making-a-fool-of-yourself-in-public thing? I don’t know. It’s like if you don’t go big and it’s not caught on someone’s phone, then it never happened. Why can’t it just be about the two people involved and not about the number of likes, y’know?”

Fair. But in all honesty, I didn’t really mind these kinds of things. Watching someone go all out to profess their feelings to someone they cared about, while making it Christmassy? That was some Hallmark aura.

And I was a sucker for a big romantic gesture.

Unless my cousins were nearby.

Then I’d rather eat gum off a subway pole.

After the elfish basketball guys sang a rendition of “Jingle Bells” with a horribly rhymed Masquerade Ball proposal thrown in, a very red-faced May shouted, “Yes!” The entire room erupted into cheers until Mr. Hernandez shooed the elves away.

Sam leaned against the table. “So, ironically, I’ve been thinking about the Mistletoe Masquerade.”

“I thought you didn’t dance?” At least that’s what you’ve always told me.

And Nona, anytime she’s tried pushing us together at parties.

“I dance.”

I made a face.

“Just haven’t found the right partner, I guess,” he added in almost a whisper.

Oh.

My heartbeat thrummed faster like it did when I had one of Eve’s espressos. “What about the mistletoe?”

His eyes snapped up to mine. “What about it?”

“I mean…you hate it, right? You really want to go to an event named after a plant you despise?”

“I don’t despise it; I just don’t think an invasive species should get all the glory at Christmas. It should belong to—”

“Douglas firs.” I had heard this speech from him at least a dozen times over the years.

“Exactly.” He beamed and then cleared his throat. “But I do feel like maybe Jo has a good point about us being seniors and how it’s our last one—”

“Well, that’s not entirely true.” I stuck my hand, which still felt a bit tingly, into the back pocket of my jeans. “The ball is open to everyone in town, since it’s held at The Market.”