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“Yes, please,” I beam.
“I’ll tell Jay,” Rafael chuckles and pulls out his phone to text.
“He’ll go ballistic.”
Ana steps back into the dining room with a stack of dessert plates in one hand and a large book in the other before placing it in front of me and Raf. “I know it seems like I do this every time you two are here, but I found another photo album,” she grins.
We flip through the pages together and it’s mostly our junior year of high school. Rafael in a baseball team photo, Joaquín in softball. Raf and I in our black formal orchestra outfits, him standing next to his bass and me next to my violin.
“We were awful,” I muse.
“They would have kicked us out if they could have,” he smiles and then turns the page.
“Oh, look at little Dane!” It’s a picture of thirteen-year-old Joaquín in a one-piece electric blue swimsuit standing in the water at the beach with Dane on his shoulders.
“Dane is such a good boy,” Ana says. “Tell him to stop by more.”
“I will,” I nod, then look back to the photo album and Raf turns another thick page.
“Nooo,” he chuckles. “Not the underwater robotics team.”
“Gasp!” I hiss. “So this is where those photos ended up. Oh my god, who let us name our robot Nauti Nautilus?”
“There was no stopping you two when you made up your minds,” Christina says, taking a bite of her fruit tart.
“Oh jeez, junior prom,” I drawl, staring at myself in a yellow and faux-crystal strapless hand-me-down dress from my older cousin, standing next to my white-blonde date, and Rafael with his date Abby.
“I can’t believe you went with Will Parker,” Raf huffs disbelievingly.
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. We had all these friend groups we were a part of, and he was never in any of those groups.”
“Well, I was getting desperate for a date and he was just sitting there in the computer lab next to me.” Truth be told, I was getting desperate because Rafael had a date and I didn’t. We could have gone together like we talked about, but then he blindsided me and asked Abigail Martin. “It’s not like anyone was going to ask me anyway,” I sigh.
“That’s not true.”
“You know, come to think of it, me asking Will to go to prom might have been the turning point of my confidence. I flat-out asked him if he wanted to go with me, and he said yes. I didn’t put any more thought into it beforehand.”
“Clearly,” he mumbles.
My eyebrows furrow. “What?”
“I’m just saying… You were pretty blind to when guys liked you.”
“No I wasn’t,” I retort.
“Ha, yeah, you were. For example, it was clear Will had a crush on you all through high school. He kept his distance because he was nervous.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re making that up. How would you know?”
“Because I always knew who had a crush on you. Will Parker, Troy McAlister, Jerome Warner, Corey Sabin-Clark,” he lists, counting on his fingers.
“What? No. None of those guys did. They used me for homework answers or never talked to me. Like Will.”
“Oh, Angie. You’re so stupid,” he grins affectionately. “We were teenage boys, that’s the best way we could tell girls we liked them. I couldn’t even look at guys then. You either keep it bottled up or study with them.”
“Well, we studied together, and you never had a crush on me.”
