I looked down at her, surprised and a bit impressed by her gumption. Before I could respond, Camila continued, her tone taking on a pleading edge.
“I’m here with my boyfriend,” she explained. “He’s not actually a fan, but I kind of made him come. But now it’s kind of weird, you know, ’cause it’s Lemonade? I don’t want to be singing ‘Sorry’ at him by myself?”
“Okay,” I said. “You can join us, but just warning you—my friends are a lot.”
Together, we walked to our section. Camila flashed the stadium worker a dazzling smile as she showed him her ticket, which was for the section to the left of us in the sparsely populated bleachers. He gave her a beleaguered look, just enough to let us know that we were inconveniencing him, and then let us through.
“We made a friend!” Michelle announced to the group, breaking out of my hold to bound toward Nia and company.
“Us too!” Nia said.
I peered around her, to where Diamond and Markus were standing, Diamond with her arm around a new guy who was not Markus, her face alight with the most genuine smile I’d seen on her since we’d met. From this distance, I could tell that the guy she was talking to was cute. My body knew that it was attracted to his before it could register that it had felt this particular attraction before, to his even brown skin and arms that were not thick with muscle but instead threaded with sinew and thick black hair that looked so much better up in a ponytail and would probably look best mostly hacked off—
You have got to be kidding me.
The boy turned around, a ready smile on his face. It was Ricky. Of course it was Ricky. And of course Camila was peeling away from me to lope toward him, because he was her boyfriend, of course he was, and my stomach was sinking deep into the cradle of my hips and the alcohol that I had drunk two hours before burned the back of my throat.
I’m seeing someone, he’d said, and the person he was seeing made sense for him. Even with my head swimming, I could appreciate how good Camila looked tucked underneath his arm. When Nia had asked me whether I was okay after the festival, I had said yes, and I had meant it. But now? I felt like I’d been sliced with a hundred papercuts and then dunked into a vat of alcohol.
Our eyes met, and Ricky’s expression went blank. I wondered whether mine mirrored his, whether our friends could trace the path of our gazes and catch wind of the tension between us. Michelle was already excitedly introducing herself to Ricky, who had an arm slung over his perfectly sweet, perfectly fun girlfriend, and I wondered if he would recognize her from the stories I’d told him in the garden as my crazy Korean friend. Then Diamond was pulling me forward too, and I remembered to reassemble my face into something of a smile, the kind that probably would not reach my eyes, the deadly smile that only Nia would recognize. Except today she didn’t, because the Weeknd was playing over the speakers and she was too drunk to notice.
“This is Ricky,” Diamond said. “He lived across from me my freshman year! I just saw him sitting over there by himself—” She pointed across the bleachers, where Camila had said she was sitting. “Small world, right?” She looked up at Ricky, too excited to notice that he was doing a piss-poor job of matching her fervor. “Ricky, this is Angie. She’s one of Markus’s good friends.”
Ricky’s eyes flitted up and down my body as if he couldn’t help it, and I praised whatever Higher Powers There Be for at least ensuring that I looked fine as hell on the day that I ran into him again. He looked nice too. He was dressed smartly in a navy short-sleeved button-down and black jeans. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, clearly at a loss for words.
“Nice to meet you, Ricky,” I said, and thrust out my hand. I held his gaze in a dare. After a pause, he recovered and took my hand to shake.
“Nice to meet you too, Angie.” He tilted an eyebrow up in a subtle question, and I clenched his hand tighter in a warning.
“Angie did my makeup in the bathroom,” Camila announced, beaming.
I gave Camila a thin smile.
“The artist is only as good as her canvas, Camila,” I said.
“Pretty sure it’s the opposite,” Ricky said. Camila swatted his shoulder, but I only stared coldly, taking pleasure in the way his smirk slowly lost its luster. Then, with a nod and a wave, I moved around them to the other side of Nia, as far away from them as possible.
It’s him, I wanted to tell Nia. The boy from the garden. The one who gave me the Water Tribe necklace. But then the stadium lights were dimming, and the jumbotrons surrounding the stage lit up with an image of Queen Bey’s eyes, her lips, her thighs. It was impossible to stay upset then, not with the excitement pulsing through the stadium. I screamed as loud as I could manage, my voice melding with those of the thousands of other stans in attendance.