DIVA & GABBY

The Invitation

By Thursday, Diva Alcantara had done the thing she swore to herself she would not do: she had rearranged her entire schedule around a girl she'd known for exactly four days.

It wasn't obvious nothing Diva did was ever obvious, she'd trained herself too well for that but she'd swapped her Thursday gym slot to overlap with Gabby's free period. She'd started taking the long way to her seminar, the one that passed the humanities building where Gabby's creative writing workshop let out. She told herself each time that it was coincidence, efficiency, a better route. She was aware, distantly, that she was lying to herself with a conviction that would have impressed her father.

Augusto Alcantara did not tolerate self-deception in business. He would have been appalled to see his daughter so thoroughly fooled by her own heart.

Gabby, for her part, wasn't playing games she didn't know how. She'd grown up in a warm, chaotic, loving house where her parents said "I love you" every single day and meant it, where a "cool" household meant her mother had once let her miss a week of school to attend a concert three states away, arguing that some educations didn't happen in classrooms. Money had never been abundant in the Cruz household, not compared to the Alcantaras' obscene wealth, but there had always been enough enough food, enough warmth, enough freedom to become exactly who she wanted to be. Gabby had never learned to hide her feelings because she'd never needed to.

So when Diva showed up outside her workshop on Thursday afternoon, feigning surprise at the coincidence, Gabby simply grinned and said, "You're doing that thing again."

Diva blinked. "What thing?"

"Pretending you didn't plan this." Gabby fell into step beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed. "It's cute. You don't have to, though. I don't mind that you like being around me. I like being around you too."

Diva's whole body went warm, then instantly defensive, an old reflex kicking in before she could stop it. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't," Gabby said, entirely unbothered, swinging her satchel onto her shoulder. "So. What are we doing tonight?"

We. The word did something to Diva's chest that she refused to examine too closely.

"Actually," Diva said, and here it was, the moment she'd been circling around all week without quite admitting it to herself, "my friends and I are having a party this Saturday. At the Whitmore house it's this place off campus my family basically owns for these things. Nothing crazy. Just people, music, a little bit of everything." She kept her tone deliberately light, deliberately casual, as though she hadn't rehearsed several versions of this invitation in the shower that morning. "You should come."

Gabby stopped walking. "Me? At an Alcantara party?"

"Is that a problem?"

"No, I just" Gabby laughed, a little disbelieving, tucking a loose curl behind her ear. "I've heard about your parties. Cristina in my dorm said someone flew in a DJ from Ibiza last semester."

"That was excessive," Diva admitted. "I voted against it. I was outvoted."

"By whom?"

"Money," Diva said dryly, "generally wins."

Gabby's laugh rang out again, delighted, and Diva felt that same warm loosening in her chest that she'd felt in the auditorium on the very first day. She wanted to keep making this girl laugh. She wanted it with an intensity that frightened her, because Diva Alcantara did not want things loudly. She wanted them quietly, privately, in the small hours when no one was watching, because wanting things loudly had a way of getting them taken from you.

"Saturday," Gabby said, testing the word like she was trying it on. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'm in."

"Good," Diva said, and meant it more than she let show. "Eight o'clock. I'll text you the address."

"You don't have my number."

"I will by tonight," Diva said, with a confidence that made Gabby's eyebrows shoot up and a slow, pleased smile spread across her face.

"Bold."

"You like bold," Diva said, echoing something in the air between them that neither of them had said outright yet but both of them clearly felt.

"I really do," Gabby said quietly, and for a moment the noise of the quad around them students laughing, a distant frisbee game, someone's music drifting from an open window seemed to fall away entirely, leaving just the two of them standing close together in the afternoon light, caught in something neither of them was ready to name.

That evening, Gabby video called her parents the way she did most nights, propping her phone against a stack of books on her desk while she folded laundry. Her mother's face filled the screen first, framed by the same warm kitchen Gabby had grown up in, and behind her, faintly, Gabby could hear her father humming along to the radio while he did dishes.

"There's this girl," Gabby said, before she'd fully decided to say it, which was very much how she operated heart several steps ahead of her brain, always.

Her mother's eyebrows rose with interest, not alarm. "Oh? Tell me everything."

"Her name's Diva. She's mom, she's so pretty, and smart, and there's something about her, like she's guarding this whole other person underneath the surface one, and I really, really want to meet that person." Gabby paused, folding a shirt with more focus than the task required. "She invited me to a party Saturday. At her family's place. It's I think it's a big deal, this family. Like, old money big."

"And how does she make you feel?" her mother asked, which was such a Cruz-household question, so entirely unconcerned with money or status or optics, that Gabby's whole body relaxed.

"Like I forgot how to breathe normally," Gabby admitted, laughing at herself. "In a good way."

Her mother smiled, that soft, knowing smile Gabby had seen a thousand times. "Then go to the party, mija. Wear something that makes you feel like yourself. And call us after, so we know you got home safe."

"You're not going to ask if it's chaperoned or anything?"

"Should I be worried?"

"No," Gabby said, and something in her voice must have carried the truth of it, because her mother just laughed.

"Then have fun. Fall in love a little, if that's what this is. You're allowed."

You're allowed. Gabby held onto those two words for the rest of the night, turning them over like a stone in her pocket, because she understood without either of them saying it directly that not every girl at that party on Saturday would have parents who'd say the same thing.

She had no idea, as she hung up the call and turned back to her laundry with a smile she couldn't quite wipe off her face, that somewhere across campus, Diva Alcantara was staring at her own phone with an entirely different kind of dread because she still hadn't decided whether to tell her father she'd invited someone new into her life at all, and some deeply buried instinct told her that whatever was starting between her and Gabby was going to be far harder to keep hidden than anything she'd hidden before.