DIVA & GABBY

Getting Ready

Saturday arrived wrapped in a strange, electric kind of quiet the kind that settles over a day when something is about to happen, even before anyone involved fully understands what that something is.

Gabby spent the better part of the afternoon standing in front of her closet, phone propped against her mirror, video-calling her best friend from home, Renz, who was scrolling through Gabby's meager wardrobe options with the seriousness of a general planning a siege.

"Not the yellow one," Renz said. "You'll look like a highlighter next to rich people."

"Rich people don't dress differently, Renz, they're not aliens."

"They absolutely dress differently. They have, like, quiet money energy. You need something that says 'I could be dangerous if I wanted to be' but also 'I definitely didn't spend three figures on this.'"

Gabby laughed so hard she nearly dropped her phone. "That's oddly specific."

"I've seen movies." A pause, then, softer: "Okay but for real. Are you nervous?"

Gabby considered the question honestly, sitting down on the edge of her bed with a green dress draped over her lap. "A little. Not about the party. About her."

"The infamous Diva."

"She's not infamous, she's just" Gabby searched for the word. "Intense. In this quiet way. Like she's got this whole ocean underneath a completely calm surface, and every time I talk to her I feel like I'm getting a tiny glimpse under the water, and I want more of it so bad it's almost embarrassing."

Renz was quiet for a moment. "That's not a crush, Gabs. That's a shipwreck waiting to happen."

"Thanks. Very comforting."

"I'm serious though. Just" Renz hesitated. "Just don't lose yourself trying to keep up with her world, okay? You're already enough."

Gabby held that thought against her chest as she finally settled on the green dress deep emerald, simple, the kind of dress that didn't need embellishment because it trusted the girl wearing it. She curled her hair the way her mother had taught her, dabbed on the vanilla perfume that had become something like a signature, and looked at herself in the mirror with a strange, fluttering confidence.

She looked like herself. That would have to be enough.

Across town, in a suite considerably larger than Gabby's entire dorm floor, Diva stood in front of a closet three times the size of most people's bedrooms, and felt more anxious than she had any right to feel over a party she had planned herself.

Her friend Bettina lounged across her bed, flipping through a magazine with the particular boredom of someone who had attended a hundred parties exactly like this one and expected the hundred-and-first to look identical. "You've tried on four outfits," Bettina said, not looking up. "This isn't like you."

"I want tonight to be good," Diva said, which was true, and also not the whole truth.

Bettina finally lowered the magazine, studying her friend with the sharp, assessing look she usually reserved for spotting counterfeit designer bags. "This is about the new girl."

"It's about the party."

"Diva." Bettina sat up. "You texted me a whole paragraph on Tuesday about someone named Gabby's laugh. You don't do paragraphs. You barely do full sentences when you're not interested in something."

Diva said nothing, which was, in itself, an admission.

"I'm not judging," Bettina said, gentler now. "I think it's actually the first time I've seen you excited about anything that wasn't a business deal your father orchestrated. I just" She hesitated, choosing her next words carefully, because even among close friends, some things about Diva's family were understood without being spoken aloud. "Your dad's not going to be thrilled if this becomes a whole thing. You know how he is about about who you're seen with. About image."

"He's not here," Diva said, more sharply than she meant to. "He's in Singapore until next month. This is my house tonight. My rules."

Bettina held up both hands in surrender. "I'm just saying be careful. Not because I don't think she's good for you. Because I think she might be very good for you, and that scares me more than if she were bad."

Diva didn't answer that, because she didn't have an answer. Instead she reached for the last dress in her closet a deep wine-red, backless, the kind of dress that didn't ask permission from anyone and something in her settled the moment she put it on. She looked, for the first time all week, entirely like herself: controlled, elegant, and underneath it all, quietly, dangerously alive.

She thought of Gabby's laugh, the way it had rung out across the auditorium on the very first day, and felt something in her chest tighten with anticipation she hadn't allowed herself in years.

Tonight, for once, she was going to let herself want something out loud.

By seven-thirty, the Whitmore house had transformed into something out of a magazine spread string lights woven through the porch railings, a low thump of music already pulsing from inside, the long gravel driveway filling steadily with cars that cost more than most people's houses. Diva stood at the entrance, greeting guests with the practiced warmth of someone raised to host, her eyes flicking again and again toward the driveway, waiting.

At exactly five minutes to eight, a rideshare pulled up, and Gabby stepped out of it in the green dress, curls loose and shining under the porch lights, looking around at the house with an expression caught somewhere between awe and disbelief.

Diva's breath caught in her throat.

She had seen Gabby every day that week in lecture halls, over breakfast, walking across the quad in the golden afternoon light but there was something about seeing her here, dressed for an evening that belonged entirely to the two of them, that made Diva feel like she was looking at her for the very first time all over again.

"You made it," Diva said, crossing the driveway before she'd consciously decided to.

"I did." Gabby's eyes swept over Diva's dress, and whatever composure Gabby had built up on the ride over visibly cracked. "You look wow. I mean. You look incredible."

"So do you," Diva said, and meant every word of it.

For a moment they simply stood there in the porch light, the party's noise humming behind them, both of them acutely aware that something significant was beginning something neither of them had fully agreed to out loud, but both of them had been walking toward since the moment their eyes met in that auditorium four days ago.

"Ready?" Diva asked, extending her hand.

Gabby looked at that hand for one long, suspended second knowing, somehow, that taking it meant stepping into something she wouldn't be able to simply walk back out of before she laced her fingers through Diva's and let herself be pulled toward the door.

Neither of them noticed the small cluster of Diva's friends watching from the porch, exchanging glances loaded with unspoken meaning. Neither of them noticed Bettina's expression, caught somewhere between delight and worry. And neither of them had any idea that in less than three hours, a simple party game was going to send them both down into the Whitmore basement and into a moment that would change absolutely everything between them.