Page 3 of The Promposal

Jake might have hated romantic movies, but he sure did know how to be a romantic boyfriend. Maybe this was how he was leading up to it. We swayed to the music, one of his hands slowly traveling up and down my back as he held me close. I again had shivers, just not of the terrified variety. But he didn’t say anything. Or ask anything. We just danced.

Which normally would be more than enough. But I was getting impatient, and we were running out of time. “Was there anything else? Like maybe something you wanted to ask me?”

He pulled his head back and gave me a confused look. A sincerely confused look. “Like what?”

Before I could explain what I thought all this had been leading up to, his phone rang, interrupting our song. He looked at the number, and a shadow crossed his face. “Give me a sec, Tills.”

Strange. He walked across the room, out of earshot. Jake had never done that before. It felt like he was hiding something from me.

Now that shuddery “somebody just walked across my grave” feeling had nothing to do with the run-down building and everything to do with how weird he was acting. He was obviously upset. What was going on?

He hung up his phone. And stood there for a second, sporting a serious frown.

When he came back over to me, I asked, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine.” He sounded distracted, like he wasn’t really paying attention to me. “I—we have to go. I have to get this key back to my father.”

“Do you want to talk about your phone call? Who was that?”

“I said everything’s fine, Tills. Just leave it alone,” he snapped at me. Actually snapped at me. The last time he’d been upset with me was before we started dating. I didn’t know whether to be hurt or angry.

Jake unplugged the lights and then led me back through the still ghoulish hotel. Only I was so focused on what had just occurred that I forgot to be scared. Because something important had happened with that call. Something that had seriously rattled him.

Something he wouldn’t tell me about.

Did he not trust me by now? Didn’t he know I would do anything to help him? Why would he shut me out?

And as we got back into his car and drove off, I realized that of all the bad things that had just happened—there was one thing that was the absolute worst.

Jake still hadn’t asked me to prom.

CHAPTER TWO

“He really didn’t ask you?” Ella sounded totally surprised. “When he said he wanted to show you something, I just thought ...” Her voice trailed off as we walked across the school parking lot. Jake had texted that he couldn’t pick me up that morning, so Ella and I had driven in together.

“He really didn’t.” In any other school, it would be understood that Jake and I would go to prom together. But not at Malibu Prep. Those elaborate promposals all over the internet? Where guys would go to expensive and creative extremes to ask a girl to prom? That style of asking had started at our school decades ago. They caught on when social media allowed us to share them with the world. While some high schools had begun to ban them for being too distracting, ours went all in on the crazy and let kids take asking to dizzying levels.

And it was highly competitive to see who pulled off the best promposal, the one that would go viral and give the guy bragging rights for the rest of the year. Which meant that some boys asked early, hitting it hard out of the gate. Wanting to be first in case someone else had a similar kind of promposal planned. Others didn’t much care, putting in minimal effort and resorting to asking on the lid of various baked goods (“It’d be SWEET if you went to prom with me” or “Be a SMART COOKIE and go with me to prom!” or “DONUT miss the chance to be my prom date!”).

Then there were the ones who waited until almost the last minute, watching their competition closely, hoping their creative, over-the-top ask would blow up any that had come before. Sometimes it reminded me of a 1980s arm race.

My hope was that Jake was waiting because he instinctively understood how important this was to me and wanted to get it just right. That he got that our prom would be the pinnacle of my student body presidential career and the highlight of my high school experience (if my John Hughes movies were to be believed). That he would make a big, showy gesture guaranteed to melt my heart, and then we would have the most incredible night together at the dance.

“Has Trent asked you yet?” Things didn’t seem to be too great between my friend and my sister. Ella hadn’t talked very much about it, but it was just the feeling I got from her whenever I brought him up.

“Don’t you think I would have told you every detail if he had?”

True. Ella would probably tell the whole school over the morning announcements. Or hire one of those skywriters to announce it to the entire town.

Much like the noisy airplane currently overhead that had just written out,Vanessa? Prom?

Distracted, I wasn’t watching where I was going and nearly tripped over Randall Hayworth. He was covered in some kind of blood and lying on the asphalt surrounded by a white chalk outline. He had a bouquet of sunflowers in one hand and a sign in the other that read, “Allison, I am dying to go to prom with you!”

“You’re going to get run over and actually need that chalk outline!” I told him, but he didn’t even acknowledge me as I stepped over his body. “Does he really think that’s romantic? No little girl dreams of the day a boy asks her to prom utilizing pig’s blood.” In fact, based on the horror movies Ella forced me to watch, pig’s blood and proms did not go well together.

Ella shrugged. “It’s not even original. Don’t you remember when his older brother did the same thing a couple of years ago? Only he staged it in his bedroom along with fake cops, crime scene tape, blood everywhere, and his mom sobbing. He nearly gave his girlfriend a heart attack.”

Jeez. No wonder other schools had started banning these things.

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