Her father glanced in the rearview mirror, and for a second, she thought she saw him smile too—as if he remembered, once, being fifteen, standing in a room full of noise and light, holding on to a moment before it slipped away.
She didn’t know how. Her feet felt like two foreign objects. But the song changed—something slow, something with a bass line that traveled up from the floorboards—and Adrien took her cup from her hand, set it on a shelf, and pulled her into the center of the room.
Clara snorted. “Your parents still think we’re ten.” La Boum
At some point, Clara caught her eye from across the room and gave her a huge, knowing thumbs-up.
When she climbed into the car, her mother asked, “Did you have fun?” Her father glanced in the rearview mirror, and
“Adrien?” her mother asked.
Then Adrien was beside her.
“You’re going, right?” asked Clara, her best friend since the sandbox, already scanning her own invitation for dress-code clues.