Cedric carried his laptop downstairs. It was infuriating that I couldn't see what he was seeing, but he stopped when he saw his dad. "Dad? What's going on?"

"Nothing," his dad said, giggling. He had been thrilled to be in on the surprise, and my shoulders shook as I silently laughed at his delight, and the confounded look on Cedric's face.

"Weirdo," Cedric said, then opened the front door. "Uh. What?"

I hit the play button on the song I had queued up. Our song. "Only You." As the opening notes played, I told him, "Follow the balloons."

Behind Cedric, which was all I could see, Nic and Maggie were standing in the hallway, curiously looking on. Then Mr. McKinney leaned into the frame, giving me two thumbs up.

Cedric stepped outside, and the sun flashed behind him. "Okay, I'm trusting you." He paused, and read the note on the first balloon.

"This is the only life." Another step.

"Where I can ask you." Step.

"This very important question." Cedric stopped.

"Keep going," I told him.

As he started walking, I tried to imagine what he was seeing. Balloons leading him around the house. "What is happening? What is the question? Okay, I'm gonna hold it together. I am trusting you because you are my boyfriend and I love y—"

Cedric cut himself off with a shriek as he rounded the house, where he would see even more balloons, as well as some tiki torches, guiding his gaze to the cardboard standup, now with my face pasted over Peeta's. I had also painted an outfit more my style onto the cardboard and completed the look with real suspenders. In my cardboard hands was a glitter-covered invitation. "No fucking way. No fucking way!"

The landscape over Cedric's shoulder bounced nauseatingly. "No?" I asked, worried.

"No, I mean, yes. Yes!" Cedric laughed and held the laptop out so he could see me. "Yes, I will go to prom with you!"

I smiled so hard my face hurt. I put my hands on my cheeks because it felt like they were going to split open.

"Where are you?" Cedric looked around. "Where are you hiding? I'm going to kiss you. I don't care about corona. I'm kissing you and that's it."

My smile faded. "Oh, uh. Sorry, I'm not... actually there."

"What?" Cedric peered back at the screen. "But how did you...?"

"Eli helped. And your dad. I was the only one who could keep you distracted for that long." I tried to smile again, but it hurt a little. I wished I had been there. It had been six weeks since the last time I had kissed Cedric. My mouth sorely missed him.

"Oh. Well, that's okay. Wait—was the whole doctor's appointment just something you made up to distract me?"

The warning note of betrayal in his voice had me scrambling. "No! No, that was real. Mom only told me about the appointment this morning, but I had planned all this before that. I almost didn't do it. I swear. If you had been really upset about all that I wouldn't have gone through with it."

Cedric sat down on the grass and tilted the laptop to talk to me. Behind him, the cardboard cutout loomed. "I mean, I'm still worried."

"I'm, uh, kinda worried too. I don't know. Maybe it was stupid to ask you to a prom that isn't happening."

"Oh, there isn't a prom?" Cedric reached up and snatched the cartoonishly large invitation from the cardboard cutout's hand and read it aloud: "Mr. James Greer formally requests the accompaniment of Mr. Cedric McKinney to a private Senior Prom, to be held in the backyard of the Greer estate on Saturday, May the 30th, 2020. Formal attire required. Dinner to be provided."

"I mean, yeah. It will just be us. I mean..."

"So this isn't happening?"

I didn't tell him that I hadn't exactly asked Mom about it yet. "It is, I meant our real prom isn't happening. It won't be the same."

"James, sometimes I want to slap that self-doubt out of you." Cedric jabbed a finger at me, or at his laptop camera. "I love you. There isn't any other part of prom I care about than being with you. So stop it. This is perfect." He grinned then, even though his eyes were shining. "I just really wish you were here right now."

"I wish I could be there too." My lips shook and I knew I was going to start crying.

Then Cedric said, "I guess I'll have to go with the next best thing." He reached up, and the top of the cardboard standee entered the frame. He puckered up and planted a kiss on the lips of my printed-out face.

I barked a laugh. When he stuck out his tongue I yelled, "Stop, you'll ruin it!"

He gave me a saucy smile. "I'm planning to ruin it tonight."

I couldn't stop laughing.

"But why so far away, though? May 30th is more than a month from now."

"I have a lot of planning to do. Plus, I didn't know if we would need extra time to find a tux. I'm not sure the tux rental places are still doing that."

"Really? You want to do all that?"

I got up and moved away from the backdrop, and sat down on my bed.

"Yeah, of course! I want to give you the full prom experience. Also, I want the full prom experience too. I need to make a music playlist and get all the decorations and order a few other things..." I didn't explain what I meant by that. "And I thought Eli and Jax and Marlo might want to join us. If they can find dates."

Cedric's face lit up. "Really? Your mom's going to let you do that? Can my friends come? Some of them didn't have dates in mind, either."

I shouldn't have mentioned it, not without talking to Mom first. "Uh, I still have to check with her. I know for sure she'll be cool with you coming over. And maybe even sleeping over..." I said it without thinking. It had been something I wanted, but I didn't think Mom would go for it.

"Wow," Cedric said. "This is so amazing. Okay, yes to all of that. And I think a month of preparation is very fair." He glanced over at the cardboard cutout, then snapped the suspenders I had attached. One of them fell off. "I do have this lovely stand-in for you, so I think I can survive. Not sure about Nic, though. He might get freaked out with you watching him at all hours."

***

As I expected, the MRI didn't find anything unusual, although the doctor said my brain had more activity than most brains. I made sure to tell Cedric and Eli both about that. "More activity in which region?" Cedric countered. "Maybe it's in the region of weird archaic knowledge."

I distracted myself with shopping for a tux online. I didn't want a boring tux, but the non-boring options were a little too flamboyant for my style. A playlist took up quite a lot of time, especially since I wanted to consult with Cedric, who basically took over. "I'm getting us a DJ," Cedric said.

"But will he play all of our songs?"

"Don't you worry. He will only play our songs," he said with a wink.

Everything was coming together, but I still had to have a chat with Mom.

She knew I had asked Cedric to prom, and yet she hadn't asked about what that really meant. Midway through May, I realized I was going to have to formally ask her.

I waited until it was my night to cook dinner. I made her favorite meal of the moment, taco salad. I poured her a glass of wine.

"What's the occasion?" Mom asked, sitting down with her phone in hand.

"I have something to ask you."

She speared some lettuce and shoved it in her mouth, then noticed how I hadn't picked up my fork. "Okay?"

"You know how I asked Cedric to prom?"

She nodded, raising her eyebrows.

"Um, I was hoping I could do a little prom in the backyard. Like, just Cedric and me. And maybe Eli and a couple other friends. We can totally wear masks the whole time if you want us to. We've all been quarantining and social distancing and it would just be for one night." I said this all in a rush and then I was out of breath and left waiting and not breathing for her response.

"I didn't realize that was what you were planning," Mom said slowly. "I thought the school might have been planning some kind of online prom thing."

My hands clasped together at my chest. "School hasn't said anything. I'm pretty sure prom is cancelled."

"And graduation. They had a meeting about it the other night."

"No graduation? Like, at all?"

Mom waved her hand. "They had a few options, but I think they're going to do something virtual."

I grimaced.

"So this prom. I'm guessing you would prefer if you didn't have to social distance with Cedric anymore."

"I mean, it's been almost two months!" Mentally I counted up the weeks. Yes, two months. "I've been quarantining. And I know Eli has, too."

"But Cedric's mother is a nurse," Mom said.

That one sentence stopped my argument cold. Cedric was never going to be able to quarantine, not if his mother was a nurse. I wanted to cry in frustration.

"I'm not sure," Mom continued. "I know it seems like cruel and unusual punishment not to be able to see him."

"It's been two months. And you said May first. You said, hang in there until May. It's May fifteenth!"

Mom blinked at my outburst. "I don't control the pandemic," she said. "And why didn't you ask me on May first?"

"Would you have said yes then?" I demanded.

"Probably not," she admitted. "But you have to realize that this is for your safety, and mine. If you're exposed, then I'm exposed. And we might not have any underlying conditions, but this virus seems to affect everyone differently."

I had been so sure Mom would let at least Cedric come over. The way she was talking, Cedric was the one she was so concerned about. "What if it's just Cedric? No one else. Just me and Cedric in the backyard."

Mom looked at me. Studied me.

I blinked so that I wouldn't cry.

"Okay," Mom said. "Just Cedric. Just for a couple of hours."

I jumped out of my chair and hugged her. "Thank you," I said over and over.

The victory was short lived. Just a few nights later, the news blew up with reports of a black man named George Floyd dying at the hands of the police. And a few days after that, Cedric told me he was planning to go to a protest in San Jose.

"You're... what?" I asked.

Cedric glanced at the camera, which he'd set on his desk while he shoved things into a backpack. "I'm going to the Black Lives Matter protest in San Jose," he repeated slowly. "It's tomorrow night. Do you want to go with me?"

I had noticed Cedric posting things online about Black Lives Matter. And during our phone conversations Cedric told me about arguments with his parents about it. Mostly Cedric said his parents didn't think the protests were a good idea during the pandemic. "They act like liberals, but really they're racists," Cedric had said last night.

Now he was asking me to go to a protest on the night before our prom. If Mom knew that, she'd never let Cedric come over.

"But... you're not supposed to congregate," I stuttered.

Cedric straightened up. "I'll be wearing a mask. And I'm going to stay six feet away whenever I can."

"Are you going with anyone else?" The thought of Cedric alone in the unruly crowds I had seen on TV made my throat constrict.

"I'm going with you, if you want to go," he said.

My mouth opened and closed a few times. "I just... I don't think I can do it," I said. I'd had a panic attack at school and nearly had another at Walmart. And that was in a calm, orderly setting, not while police were firing tear gas into the crowds.

"It must be nice," Cedric said.

I blinked myself out of my imaginings of being in a crowd like that. "W-what?"

"It must be nice to be able to sit in your nice house and ignore what's happening."

Again I couldn't speak. He sounded angry. My voice was thick as I said, "I just don't want you to get sick. Or hurt."

"But I guess it's okay for the police to kill people."

Now the tears. I wished I didn't feel so helpless and alone. "Please, don't go," I whispered.

He looked at me with a coldness I'd never seen before. "I'm going."

I wanted him to beg me to go. To say, If you loved me you would go with me. I wanted to say, If you loved me you wouldn't go. But he didn't, and I didn't.

He said, "I'm going," then, "I'll talk to you later."

Why I looked up the protests that had started happening around the country, I couldn't say. But as I watched video after video of police brutality and non-socially distanced crowds, the familiar wave of dizziness came over me, and I

         fell

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