You Should See Me in a Crown

  FOR MOM

  All I am is because you are.

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Week Zero

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Week One

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Week Two

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Week Three

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Week Four

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Week Five

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Week Six

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I’m clutching my tray with both hands, hoping that Beyoncé grants me the strength to make it to my usual lunch table without any incidents.

  I shudder at the thought of a slip that douses me in ranch dressing or a trip that lands me in the lap of one of the guys from the wrestling team. Or, worse, a video of that fall blowing up on Campbell Confidential, the gossipy, Twitter-esque app some senior created a few years ago that has become my worst nightmare. I’m grateful that in a few months all this will be behind me. I’ll be on my way to Pennington, the best private college in the state, living the life I’ve always dreamed about: one surrounded by people like me, in a place I fit, on track to becoming a doctor. It’s so close I can taste it. All I need is the email confirming that I got the scholarship and—

  “Lighty, watch it! I’ve got a thing to do.” Derek Lawson leans into the word thing like what he’s prepping for is some big mystery as he plants himself directly in front of me. I take a step back—tray still in my death grip—and brace myself. I know what happens next. We all do. This type of public spectacle is second nature in Campbell this time of year.

  Before I have a chance to spare myself the very specific torture that accompanies watching a flash mob full of varsity athletes singing and dancing in unison like some sort of value-brand boy band, it’s already happening.

  Derek slides across the floor with the type of drama that would make the cast of Hamilton sit up and take notes. He climbs onto the long table where his crew normally sits and points down to his girlfriend and my not-so-secret rival, Rachel Collins. Someone presses play on a speaker somewhere, and that’s when it starts: another freaking promposal.

  Even though this has been happening at least twice a week since the semester started, I swear one of the freshman girls at the table next to me faints from excitement when Derek begins singing a remixed and prom-themed version of “Time of My Life.” Her friends are too distracted to even help her up.

  Prom in Campbell County, Indiana, is like football in Texas. The only difference is, we don’t get our fanaticism out of our systems every Friday night for months on end. Nope, in Campbell we just hold it in, eleven months and twenty-nine days per year, until one day we explode. The whole town, covered in a heap of sequins and designer tuxes and enough hairspray to fuel the Hindenburg.

  It might be impressive if it weren’t so ridiculously, obnoxiously annoying.

  “You’re the one girl, I want to go to prom with!” Derek is belting at the top of his lungs and it is certifiably awful, but no one seems to care. The girls from the pom squad come in from the hallway, where they must have been lying in wait, fully decked out in their uniforms, and grab their partners from the basketball team. And suddenly, they’re doing full Dirty Dancing choreo and not missing a beat.

  The entire cafeteria is watching this show, and I sort of want to die. My stomach threatens to bring up the granola bar I ate for breakfast just at the sight.

  Not only because it’s Rachel at the center of the attention again, but because this public of a display of, well, anything really terrifies me—even when I’m the furthest thing from being involved in it. I mean, everyone is looking at you, watching you, waiting for you to do something worth posting to Campbell Confidential. The idea of people’s eyes being on me for any longer than the time it takes for me to pass out their sheet music before concert band rehearsal makes me undeniably anxious. It’s why I never ran for class president or auditioned for a school musical and can barely take solos in band without wanting to evaporate.

  When you already feel like everything about you makes you stand out, it just makes more sense to find as many ways to blend in as you can.

  But still, there’s something about the way Derek is looking at Rachel that makes my heart sink. People like Rachel and Derek get the perfect high school sweetheart love story to tell their kids about one day, but tall, black, broke Liz Lighty doesn’t stand a chance. Not in a place like this, anyway.

  I don’t resent my classmates—I really don’t. But sometimes (okay, most of the time) it’s just that I don’t feel like one of them.

  “I’ve searched through every Campbell store, and I’ve finally found the corsage for you!” Derek extends his hand, and Rachel grabs it, fully sobbing now. How she manages to look like an Instagram model even as she sheds a bucketful of fake tears, I’ll never understand.

  Derek’s grand finale—I kid you not—is The Lift.

  With clearly practiced finesse, Rachel runs forward, leaps into his arms, and is lifted above the crowd in the cafeteria. She looks less like Baby and more like Simba looking over the Pride Lands if you ask me, but whatever. Everyone is on their feet by the time the song ends, and the entire fourth-period lunch booms with applause.

  There is a look of begrudging respect on my best friend Gabi’s face as she watches the poms and the basketball guys stand around clapping and looking up at the couple in admiration. Everyone in the room now has their phones out, no doubt recording for Campbell Confidential. And the freshman girls next to us are in literal tears—the one who fainted is even doing a CC Live recording from the floor.

  I look past Derek and Rachel’s table and the hordes of fans surrounding them, and my eyes lock onto the corner of the cafeteria that I’ve avoided like the plague since freshman year. I can’t help myself. Some of the senior guys from the football team are cheering, standing on their chairs and shouting support to their fellow clichéman, Derek. All of them besides Jordan Jennings. I feel the same anxious clench of my heart I always do when I see him, my ex-best friend. His smile is faint as he claps, half-hearted, and I can tell how artificial it is from this far away.

  He’s almost too cute to stare at for more than a few seconds at a time. And this isn’t just me being thirsty; with his smooth brown skin, his waves where his curls used to be, he really looks like he belongs in a teen soap opera—all effortlessly flawless or whatever.

  I remind myself of what he made sure I knew when we were freshmen: People like me and people like him exist in two different stratospheres, and it’s best to keep it that way.

  “Ugh! Organizing a promposal on the day Emme vacates her spot as potential queen? It’s Kris Jenner–level strategy. I’d be pissed if I weren’t so jealous I didn’t think of it myself.” Gabi shoves a book into her locker and shakes her head.
“The devil works hard, but Rachel Collins works harder.”

  “Jealousy is a disease, Marino. Get well soon.” Britt smirks from where she leans against the wall, and Gabi narrows her eyes in her direction. “Seriously, who cares about Rachel Collins? I’d rather talk about who would win in a steel-cage match between Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman. Who are you putting your money on, Lizzo?”

  Stone, sitting cross-legged in deep meditation, seems to be completely unconcerned with the fact that there’s a furious between-class rush that threatens to flatten her. I haven’t said much since the promposal at lunch—haven’t been able to shake that weird feeling of otherness that sometimes hits me in waves so strong they threaten to pull me under—but that doesn’t stop Gabi and Britt from trying to get me to chime in anyway.

  “G, that is so far from relevant,” I start, linking my arm through hers as we all head toward our next classes. “It’s not like any of us are next in line for the throne.”

  “I’d say we’re a lot closer than some people,” Gabi says, voice laced with faux sadness. “Closer than Freddy, at least.”

  I’ve been good, careful, not to ever have any cafeteria mishaps, but other people haven’t been so lucky. Last week, Freddy Brinkley tripped over his own shoelaces (rookie mistake, you always double-knot before you start the trek into the battle zone) on his way to his seat and face-planted into a plate of spasagna, Campbell County’s lasagna-spaghetti hybrid dish.

  At least thirty people captured it on Campbell Confidential, and it’s been remixed, remastered, and retooled so many times and in so many ways that I don’t think poor Freddy is ever going to get past #SpasagnaGate.

  Freddy got cocky, thought he could make The Walk without the proper precautions, and he paid the ultimate price: a public meme-ification. You hate to see it.

  Britt and Stone leave us at the band room to head to their next class. Band passes quickly, too quickly for my taste. Between my anxiety about waiting for the scholarship email, which I know is supposed to come today, and the general buzzing energy of prom season kicking everything into overdrive, I’m not ready for class to be over when it is.

  Gabi gathers her things quickly once the final bell rings, not taking nearly the same care as I do to tuck her clarinet back into the soft velvet of the hard case. She’s going to miss her favorite Campbell Confidential livestream—the Prom Projectioners, a group of girls who make predictions every Monday afternoon about who does and doesn’t stand a chance at making prom court—if she doesn’t leave right now.

  The rest of our classmates are pouring out the side doors into the parking lot, but I’m staying behind like I do most afternoons. There’s always something more to get done before going home.

  “I still can’t believe that Emme went ghost like that.” She pulls her sleek black sunglasses from her bag and adjusts them over her eyes. She pauses for a second. “You think Jordan is okay?”

  Emme Chandler: Jordan’s girlfriend of three years, the sweetest person alive, and mysteriously disappeared shoo-in for prom queen. We weren’t friends with her—we were barely in the same area code, socially—but since she’s practically Campbell County royalty, it’s hard not to wonder where she went.

  But the question still catches me off guard. Back when the three of us were friends, G and Jordan fought constantly. I wonder if a part of her cares about him still, even if she doesn’t want to, the same way that I do.

  Jordan, G, and I were closer than close in middle school. For years, the three of us did everything together. We all met in band in sixth grade, when me and Jordan were battling (auditioning, technically) for first-chair clarinet. And whenever he landed first chair, his smile smug and shining with his braces, he’d say, “Don’t be embarrassed, Lighty. A first is nothing without a good second!”

  During the school year, we would watch Jordan hang up his nerd hat on Friday nights to play football for our surprisingly good middle school team, and then we’d practically camp out at Gabi’s house for the rest of the weekend—me and Jordan putting Gabi on to black cult classics from the ’90s like House Party and Friday. We were so goofy back then, so unconcerned with what other people thought of us as long as we had each other, we even performed in our school’s talent show together. Or at least me and Jordan did. Even then, Gabi had a pretty refined aesthetic.

  Jordan and I dressed up in these awful, thrifted, super-baggy ’90s outfits and did the Kid ’n Play dance sequence from the first House Party. We got second place, but honestly, we were robbed by Mikayla Murphy and her stupid Hula-Hoops.

  But things change, people change, and Jordan is no different.

  At some point, he made sure I knew that our friendship was just a phase. And there wasn’t much I could do about it by then.

  Gabi is still looking at me, and I realize I don’t know how he’s doing. I don’t know anything about him anymore.

  “I’m not sure, G,” I say.

  And despite how I feel about him now, I can’t help but think, But I hope so.

  “Is it just me, or was your section particularly out of tune today?” Mr. K asks as I stop by his desk to hand him the sight-reading quizzes we took. His eyebrows are raised in a way that tells me he knows that I know my section was all out of whack today. And as first chair, he expects me to straighten them out. Mr. K is a good guy. He’s young, younger than most of our other teachers, and it shows in the way he’s still all excited every time he walks into the band room. He’s what my granny would call “wet behind the ears.”

  Plus, he really cares about us. He spent a lot of his own time helping me prepare for my Pennington music scholarship and orchestra audition, rehearsing the perfect piece—classic, not too contemporary, just what they prefer. And when my granny couldn’t get off work and G had some family thing at the resort in French Lick, he even drove me up there. We’d worked hard—I’d worked hard—and the audition was in the books. My future felt as good as set. I’d gotten accepted to the school itself. Now I just needed to be accepted into the orchestra and awarded a scholarship for outstanding musicianship, and my future would be set, too.

  Music is something I understand—the notes are a thing that I can always bend to my will.

  Between the promposal at lunch and stories about where Emme has disappeared to since last Friday though, the entire school hasn’t been able to focus on much of anything today, let alone the new arrangement of “Once We Leave This Place” by my favorite band, Kittredge, that Mr. K handed out today.

  “You know what? Don’t answer that. I’m hoping it was just me and not the mark of prom-mania descending on my precious concert band again.” He laughs with a shake of his head. He takes the sight-reading quizzes from me and cocks his head to the side.

  I look down at my phone, clutched tightly in my hand, and will an email from the Pennington College School of Music to appear. All it takes is one email, one confirmation, and I’ll be on the fast track to the rest of my life.

  “You feeling okay today? You’re not looking like the cautiously optimistic, ‘you can catch me smiling at my sheet music only when I think no one is paying attention’ Liz Lighty I’ve come to know. I thought you’d be more excited to play your own arrangement for the first time.”

  The classroom has mostly emptied out, the few people left behind far enough out of earshot that they can’t hear us. Mr. K knows I don’t really want anyone to know that the music we’ll be ending our spring concert with is a piece that I arranged myself.

  My cheeks heat. I’m not sure why it makes me feel weird to know that people are playing something I had a hand in creating, but it does. It feels too public somehow. Like this thing that I do on my own to stay sane doesn’t belong completely to me anymore or something.

  “I am excited, I just—”

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out faster than should be humanly possible.

  And it takes less than a minute for everything around me to completely fall apart.

  I read through th
e email quickly.

  We regret to inform you that despite your admirable academic and musical achievements, competition was incredibly tough this year, and you were not selected for the Alfred and Lisa D. Sloan School of Music partial-tuition scholarship, nor will you be offered an advanced seat in the orchestra, which means you’re out of luck to the tune of $10K. And while, yeah, it definitely sucks that you didn’t get into the orchestra you’ve wanted to be a part of your entire life, feel free to audition again once you’re on campus—not that you can pay to go!

  That scholarship was my ticket to Pennington and all that comes with it. It was the last piece of the puzzle I’ve been putting together for the past four years. Excellent grades? Check. Solid, albeit modest, extracurriculars? Check. Outstanding enough musicianship to earn me a spot in the world-class Pennington College Orchestra and bridge that final gap between the money I’ve saved, the scholarships I’ve managed to get, the loans I qualify for, and the cost of tuition at the most elite private college in Indiana? Not so much.

  My mouth goes dry. I open and close it, trying to gather words to explain what’s happened, but nothing comes. All I can feel is dread. All I can think about is what Mr. K said to me as we waited for my audition to begin:

  “You’ll fit in so well on Pennington’s campus next year. I know that Campbell isn’t always the easiest place to be, but Pennington was a dream for me,” he’d said as we pulled into the visitor’s parking lot of the music school. As the gorgeous limestone building had come into view, my stomach did what it always does when I get nervous or scared or excited—tightened up, and not in the cute butterflies-in-my-stomach way. Tightened like it was threatening to force out everything I’d consumed that day. I thought I might puke then and there, might just call it quits before I even went inside, but Mr. K cut the engine and pressed on. “This isn’t the only place where you can be yourself, but it was the place where I figured out what it means to be who I am. And that’s worth how you might feel right now.”

  And now, two months after that audition, I learn it was all for nothing. All that time, that work, and I failed. And I don’t know where to go from here.