On the morning of prom, Cella Rodriguez woke before dawn, not because she had slept well, but because sleep had barely touched her at all.

The room was still dark, the first suggestion of morning only beginning to gather at the edges of the curtains, and for a few quiet seconds she simply lay there on her back, staring at the ceiling with her hands folded over her stomach, feeling her own heartbeat rise and fall as if it, too, had become restless in the night. She did not smile at first. She did not let herself. She had spent too many weeks at Westbridge teaching her face how to stay calm, how to hold itself together, how to give nothing away. But some feelings refused to be disciplined, and this one had been growing for days now, warm and terrifying and impossible to deny.