A Formal Affair Read Free

didn’t know you signed. What does it mean?”
    â€œIt means please don’t put so much starch in my shirt, ” Carmen said, before collapsing in giggles.
    Domingo smiled. “Very funny, loca . How will I ever find anyone who makes me laugh the way you do?”
    As Carmen took her keys out of her pocket and opened the door to her home, she wanted to say, “You won’t find anyone who makes you laugh as much as I do.” She wanted to add, “ Please don’t find anyone.” She looked at Domingo, and right away she could tell that he knew just what she was thinking. She leaned in to kiss him, and this time it was her own tears that wet her cheeks.
    It might have been because neither of her best friends had been through the breakup of their first loves, or it might have just been too painful, but Carmen didn’t want to talk about Domingo or the twinge she felt whenever he crossed her mind when she was out with the girls. By the time school started in September, she was managing to think about him only roughly fifteen times a day. While not great, it was a heck of a lot better than the fifty or more times per day she had thought about him when they first “broke up.” Now that it was the beginning of October and the amigas were already a month into their junior year of high school, she thought of him only four or five times a day. By Thanksgiving, she reasoned, he’d be a once-a-day memory. And by Christmas, she’d be over him. At least, that’s what Carmen told herself. So she kept her still healing heart out of the conversations with her mejores amigas.
    But that didn’t mean her best friends didn’t worry. Or try to get her to talk. Before school started, Alicia and Jamie had fretted obsessively about Carmen—calling her every day to see if she were lonely or needed a cheer-up trip to the beach or mall. And while Carmen had appreciated the way they dragged her on cheesy, touristy glass-bottom boat rides and plied her with pints of dulce de leche ice cream, Carmen never talked about the breakup. She insisted over and over again that she really was fine. And so, as time passed, her friends began to believe that she was telling them the truth.…

NOW, A FEW months later, Carmen shook off her old memories and leaned against a locker. She looked at the Save the Date card for the winter formal as she half listened to Alicia go on about the SoBees. “You know, they’re obnoxious. Es la verdad . But even so, I’m pumped. We’re juniors now, upperclassmen. We can go to winter formal. It will be like a practice run for prom.”
    Jamie tried to hold out and hide her excitement, but she failed, miserably. Her expression, usually stern, was almost beaming. “I hate to give them the satisfaction of thinking they know anything about anything , but I have heard it’s an amazing party every year. And it’s our first winter formal.”
    Alicia nodded. “No doubt! I heard this year they are going to have a snow machine that makes real snow.”
    Jamie slammed her locker shut and pumped her fist. “I’m sold. I miss real snow.”
    Alicia sighed. “I’ve never seen snow, except the tacky fake kind in my front yard at Christmastime.” Every year, Alicia’s parents had a big Winter Wonderland party and their lawn would be covered with “snow,” a kind of gross foam that took weeks to fully rinse away. Alicia had loved it when she was a kid, but now that she was older and more environmentally conscious, not so much.
    Jamie’s eyes grew larger. “You’re kidding, right? But you guys have been to Nueva York.”
    Alicia shrugged. “With you. And it was summertime.”
    Jamie couldn’t get the Stop the Presses expression off her face. “But it snows in Texas. And in Madrid.”
    Alicia shrugged once more. “Again, not when we were there.”
    â€œ Increíble, ”