The candy-sweet pop music pounded in my ears as I looked around the gym. The place was decorated with streamers and balloon arches and banners, but I wasn’t looking at any of that. I was scanning the crowd with quickly-increasing anxiety, trying to find someone I knew—anyone I knew.

There weren’t a lot of people at this school I would consider friends, but I would take just one familiar face—anything to help me make some sense of what was going on. I’d be happy even if this turned out to be some kind of large-scale senior prank, but something told me that wasn’t what I was looking at. Between the DJ and the dancing extras and the concert-worthy sound system, whatever this was had a much bigger budget than any senior prank I’d ever heard of. Their balloon budget alone had to be in the thousands. And—worse—I’d looked everywhere, and there wasn’t a single familiar face in the gym.

But even though everything around me was completely unfamiliar, there was also a strange, unnamable sense of familiarity. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and it didn’t make any sense, but it was there, like an itch in the back of my brain.

I took a deep breath and tried to tally the facts: I had followed Professor Ramsey, and I should have walked out of the auditorium where we’d been speaking directly into a hallway leading to the math classrooms, but instead I was in a gym. And—weirder still—it wasn’t even my high school’s gym. The gym at Riverside High was in bad shape, with peeling paint and warped floorboards. This gym was much newer, and all the floors were level. Riverside High’s gym also didn’t have a stage, and we didn’t hold our dances in the gym.

My brain was spinning like a top as I tried to process all this information, but it finally slowed enough that I noticed the banner hanging over the DJ booth—North Point High School Homecoming.

I stared at it in shock. What the hell? It was March a few minutes ago, but now it was October? Homecoming season?

And I didn’t go to North Point High. I went to Riverside High. Where the heck was North Point?

My heart had started to beat hard enough that I could hear my pulse in my ears. My hands felt slick with sweat, and I clenched them into fists. As hard as my brain was working on it, nothing about what was happening made any sense, and I could feel myself starting to panic.

A blond girl walked by me and grinned shakily, but I found I couldn’t return the smile. I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was stare back at her, confused.

Strangely, after a moment, the girl spun on her heel and literally sprinted away.

Okay, that was pretty odd.

I shook my head. I didn’t know how it was possible, but every moment was managing to be even weirder than the previous one. It wasn’t like I had been to a lot of dances during my high school career, so I didn’t have a lot to compare this experience to, but I figured I should at least know who some of these people were, even if I still didn’t know what the hell was going on.

I took a step forward, and my ankle rolled worryingly. I looked down and was shocked to see that I was wearing a pair of sparkly silver heels. High heels. I had never in my life worn high heels, and I had no recollection of picking these out or putting them on.

Then my eyes traveled upward, and I realized I wasn’t wearing the jeans and gray t-shirt I’d put on that morning. I was wearing a dress. A dress. I was in my jeans two minutes ago, and now I was in a very short, very tight, very uncomfortable hot pink…thing.

I swallowed hard.

My eyes were still down, so I only saw when a hand appeared in my line of vision. The hand was holding a clear plastic cup with red liquid inside of it.

“I got you a drink.”

I looked up to see a boy standing in front of me. I had no idea who he was, and he was the kind of guy that I would have remembered if we’d met before. He was what my grandma would have called movie-star handsome. He had the whole package going for him—tall, dimples when he spoke, blond hair falling messily over his forehead, clear blue eyes, the kind of jaw that could cut glass. He was so beautiful he didn’t even look real.

I stared up at him, stunned. I had never before spoken to a guy who looked like this. Hell, I didn’t even think I’d ever seen a guy who looked like this in real life. And I certainly hadn’t seen guys in high school who looked like this. Riverside High was filled with guys who were still fighting their way through the most awkward stages of puberty, but this guy looked like awkward was a distant memory, if he’d ever seen that stage at all.

How old was he, anyway?

I looked into his face, but I wasn’t completely sure. He could have been eighteen—but he also could have been twenty-five.

He was still holding out the drink, but I hadn’t taken it or responded, and after a moment he waved a hand in front of my face, like he was trying to get my attention.

“Hello?” He smiled, making his dimples stand out. “Are you there? Earth to Lana?”

Hearing my name come out of his mouth was so surprising I took a startled step back—and that was a mistake. I was still wearing the sparkling silver heels, and my ankles gave way. I was falling, but in a matter of a millisecond, the guy stepped toward me, grabbing me around my waist and pulling me toward him.

Suddenly I was being held—held tightly, for the record—by this unimaginably gorgeous movie-star-high-school student. When I looked up into his eyes, I could see what looked like genuine concern in them.

“Hey,” he said softly, his face close to mine, “are you okay?”

I narrowed my eyes. This felt familiar. This all felt familiar. I’d heard that line before. More than that, I’d heard this guy say that line before.

I was standing behind the couch in the living room just as the last of the light faded from the sky. It was almost night, and my sister sat on the couch, watching one of her favorite movies for what felt like the hundredth time.

I ignored the movie on the screen. “Catie, do you have any homework?”

Catie groaned in response. “Lana!”

“What?”

She rolled her eyes. “You have to relax. It’s Friday.”

“Do you have any—”
“Yes, I have homework,” Catie said. “I have some math and an essay on the Egyptian gods, but I have plenty of time and, right now, I just want to watch my movie.”

I glanced at the screen. The colors were garish, the editing felt somehow both sloppy and predictable, and the music hit my ears like nails on a chalkboard. I shook my head. “What do you even see in this saccharine nonsense?” I asked dismissively.

“Lana,” Catie groaned, tossing a throw pillow at me.

I dodged the pillow. “I’m serious. There’s no realism to this, no sense of place, no depth.”

Catie tossed another throw pillow at me.

“Listen, if you don’t get it, then I can’t explain it,” she said.

“It’s not that I don’t get it,” I muttered, looking at the TV again. Somehow the story had transitioned into a dance sequence, which made about as much sense as anything else in the storyline. I watched as one of the main girls—wearing a horrifyingly fluffy dress—tripped. She fell backward in a cheap slow-motion shot.

It was my turn to roll my eyes. I could feel what was coming next as certainly as if I could hear a train pulling into a station. “And now the hero will come to save her, right in the nick of time.”

“Shut up, Lana,” Catie snapped.

But then—right on schedule—a hero so good-looking he looked fake appeared on screen, catching the girl around the waist, stopping her from falling, and pulling her toward him. Their faces were absurdly close, but the director had decided what he needed was a close-up shot of the movie’s prettiest boy, so there was an inexplicable close-up on the guy’s eyes as he said softly, “Hey, are you okay?”

I gasped and felt my whole body go cold.

Hey, are you okay?

That’s why this guy was so familiar. That’s why I didn’t recognize a soul but still felt like I’d seen all this before.

This was all from She Hasn’t Been Kissed!