Theo Okafor came down the line, tall and nervous in a rented tux that was a little too short at the wrists, holding a corsage box. He was the older brother of the twins Junie babysat on Tuesday nights, and he'd asked her to walk the March with him in February in the Okafors' kitchen, so awkwardly and with so many false starts that both of them had ended up laughing too hard for him to finish the sentence. He had gone to every one of her dress fittings that he was allowed to, which was none, and had asked about all of them.
He saw her. He stopped walking.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
"You look—" He seemed to give up on the end of the sentence. He opened the corsage box instead. It was a single white rose, plain, with a green ribbon. "I didn't know what color your dress was going to be anymore. Your dad texted me that it changed. So I just went with white. Is that okay?"
"That's perfect," Junie said.
Mark stood back by the trophy case in Walt Ostrander's ironed flannel and watched Theo fumble the corsage onto her wrist, and then he looked up into the bleachers. Pearl was there already, in the front row on the aisle, where somebody had given up their seat for her. Next to her sat Brooke with her sketchbook in her lap.
He didn't go sit with them. Not yet. He stayed by the door where he could see the whole floor.
Mr. Abernathy, who taught American history and had read the names for the Grand March for twenty-two years in the same voice he used for the Gettysburg Address, stood at a microphone by the plywood Eiffel Tower with a stack of index cards. Couples came in pairs through an arch of white balloons at the far end of the gym, walked the length of the floor along a strip of red carpet, paused at the center to turn and face the bleachers, and walked on. The parents clapped for each one. Phones flashed.
Junie and Theo were eleventh from the end.
"Juniper Hale," read Mr. Abernathy, "escorted by Theodore Okafor."
They walked through the balloon arch.
She would not remember much of it afterward. She would remember the strange softness of the red carpet under her flats and the heat of the lights and the sound of her own heart in her ears. She would remember the way the blue satin moved around her ankles, cool, and the weight of the sash low on her hip. She would remember Theo's arm, rigid with nerves under her hand, and how he whispered, out of the side of his mouth, "Don't let me trip, don't let me trip, don't let me trip."