"Usually," Keisha had said on the porch before leaving for campus, "parents read the nomination email. It went out three weeks ago."
Rochelle had not answered that. In the car now, she tried a different angle. "Novah, your hair—when we get there, I'll fix the puff. There's a lounge off the ballroom."
"You don't have to," Novah said.
"I want to."
Want, Novah had noticed, often arrived after witnesses.
Tiana stared out the window at the river bridges. She loved the Ambassador Walk. She had practiced the slow turn in the hallway for weeks, loved the weight of formalwear, loved the way donors' faces softened when a girl her age spoke cleanly about literacy funds. She was not a fraud. She also was not stupid. She had heard her mother in the bedroom. She had watched Keisha walk past her like gold was weather and Novah was climate.
"I'm glad you won," Tiana said, quieter than the sequins. "I mean it. I didn't know it was you. Mom talked about the Ambassadors like that was the whole night."
Novah's thumb rubbed a daisy petal. "It is the whole night for her."
"Not for me," Tiana said, and then, because honesty was slippery, "Not only for me."
Rochelle's eyes found them in the rearview. "We are a family. We celebrate all of it. Tiana's presentation *and* Novah's award. Both matter."
Novah looked at the roses. "You said people wouldn't be watching me."
The car filled with the soft roar of the highway. Rochelle's jaw worked once. "I was focused. That doesn't mean—"
"It means what it means," Novah said, and then closed her mouth because she was nine and still trying not to become the kind of person who used a win like a knife.
Tiana reached across the seat and, after a hesitation, touched Novah's sleeve. Not the flowers. The sleeve. "Your dress is nice."
"It's plain."
"It's honest," Tiana said, borrowing Keisha's word for daisies without knowing she was doing it. "Like you."
Novah didn't smile. But she didn't pull her arm away.
IV.
The civic ballroom had been transformed into Riverview Academy's idea of importance: tall white arrangements, navy linens, a stage with a lectern and a screen that cycled through donor logos and student artwork. The Ambassador Walk would happen after dinner, a slow procession of high school girls in formalwear presenting envelopes of pledged gifts and speaking one sentence each about the capital campaign. Before that, the academic awards—Lower School first, then Upper—would remind everyone that the school produced minds as well as manners.
Rochelle Prentiss knew every inch of the parent committee's plan because she had chaired half of it. She had argued for better lighting on the Ambassador line. She had personally approved the gold color story for the sophomore Ambassadors. She had imagined photographs of Tiana in sequins circulating through alumni channels like proof that the Prentiss family understood how institutions remembered you.