“Nice of y’all to show,” Rachel shouts across the parking lot. “It’s not like the rest of us are just standing here in the rain.” She only joined the Spirit Week Committee as an alternative to summer school (which was an alternative to all her detentions), but you’d think we just interrupted her wedding. She plants one hand on her hip then points her other hand sharply, first toward my float, then Megan’s.

I make my way along the long line of trucks and convertibles toward Derek’s cherry-red pickup. The whole senior class is invited to participate in the parade, but those of us who “won” a superlative lead the way. It’s just a few laps around the school, the underclassmen watching through the classroom windows, followed by a pancake breakfast in the cafeteria. Pretty unremarkable, but it’s a tradition I’ve always looked forward to. We all have, I guess.

“If it’s not my beautiful bride,” Matt proclaims from the truck bed.

“Hi,” I say stiffly. I don’t want to be cold, but frigidity seems like the best course of action when you’re standing with your ex whose heart you’d rather not keep shredding, on a float devoted to your relationship, just like all the “Matt &Nat” carvings in all the trees and bathroom stalls around the middle school. Even his letterman jacket proclaims our “undying” love: Matt Kincaid, QB1, has been #4 since age twelve, when he chose his jersey number in honor of my birthday, April fourth.

As he offers me a hand and helps pull me up, my eyes land on a hideous monstrosity of white taffeta and lace draped over one side of the truck bed. “My gown,” I say. “It’s just how I imagined it.”

Matt laughs, swipes the dress up, and lifts the immense amounts of fabric over my head for me to put on.

“Don’t you have to wear a tux or something?” I grumble, forcing my head and arms through the respective holes.

“Rachel gave me a suit jacket,” he says. “It’s under my coat.”

“Oh, how convenient,” I say, then a whiff of something sweet hits me. “Is that whiskey on your breath?”

He glances down at his feet, scratches the back of his head, and then eyes me. “Maybe.”

“Since when do you drink whiskey at eight in the morning?”

“Well, I guess you wouldn’t know, would you, Nat? You’re not exactly blowing up my phone these days.”

“Fair enough,” I say. By the time we broke up, I already found Matt’s burgeoning party boy persona a little annoying. At first, I’d just assumed that he was being absorbed into the many-headed monstrosity that the football team can be, while forsaking his true self. But when his drinking became more and more regular, I knew that wasn’t it.

“You want some?” Matt says, patting a flask-shaped lump in his pocket.

“A flask?” He nods. “What is this, Atlantic City in the 1920s?”

“Do you want any or not?”

“Hold on, I’m about to make a joke about the little teetotaling town from Footloose.”

“Nat,” he says. “Yes or no.”

“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t want to fall off the stage onto the mob bosses while I’m doing the Charleston.”

He laughs again and shakes my shoulders. “So, what do you think? Are you ready?”

“To debut my flapper dress to a bunch of bootleggers?”

“To get married,” he says.

“Ah.” I look up at the cement-and-faded-redbrick school, the cropped green grass and trees, the columns of dark clouds forming overhead. Thunder booms in the distance, and this secondhand dress is soaking through, growing heavier with rain every second.

And suddenly, it happens again.

I feel my stomach rise as though I’m on a roller coaster. Matt, Megan, Rachel, and all the others, Derek’s truck, the school itself—everything—is gone.

I’m alone in a field of rolling blue-green hills, standing in a cool breath of wind beneath a brewing storm, my hair and dress dripping. Thunder booms again, closer this time, and rain rushes down my eyelashes, blurring my vision. On the hill in front of me, where the school should be, I see a herd of buffalo.

I can hear them eating the grass. It’s a thick, breathy, crunching sound, and puffs of mist expulse around their velvety nostrils. Their great heads swivel back and forth as they eat; their large brown eyes with impossibly long and curled lashes are watching me, though they don’t seem concerned.

And then it ends, as quickly as it started.

My stomach drops back down. The school flickers back into place. The buffalo wink out of existence. Matt’s in front of me again, the corrugated truck bed firm beneath my feet. The sounds of the world rush back in, my classmates hooting and laughing and talking all around me, leaning on their horns and driving Rachel insane as she tries to get everyone moving. “SCREW YOU,” she’s screaming. “Seriously, Tony, screw you!”

“Nat?” Matt says. “It was just a joke. I don’t really think we’re getting married. You know that, right?”

I nod, distracted.

“I mean, unless you want to get married, in which case—”

“Matt,” I warn, immediately alert again.

“Don’t do that, Nat. Don’t say my name like you’re about to deliver crushing news. It was just a joke.”

“I care about you,” I tell him. “You’re a good person.”

“But,” he says flatly.

But I’m still reeling from the fact that you disappeared a second ago.

But I’m too busy trying to figure out what’s happening to me to have this conversation again.

But I’m worried that I started liking you because you made me feel normal, in the most Union sense of the word.

But you can’t stop trying to turn me back into the Natalie you fell in love with, the one who tried desperately to be the quintessential prom queen instead of the girl with two mothers, two fathers, and two nations.

“But I’m moving to Rhode Island, for one thing,” I settle on.

“Why does it have to be Rhode Island?” he says.

“I don’t know. Maybe it just can’t be Kentucky.”

He laughs harshly. “What, you need to make sure there’s nothing else better out there?”

“I’m not going to college to look for a boyfriend, Matt. I’m going to figure out who I am and what I want to do. Why are you allowed to figure those things out, and I’m not?”