A loud mechanical noise sounded in the background.
“Nope. Alana is just in the middle of making smoothies.”
“Frank?”
“Yep.”
That was fast. “Tell her to call me when she’s done.”
“Is that Kate?” I heard Alana ask in the background. “Ask her if she finally caught her fish.”
“Tell her yes,” I said.
“Nice,” Frank said. “Speaking of catching fish—me, Alana, you, and Diego, my boat, this Saturday.”
“Okay.” I sat down on the dock and dipped my feet in the water. The sun was low in the sky and sent a shimmery reflection off the lake and backlit a sailboat in the distance.
“Yeah?” Frank asked.
“Yes.”
“Awesome.”
“As long as you aren’t a punk on the lake.”
“I will try my hardest.”
Friday, at lunch, Diego and I sat on a bench in the commons waiting for Alana. She’d told us she had a surprise.
Diego held my hand, like he had every time he’d seen me for the last two days. It still made me incredibly happy.
“You don’t post a lot of updates online,” Diego was saying. “Why not?”
I shrugged and tried to unwrap a burrito one-handed. Diego laughed but when I tried to take my hand back he wouldn’t let me.
“You’re a brat,” I said.
“Yes, I am.” He brushed a kiss to my knuckles.
“I don’t know,” I said, answering his social media question. “I’m private. You don’t post a lot, either.”
“I know.” He set down his bag of chips and took his phone out of his pocket. “But I think we might need a picture of the two of us together. Since you have so many of you and Hunter.”
I tilted my head his way. “Those pictures are like six months old. Have you been stalking my social media?”
“Yes,” he said unapologetically. “How else was I supposed to see you when you were constantly ditching me?”
“I wouldn’t say constantly.”
“Constantly,” he said. He held his phone out in front of us and pulled me up against his side.
“You know I take the world’s most awkward pictures,” I said.
“You’re adorable.” He kissed my cheek and snapped a picture.
“Awww,” Alana said. “So cute.”
Diego lowered the phone. Alana stood in front of us, with a group of about twenty people behind her.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s my surprise. A listening party.”
“A listening party?” I repeated in shock.
She held up a wireless speaker. “The podcast was uploaded and we’re all going to listen to it together.”
My mouth dropped open. This was definitely a surprise, but not really the good kind.
Alana pointed to the grass in front of the bench and on cue, the group of twenty sat down.
“Did they rehearse that?” Diego mumbled next to me, and I smiled.
“Diego, you are in for a treat,” Alana said. “This is Kate’s best episode yet.”
“I can’t wait,” he said.
My cheeks went hot. I usually hated listening to my own voice but this week would be particularly embarrassing. “Maybe we should listen to this later, when we’re alone,” I said to Diego.
“Or we can listen to it now,” he offered.
So we did. And he heard me stumble through a very unpracticed and halting confession. Then I listened to his voice on the speakers tell all the listeners that he was Looking for Love. Several people in the listening group “awwed” and giggled.
Diego smiled my way when I told Victoria she needed to take over.
“Thank you,” he whispered in my ear. “I know that was all really hard for you to say publicly.”
“I had to.”
He kissed my hand. “I did, too.”
The rest of the day, people called Diego “Looking for Love” in the hallway, or stopped to ask us questions.
“Is this what fame feels like?” he asked.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
We stopped at his locker before heading out to the parking lot. “Hey, can I store my history book in your locker? It’s closer to my class,” I asked, digging the textbook out of my bag.
“Already want to move into my locker?”
I laughed and handed it to him. He shoved it in and dug around his locker for a while, exchanging books and looking through papers.
I wrapped my arm around his waist. “Have I ever told you that you take an inordinately long amount of time at your locker?”
“You’ve timed me?”
“I don’t have to.”
“This coming from the girl who spent ten minutes at her locker the day she hit her head on it.”
“I kept getting interrupted.”
“I’m just saying.”
I took a black marker out of my bag and wrote D+K on the inside of his locker door.
“Cute,” he said. “People are going to think I did that.”
I drew a heart around it. “Now they will.”
He snatched the pen from my hand and beneath my heart wrote Mi amor.
My heart skipped a beat. I may not have remembered a lot of Spanish from class, but I knew what that meant: my love. I wasn’t sure how to respond, though; it’s not like he said it out loud. He didn’t seem to expect a response; he just shut his locker door and took my hand again.
We headed for the parking lot. I could see my car in the distance, Max and Liza waiting for me there.
“Diego?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“I have a weird request.”
“Okay?”
“My brother.”
“Frank told me about the fight at the carnival. Who do you and I need to beat up?”
“No beating up. Maybe just a talking-to will do the trick. I’m going to suggest the next episode of the podcast be for people who have struggled with bullying to call in.”
“Maybe I’ll have to call in that day, then,” Diego said.
“You’ve struggled with bullying?”
“My entire seventh-grade year. Some kids can be mean.”
“They can.”
“But then some can be really nice. Since then I’ve always hoped I could be the latter.”
“I think you’ve succeeded.”
We reached the car and Diego patted Max on the back. “I heard you defended my girlfriend the other night.”
“Who?” Max asked.
Diego held his hand to the side of his mouth and loud-whispered, “Your sister.”
Butterflies took flight in my stomach. Even though I figured as much, it was the first time he’d said the word girlfriend out loud and I liked the sound of it. A lot.
Diego turned to me and wrapped me up in a hug, kissing my cheek several times as I laughed.
“Right?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Ew,” Liza said. “I’m going to call in to the podcast on Wednesday and ask how you politely tell friends that they are acting too cheesy.”
I grinned at her. “And I will say, is there such a thing as too cheesy?”
“Have you ever wakeboarded?” I asked Diego as I climbed onto Frank’s boat from the dock at the marina.
“No,” Diego replied.
“Water-skied?”
“Nope.”