“Be the shoes,” Josie encouraged.

I stared at myself in the mirror. I looked like a whole different person. A person brave enough to go braless. A person open to possibilities. A person in all kinds of trouble.

I looked at all our faces reflected in Josie’s mirror—theirs with delight, and mine with concern.

“I guess it’ll work,” I said, chewing my lip.

If nothing else, it was a hell of a disguise.

* * *

SATURDAY CAME QUICKLY. Too quickly. And not quickly enough.

Diana made me sit at her dressing table while she gave me a makeover. “Just a little,” she kept saying, but I think she used every vial, spray bottle, brush, and tube in every drawer. She plucked my eyebrows. She curled my eyelashes. She dusted me with powders and teased my hair. She frowned and fussed while I sat with my eyes closed, under strict orders not to peek.

When she gave me permission at last to open my eyes, I saw the same me, but different. The eye shadow and lipstick were the biggest shockers. My eyes looked twice their normal size, and my lips were dark red and extra plump.

“It’s like the cartoon version of me,” I said.

She gave me a look. “Thanks,” she said.

The biggest change was my hair, which they’d insisted I leave down and loose—instead of my usual low bun. A bottle of hair spray and thirty minutes of blow-drying and teasing later, it wasn’t just hair. It was a mane. I didn’t even look like myself to myself.

The three of us stared at me in the mirror.

“It is a very different version of you,” Diana concluded.

“Which is better?” I asked.

Diana gave me a quick squeeze. “I’m very fond of the everyday you,” she said, somehow knowing the exact words I was hoping for, “but this is fun, too.”

I waited to put on the dress until the last minute so I wouldn’t wrinkle it. Same with the shoes—to lessen my chances of breaking an ankle.

When the rookie was a few minutes late arriving, I felt like I couldn’t take it.

I pulled out my phone.

“I’m going to cancel,” I said, shaking my head at my mom and Josie, who were keeping watch at the front window. “I can’t do this.”

My hands were cold. Everything felt cold. And hot. Both. At the same time. What was I thinking? We were going to get caught, and I was going to get ridiculed, scoffed at, and then fired, in that order, and my life as I’d known it was going to be over.

“You can run into a burning building, but you can’t spend one evening with a nice guy?”

“That’s different,” I said.

“I agree,” Diana said.

Josie added, “This is more fun.”

“That all depends on how you define ‘fun,’” I said.

It wasn’t a date, but it felt like a date. It was too many opposites. I wanted to go just as badly as I wished I’d never offered. I wanted the rookie to hurry up and get here just as badly as I wanted him to never show up at all. I wanted to wear a little flouncy dress for once in my life, but at the exact same time, I wanted to put on my sports bra and a sweat suit—with hood.

My fingers felt like they’d been refrigerated.

At last, a knock at the door—and I felt a visceral jolt of fear in my body. This felt like the scariest thing I’d ever done. How crazy was that? I’d extricated bodies from car accidents, and had guns pointed at me, and literally watched people take their final breaths—but this was the scariest thing I’d ever done.

I grabbed Diana’s arm. “Maybe I should wear my dress uniform.”

“Your uniform?”

I nodded. A blazer and some shoulder pads suddenly seemed very appealing.

My heart was glugging like a motor. Without deciding to, I half-hid behind one of the French doors.

But Josie was opening the door, and then Diana was joining in, all normal, as if people opened doors for visitors all the time.

Diana smiled and said, “Hello, rookie. You’re late.”

“I was early,” he said, his voice all apology, “but then I saw a kid wipe out on his bicycle, and I stopped to help.”

Of course he did.

Josie and Diana looked at each other, like, Adorable.

He’d gotten a haircut since that morning—shorter in back, but still longer in front. He wore a perfectly tailored dark gray suit and a baby blue tie.

He looked unfairly handsome.

And so it was happening. Whatever choices I’d made were playing themselves out. There was nothing left to do but step out and meet him.

Just as I did, he looked up and saw me.

Here was something I noticed: He dropped his smile for a second right then. It was like he forgot everything—what he was saying, what he was doing. He held very still.

Did I look that different? I wondered. Was I that shocking?

In my whole life, nobody had ever looked at me that way.

I guess I could have come up with some self-deprecating explanation for the shock of his expression: food in my teeth, a booger, a sudden nosebleed … But I didn’t.

I knew that stare. I knew it because I recognized it.

It was exactly the way I was staring at him.

Here’s something else I noticed: All my naked agony of anticipation? At the sight of him, it melted away. All my nervousness—gone. His presence in the room made everything okay.

Maybe I was doomed to regret everything later. But I couldn’t regret anything right now.

I took a step closer.

So did he—forgetting my mom and Josie altogether. “You clean up good.”

“Back atcha,” I said.

“Thanks for saving me tonight,” he said.

“Just don’t tell anybody.”

His smile faded again then, and he made a dead-serious X over his heart as he said, “Hope to die.”

He took a few steps closer, like we were the only people in the room. Then he took my hand to lead me to the door.

“I have to tell you something, rookie,” I said.

“What?”

“I cannot walk in these shoes.”

“That’s fine,” he said, holding out his arm. “I’ll help you.”

“And I feel totally naked in this dress.”

He stepped back like he was checking. “You’re definitely not naked. That, I would notice.”

“And I know this is not a date, but it kind of feels like a date, and I need you to know I’ve never been on a date before.”

He tilted his head. “Never?”

“Never.”

“This is your first date?”

“It’s not a date.”

“But if it were—it would be?”

I nodded. “If it were, it would be.”

I think we said good-bye to my mom and Josie, but I don’t really remember.

All I remember is the feel of his arm around my waist, and how thin that silky fabric was, and how I was aware of everything: the wind blowing my hair, the late-afternoon sun on my collarbones, the feel of each unsteady step. Every inch of my skin felt awake, every breath I took seemed to swirl in my chest, and every time I dared to glance over at the rookie, my whole body tingled.

Not good—and too good, all at the same time.

He led me to his truck and opened the door for me.