My boyfriend, Fom, was waiting for us when we got to the school. I smiled when I saw him standing there as we pulled up into our usual spot. When I spotted Evan standing next to him, though, I just glared at the two of them. Evan was Fom's best friend, and Kenya's ex. They broke up barely a week ago. I still hadn't gotten the full explanation for what happened between them, but Evan had wisely stayed away for most of that time. Whatever happened, I knew it was his fault.

"Now, now," Fom said. His hands were in the air defensively, trying to hold off my righteous fury as I stormed out of the car towards them. "It's graduation day. Evan is shipping out tomorrow. Let's just celebrate the occasion like everyone else, alright?"

"Shipping out?" I asked. That drained some of my anger, though not all of it. "Seriously? You enlisted? You?"

"What can I say," Evan said, shrugging. "I'm not getting stuck on this mudball for the rest of my life. You two will be in the Pilgrims. Fom has that scholarship on New Krypton. I wasn't going to be left behind."

"We already left you behind," I said.

"Dor, it's fine," Kenya said. "He can hang out with us if he wants. It's fine."

"See?" Evan said. He pointed towards Kenya, her usual placation his supposed evidence that he wasn't a piece of dung. "Besides, I'm here to help. I heard about Jenny cutting out."

"Yes, but did you hear why?" Fom asked. He looked between the three of us, looking like he ate the canary.

"Yes, Fom, we all know," I said. I was usually the last to hear about such rumors, at least in our little group. Fom was instantly deflated by my statement.

"It's not that big of a deal," Evan said. "Right, Kenya?"

"Do not address her directly," I said. I threw my hands up into the air between the two of them, cutting off his view of her. "Fine, if you guys are going to help then come along. I won't stop you. But I expect the two of you to work."

"Of course," Evan said.

"Well, not all the time at least," Fom said. He smiled at me mischievously, no doubt giving me eyes behind his sunglasses.

"Come on," I said. "Let's all get out of the Keplight so we can actually see each other."

Our school was a low, squat, huge, metal structure stuck out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of town. It was one of the original buildings that was set up on the planet, about three hundred years earlier. At one point, it was the entirety of the colony. That was before people started migrating there in droves. As backwater as the planet was, at least there was a decent infrastructure, decent jobs. Well, if you actually consider factory work decent. Some of the planets out there were worse off than New Kansas, but not by much.

The front entrance opened up into the main lobby. As soon as the doors behind us fell closed, we were able to take off our sunglasses and see around us. The lobby hadn't been set up at all. This was where the graduates and guests were supposed to be arriving for the party, right after the ceremony. The party itself was in the gym, just to our left. I expected to have the tickets counter set up at least. But the lobby was just as vacant as it was the day before, when we were there for our last finals.

"Okay, Evan," I said, figuring to get rid of the albatross first. "You're in here. Find a table for the ticket counter. The lock box should be in the student council room. You do know where that is, right?"

"Yea," Evan said. "I think I've been there a few times over the years." He eyed Kenya with a smirk on his face. I just rolled my eyes as I pulled Kenya and Fom into the gym itself.

The gym was worse. Much worse. The gym was big enough to run two regulation length basketball games next to each other, with a healthy crowd for each. It was still set up for the gym finals. There were three racks of volleyballs, plus the nets themselves, still set out in the middle of the room. I assigned Fom to the nets and Kenya to the balls as I looked towards the storage closet for the supplies that were supposed to be in there. Streamers and party balloons weren't easy to come by on the planet. Even paper mache was practically unheard of. Most years, we had to recycle the decorations from one party to the next. You'd be surprised how many under the sea themes there really are.

But this year, the student council had splurged on the decorations for the graduation party. We got a decoration projector that was disguised as a disco ball. It was dirt cheap, too, as it was used, and disco was going out of style again on New Hyphestus. Shipping wasn't too bad either, as New Hyphestus was one of our usual trading partners and only two sectors over from us. Still, the projector was supposed to arrive just two days before the party and many of us were worried it would be delayed.

And, when I saw that it wasn't in the storage closet, I spent much of the next twenty millies panicking as I tried to find it.

"Don't worry about it," Kenya called to me. She and Fom were done making the gym look more like an open, empty room and less like a smelly, disgusting gym. "The old decorations are still in here anyway. We can just hang those up."

"Which will take the rest of this diddy and then some," Fom said. "We'd better get started."

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"I cannot believe Jenny could screw us like this," I said. "Whose bright idea was it to run for student government anyway?"

"Yours," Kenya said. "And it wasn't a stupid idea. That stuff looks great on college applications. And Pilgrim applications. Without this, we wouldn't have a chance at getting in. Remember?"

"Yea, yea, yea," I said.

"Hey, look what I found," Evan called out. He was holding the projector in one hand, and a smile in the other. "It was tucked away in the student council room."

"And you waited till now to bring it here?" I asked. I pulled it from him before shooing him back to the lobby. "Out with you."

"Think it works on mana?" Kenya asked.

Kenya and Fom came over next to me as I looked around at it, trying to figure it out. The entire surface was made up of mirrors, reflecting the lights of the gym back at me and all around the room. There wasn't a hook to hang it up, which suggested that it hovered on its own. Which normally meant mana. We didn't have a budget for mana.

"What a waste," Fom said, dejectedly.

"Maybe, maybe not," I said.

Picking a spot at random, I placed my implant against it. My usual HUD popped up on the mirrors, blocking off the reflective surface. After a moment, a new link showed up to the side for the control interface for the projector. I quickly tapped on that, which wasn't easy while still holding the thing. When it started to slip out of my hands, Fom grabbed it and held it steady.

There weren't many options in the decorations, and most of them were marked as custom. They must have been left over from the old user. I tapped one of them at random and the projector activated. It quickly flew out of Fom's hands, soaring up to hover near the ceiling. Once in place, it projected the decorations all around the room. With the lights on, it was hard to see some of them, and there was some misalignment in the corners. Other than that, it looked pretty good. Silver banners stretched across the walls. Holographic balloons hovered in the air. The disco ball itself... discoed. All in all, I'd say it was worth the expense.

As long as it didn't die on us in the middle of the party.

"Still charged at least," I said. "If it is magic, the juniors can deal with it next year. It's not our problem after tonight."

"Well, it's hovering," Fom said. "That means its either magic or Delnadian tech."

"Whatever," I said. "Decorations are done. If Evan has the ticket counter set up, we should be good."

"What about food?" Kenya asked. "Refreshments?"

"We're not setting those up yet, are we?" Fom asked. "They'll go stale."

"That's not our department. We're done here, folks. Time to get ready for the graduation."

"Woot," came a call from outside the gym. That was such an Evan thing to do. I couldn't help but smile.

"See?" Fom said. He pulled me over towards the far wall so we could be out of earshot of Kenya as she headed off to the changing room. "He's not that bad, is he?"

"He hurt my friend," I said.

"That's not how he tells it. And Kenya doesn't seem to have any hard feelings about the whole thing. What has she told you, exactly?"

"Nothing," I said. "Which is totally not like her. That's how I know it's bad. If it was just them not liking each other. Hell, if it was that they'd never see each other after tonight. That I'd understand. She knows that. What else is there besides that he did something so bad that she's too nice to say anything about it? I'm just hoping she tells me before it eats her up inside. Maybe while we're out exploring the universe, we can discuss how horrible our high school boyfriends really were."

"Hey," he said. Clearly, he was offended, despite the fact that he knew that I was teasing. "I wasn't that bad, was I? If we weren't heading off to different parts of the galaxy, we'd still be together, right? At least for the summer?"

"Well, sure," I said. "I mean, I'm not the kind of girl to marry my high school sweetheart. But, yea, I could see us still being together. If we were born on Earth or Grand Prigas or somewhere actually livable. Hell, I've heard Mars isn't so bad these days."

"What about Pliant?" Fom asked.

"Pfft, sports world? Oh, no. If we grew up on sports world, we never would have dated. You'd be on the team and too high and mighty for little old me."

"I was on the team. I have a sports scholarship."

"Oh, you know what I mean. It's different here. It's different in most places. If you want to go off to Pliant, you could probably make a killing there."

"No, I'm not Pliant talent. I just want to make it in college and get an actual education. Like you and Kenya will get in the Pilgrims. Like Evan might get in the fleet, if he doesn't get stuck in infantry. Getting offworld is easy enough these days. It's not ending up somewhere just as bad, or worse, that's the real trick."

He eyed the doors to the changing room behind me for a moment before kissing me, gently, on the lips. Fom was never one for PDA, but with no one else in the room he might have taken me right there. We had been intimate enough over the years that we had been together. But, with us never seeing each other after tonight, we agreed to break up amicably. The party would be our one last hurrah before heading off.

"God, you can still take my breath away," I said, once he was done kissing me. "I will miss that. I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you, too," he said. "It's not too late, you know. You could still apply for the spring semester at NKU."

"And give up on the Pilgrims? Never. Not on your life. I've been training for years for this. I didn't take AP Latin, AP French, AP Irish, and AP Farsi for nothing."

"Yea, those dead language courses are really going to come in handy when learning languages no one has ever heard before," Fom said. It was his usual joke about my coursework.

"It's not the languages that matter; it's that I learned them. Besides, they were the closest thing this craphole had to proper linguist training. The Pilgrims will have something much better, and I couldn't afford to be behind when I got there. Anyway, we'd both better get ready. People are going to start showing up in about twenty millies, and the ceremony is starting like ten millies later."

"The ceremony is starting in thirty millies, but people should be showing up now. You'd better get used to arriving on time for things. Even the Pilgrims are picky about tardiness."

"Oh, tardiness smardiness," I said, waving off his concern as I headed over towards the changing rooms.

"You'd better get ready," Kenya said, as I came inside. She was just getting out of the steam shower, her towel hastily wrapped around her hair. The rest of her was bare to the world. Kenya was never one to worry about nakedness. Considering where we were heading, that was a good thing. There wasn't much in the way of privacy on spaceships. As she walked over to her usual locker, she gave an added swing to her hips, emphasizing her walk in what would probably be a seductive manner, if one was into that sort of thing.

"Yea, yea," I said, nodding in her direction. I waited until she was hidden behind her locker door before stripping and jumping into the shower myself. While I knew that there wasn't much privacy on spaceships, I wasn't there yet. I could get used to it once I was out among the stars.

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