A Prom to Remember

by Sandy Hall

  “What size do you wear?” Madison asked.

  Lizzie hesitated. She hated talking about stuff like this. It was why she avoided shopping with friends, even people she trusted like Madison.

  “I swear I’m not going to put it on blast to the whole school or something. But it’ll help when we’re trying to find dresses together.”

  Lizzie felt a little wave of relief. “Right. Um, a 16 or an 18, depending on the cut. And I can’t really wear junior’s sizes. They don’t exactly fit my stomach. Or my arms.” She blushed but Madison was still all business.

  “All right, we’ve got this under control,” Madison said. “For the record, I’m an 8 or a 10 if you see anything good for me.”

  Instead of veering toward the junior’s section in Macy’s, they took the elevator upstairs. But Madison didn’t go to the back of the store to the plus sizes, and instead went toward the formal dresses.

  “Do you really think they’ll have my size over here?” Lizzie asked.

  “It’s worth trying, right?”

  They split up and started searching. Every dress that Lizzie looked at was way too expensive, and every dress that Madison held up for her had the same exact problem.

  And that’s when she saw it. The promised land.

  Also known as the clearance rack.

  She walked over and found a section of size 16 dresses; most of them were still too expensive, but one of them was thirty-five dollars. It wasn’t exactly what she wanted. It was red and short and might not look great on her. But the price was right so she might as well try it on.

  She showed it to Madison.

  “That’s not exactly what I would have picked out for you, but I like it.”

  Lizzie was shocked by how much she liked it. It gave her a waist and a little bit of cleavage and actually made her feel slim and feminine.

  When it was time to check out, Madison had picked up a white sparkly jumpsuit and she offered to put Lizzie’s dress on her card.

  “I get points and you get an extra fifteen percent off.”

  It was hard to say no to.

  And it left her with more than enough money for dinner at the food court.

  They just avoided the Hot Potato stand. Both of them were sick of potatoes.

  Paisley

  Paisley had been tiptoeing around the school for a few days after Henry had rejected Amelia, not because she was afraid of Amelia, but because she had zero interest in confrontation.

  Amelia seemed like she’d be a hair puller if a fight ever got physical and Paisley wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  But all that came to an end when Amelia stormed into the second-floor bathroom while Paisley was washing her hands. She barely even had time to react, or dry her hands, when Amelia was standing next to her, staring her down in the mirror.

  “Hi,” Paisley said brightly, spending much too long drying her hands in an attempt to mask the fact that they were shaking.

  Confrontation was seriously the worst.

  Amelia put her hands on her hips.

  “Please don’t beat me up,” Paisley said. Turned out that in the face of going one-on-one with Amelia Vaughn, Paisley became a whimpering mess.

  Amelia rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to beat you up.”

  “Oh good, that’s a relief.” Paisley skirted around Amelia in the direction of the door. “I’m just gonna head out in that case. You know, things to do, people to see.”

  “No, I want to talk to you.”

  “My mother is dating a cop!” Paisley yelled. That was a lie.

  “I’m seriously not going to do anything to you.”

  “Fine. So, what’s up?” Paisley asked, remaining close to the door for a quick getaway if necessary. “I’m not going to apologize for going to the prom with Henry. He’s my best friend. It’s how things go sometimes.”

  Now Amelia actually looked kind of sad. Maybe Paisley had been reading her all wrong.

  Amelia’s shoulders dropped and she crossed her arms. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to go to the prom with me.” She held up her hand. “And before you go defending him, you can’t tell me that this wasn’t what the whole thing was about.”

  “I thought you were going with your boyfriend anyway?” Paisley asked.

  “Yeah, I talked him into it. But it would have been more fun to go with someone still in high school. Drew is just going to complain the whole time. I don’t know. It’s not as much fun with him as it used to be. Also we broke up.”

  “Oh. Well, Drew must still be pretty into you if he agreed to go to the prom with you even though you broke up.”

  Amelia shrugged half-heartedly.

  “Listen, Henry is kind of a weird dude,” Paisley said, choosing her words carefully. “He’s awesome. And I love him. But I think he feels like he got pushed into the spotlight this year and keeps getting more attention than he really wants or likes to have.”

  “He’s a really good pitcher,” Amelia said. “Of course people took notice.”

  Paisley smiled and nodded, because it was nice that Henry was getting acknowledged for his talents.

  “I was so focused on wanting to be prom queen and on finding a king, you know, to be queen with, I kind of didn’t realize he wasn’t into me?”

  “I think there are plenty of guys who are very into you, and Henry doesn’t hate you or anything like that.”

  “Then why won’t he go to the prom with me?”

  This conversation was hitting rough terrain, and Paisley was not sure she’d be able to handle it if Amelia started to cry. “Henry likes to live under the radar, and you live over the radar.”

  “But why did he say yes in the first place?”

  “I feel kind of bad and weird talking to you about him like this,” Paisley said, scrunching up her nose.

  “I know. I get it. I’m kind of embarrassed. It sucks, getting rejected.”

  “Yeah, totally,” Paisley agreed, even though she had done more than her fair share of rejecting recently. “And I guess Henry said yes because he’s not very good at saying no.”

  “I guess I don’t want to go with someone who doesn’t want to go with me anyway.”

  Paisley nodded. “I’m not gonna lie, Amelia. This conversation went in a completely different direction than I ever would have expected.”

  Amelia’s expression changed quickly from sad to her usual resting bitch face. It was like the bathroom had turned into a freezer. She stuck her finger in Paisley’s face.

  “Don’t you dare ever tell anyone about this conversation. I will deny the whole thing, and I will make your life miserable.”

  Paisley backed up a step. She was going to say something snarky about how unless Amelia planned to stalk her postgraduation, she wasn’t going to have a lot of luck ruining Paisley’s life. But she held her tongue. Mostly because she was a little scared again.

  “Okay,” Paisley squeaked out.

  “And never, ever mention this to Henry. I have a reputation to uphold, and he doesn’t need to know about any of this. For once in your life follow the girl code.”

  With that, Amelia tossed her hair over her shoulder and stalked out of the bathroom.

  Paisley looked at her refection in the mirror quizzically. “Did she just come in here to talk to me?”

  She shrugged at herself.

  “At least the conversation ended in a more expected way than it began,” she said.

  Paisley decided to stop talking to herself and go back to physics.

  She had never been so surprised and then disappointed over the span of a single conversation.

  Chapter 20

  Jacinta

  Jacinta wondered about the futility of doing homework at this point in her senior year. Would it really make a difference, in the scheme of things, if she just skipped this reader reaction paper for the short story they read in English class? Would Ms. Huang actually fail her?

  Unlikely.

  On the other hand, it could af
fect her overall grade and might lower it enough that she wouldn’t be exempt from the final. And she really wanted to be exempt from that final. She didn’t need to waste multiple hours taking an essay exam about all the books they’d read throughout the year. That sounded painful, especially when the alternative was to write the reaction paper that was sitting in front of her.

  As she jotted down notes and tried to get her thoughts in order, her phone rang.

  Jacinta was confused.

  She hadn’t heard her phone ring in a long time, not since she had finally convinced her mom to start texting her last year.

  She looked at the phone, and the screen told her that Emma Lim was calling.

  Why on earth would Emma be calling on a Thursday night?

  Jacinta answered. “Hello?” She sounded like a cartoon bear.

  Did her voice always sound so weird when she answered the phone, or had she legitimately forgotten how to do this?

  “Hey!” Emma said.

  “Hi,” Jacinta said.

  “I know we talked the other day, and I hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Ooooo-kay,” Jacinta said.

  “So, as it turns out, my parents were planning to surprise me with a plane ticket to New Jersey next weekend. When I told them about how Landon’s friend was going to the prom with him they finally told me that they had this plane ticket. And I’m going to be staying with my cousins or whatever. And it’s like all worked out.”

  “So, you’re coming next weekend?”

  “Yeah, it’s so weird how late your prom is. I’ll already be done with school by then. But I didn’t think I’d really have the money for this trip. Then like I said, my parents wanted to surprise me. Surprise!”

  “So, I’m not going to the prom with Landon?” Jacinta asked, trying her best to keep up, but there was a lot of information coming from Emma.

  “I mean, of course you should still go. But I’m going to be surprising him. So I was hoping you could help me with that. And we can all go as a big group. Won’t that be so much fun? Landon, me, Kelsey, Kelsey’s boyfriend whose name I can’t remember, and you!”

  That honestly sounded like torture to Jacinta. Hooray for being the fifth wheel. This was the opposite of what she wanted.

  “I need you to make sure that there’s a ticket for me.”

  Jacinta blinked slowly and shook her head.

  “What were you going to do about a ticket if your parents had gone through with the surprise?”

  “Oh, um, I don’t know,” Emma said offhandedly. “Are they a lot of money or something? I don’t really understand these northern proms.”

  “Can you hang on a second?” Jacinta asked.

  She didn’t wait for Emma to answer. Instead she grabbed a pillow and screamed into it for ten seconds. She was pretty sure she knew exactly what was going on. Emma had decided that she didn’t want Landon to go to the prom with another girl, so she begged and pleaded with her parents to let her come for the weekend.

  That was seriously the only explanation.

  Jacinta picked her phone back up. “Sorry about that. So, here’s the thing. This northern prom is at a hotel and it costs a hundred dollars a ticket.” Before Emma could complain about the price, she chattered on. “And it would have been even more since we’re having it at a fancy hotel, but our class is really good at fund-raising.”

  “Oh, ours was in our school gym, so it wasn’t—”

  Jacinta cut her off. “So I’m going to have to go talk to the head of the prom committee and find out if there are any tickets left. Okay?”

  “Sure, that’s so nice of you. I’ll PayPal you the money.”

  Jacinta had kind of been hoping that part would deter Emma a little bit, but apparently not.

  Jacinta was filled with the kind of rage that was usually reserved for slow walkers and people who texted during movies.

  And Jacinta knew that it was actually really sweet of Emma to want to do this, but Jacinta wasn’t sure why she needed to be involved. It all felt kind of passive aggressive.

  “Do you want my e-mail address so you can PayPal me?” Jacinta asked after realizing that Emma had been quiet for an awfully long time.

  “Yeah, that’d be so great. Thank you so much. I know you can figure this all out for me. I really appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, cool, you’re welcome,” Jacinta said. Then she spelled out her e-mail address.

  “I really can’t wait to see Landon’s face when I show up on prom night. I’m going to need all the information, like where you all are taking pictures and things like that. What kind of dress do you have? I guess I’ll wear the dress I wore to my prom.”

  Jacinta was 99.9 percent sure that she was supposed to ask about Emma’s dress and offer details about her own, but she couldn’t handle this conversation even one more second.

  “Well, that’s good,” Jacinta said. “I really should go, though. I still have homework to do for tomorrow.”

  “That’s so weird! Graduation is on Tuesday for me.”

  “That’s great,” Jacinta said. “Bye.”

  She hung up without waiting for Emma’s goodbye.

  She lay back down on her bed and decided to scream a little more. It felt so good the first time around. Might as well keep it up.

  She wasn’t sure how she got involved in stuff like this, but it solidified the fact that she would never be anything but a background character in her own life. She needed to learn to take a stand. And she thought she had. She thought she was getting better.

  But how do you tell someone else’s girlfriend not to go to the prom with them? Jacinta didn’t have that kind of moxie, and it really was not her place to say things like that.

  At least now she wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of whether or not to slow dance with Landon. And if she was being absolutely honest with herself, she hadn’t been really that excited about going with him anyway.

  She sucked in a deep breath and went back to her desk.

  Might as well keep working on her reaction paper. Though being exempt from the English exam didn’t even feel like a big deal anymore.

  Cora

  Cora was just closing up shop in the student government office on Friday during lunch. She didn’t want to have to stop back here after school, considering it was a long weekend and all. But she needed to make sure all the prom money was safe and sound. She gave a quick count and locked the safe.

  When she turned around, Jacinta was standing at the door.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Cora asked.

  “Well, I was wondering if we could still buy prom tickets.”

  Cora’s eyes narrowed. “I mean, I guess. I think today is the last day to make changes. It’s going to take some rearranging of tables, I think. And don’t you already have a ticket?”

  Jacinta nodded and then dove into the story of how Landon’s long-distance girlfriend conveniently decided that she wanted to go to the prom with Landon after Jacinta had already made all the plans to go with him as friends.

  No matter how stressed out Cora was, and at this point in the school year she was pretty stressed out, she couldn’t make Jacinta feel worse, no matter how much she wanted to guilt her.

  Between wanting to break up with Jamie, the prom coming up, and finals looming, Cora had had it with high school. But Jacinta was obviously really sad about this turn of events, so Cora put on her cheerful-acquaintance hat and did her best to deflect.

  “Well, that bites. Are you sure you want me to get her a ticket?” she asked, hoping maybe Jacinta would say no.

  Jacinta rolled her eyes. “It does bite, right? I’m not making this up or being sensitive? Like this is all so sudden. She seemed totally normal about the idea. She lives out of state. I live here. Landon and I are friends. Why would she change her mind at the last second? It’s just so convenient that her parents bought her a surprise ticket.”

  “It does seem really con
venient,” Cora agreed.

  Jacinta nodded sadly.

  “Are you okay?” Cora asked.

  And that was it, that was all it took for Jacinta to start crying. Not big, dramatic sobs, but her eyes filled with tears and then spilled over. Cora understood.

  “I feel like I hold everything back, like all my opinions, so that I never hurt anyone’s feelings and yet I still get shit on?”

  Cora nodded. That wasn’t exactly what her life was like, but it felt like a shade of her own issues if not her exact issues.

  “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have laid this all on you. I’m so sad and everything feels so weird lately? For months now.” Jacinta sniffled.

  Cora nodded again. “I think a lot of us have been feeling that. It must be a senior year thing.”

  “And I didn’t even want to go with Landon, but I can’t exactly explain that to anyone, you know? Like I don’t want to hurt his feelings, and I don’t even feel like I can say it to Kelsey because she dated him, and I’m sure she thinks he would make a great prom date. So I’m left with all these thoughts and nowhere to put them. And now I’m here, telling you. I am so sorry.” Jacinta wiped her eyes and sniffled a few more times before Cora could locate the box of tissues and hand them to her.

  Cora made comforting noises, unsure about what to say.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about?” Jacinta asked. “Misery loves company.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Of course, you just listened to me.”

  For some reason, Jacinta’s earnest inquiry felt like a dam breaking somewhere inside Cora, like she couldn’t hold back for even one more minute.

  She shook her head, because if she spoke, she would definitely start to cry.

  “Well, just know that the offer stands.”

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Cora said, tears welling up in her eyes. “And once I start I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop.”

  “I’ve got time. Ms. Huang has a substitute today, so I’m sure we won’t miss much if we’re late.”

  “I want to break up with Jamie,” Cora blurted out, and then the floodgates really opened. She was crying so hard she couldn’t even make any sound.

  Jacinta came over to her and wrapped her in a warm hug. Cora melted into her, and for a second they both just sniffled.