Prom Date

by Diane Hoh

  “No thanks. I’m going to my locker. I forgot my physics book and I need to study tonight.” Then she looked at Margaret, her gaze level. “Why don’t you see if Mitch will go with you? I’m sure he’d love to.”

  Oh, Caroline, Margaret thought, don’t be like that. But she said nothing. The truth was, at that moment she would rather be sitting outside with Mitch. He’d be better company than Caroline in the mood she was in.

  Everyone took advantage of the break. There were quick trips to lockers, visits to the rest rooms, treks in search of a drinking fountain or vending machine. Mitch, Lucas, David, and two other boys on the committee went outside to toss a ball around.

  Margaret went outside, too. The sun was warm, comforting, the air fresh. She hadn’t slept very well the night before and her knee was aching. When she sat down on one of the wide, stone steps and leaned back against a fat white pillar, she closed her eyes and dozed off.

  She was snapped back to reality by the sound of Jeannine’s voice from inside the gym.

  “Hey, where is everybody? We’re going to be here all night if we don’t get back to work.”

  Margaret roused herself, shook her head, stretched, and called out to the ball players, who had moved out of sight in search of a grassy stretch of lawn.

  But when they all moved back inside the gym, only Jeannine was standing at the table littered with decorating supplies.

  Lucas looked indignant, asking Margaret accusingly, “How come you made us come back inside when no one else is here?”

  “Oh, thanks a lot!” Jeannine sent Lucas an insulted look.

  “You know what I mean. Kiki’s not here with the money. I’m going back outside. Call me when she gets here.”

  But before they could turn around and leave the gym again, Beth and Liza, then Caroline, entered the big room. Lacey arrived a few seconds later, her arms full of books. “So, let’s get started,” Jeannine said impatiently, plopping her skinny frame into a chair. She glanced up at Beth. “What are we supposed to do next?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m clueless. We have to wait until Kiki gets back. She’ll give Caroline the candle money, Caroline will go to the mall, and while she’s gone, we’ll do whatever Kiki has on her list. But first, we need her. I think we should just wait.”

  So everyone sat in beige metal folding chairs around the long, narrow, metal table in the warm, sunlit gym and waited for Kiki.

  But Kiki didn’t return.

  Chapter 20

  KIKI PAPPAS HURRIED ALONG the scuffed hardwood floor that now, in late May, no longer smelled of fresh varnish, as it had in September. She hated that smell. It reminded her each fall that an entire new year of school was beginning, another nine long months of long days striving to Get It Right.

  Kiki chewed on her lower lip. So many things to remember when it came to getting it right. Looking Good, that came first, of course. That was never enough, though. After that came Good Grades and then Talent and if you managed all of it properly, you became Popular, which was the goal all along, right?

  It was all very hard work and she had no reason to believe it would get any easier in college. Might even be harder. There’d be more competition, for one thing.

  She didn’t have to worry about competition when it came to dating. That was always a comforting thought. She had David. He really loved her. And they were going to the same Ivy League school. One of the best, of course. Liza and Beth would be there, too, because like most best friends, they had made a pact years and years ago that they wouldn’t be separated. Stephanie had been part of the pact. College wouldn’t be the same without her.

  Kiki rounded a corner in the hallway, thinking, but first, before college, there’s the prom. The best night of the year. She loved proms. She’d gone to every single one in high school.

  And Mitch had asked that girl Margaret, who had almost died Friday night. A horrible, terrible thing, almost as bad as Stephanie dying. Scary stuff. Very scary stuff.

  But Mitch and Margaret Dunne? What was that all about? Trying to make Liza jealous? But Liza wasn’t jealous. Why should she be? She was going with a college guy. It was Kiki’s opinion that Liza had outgrown high school guys a long time ago. She was just too clever and sophisticated for most of them. In truth, she probably scared them half to death. Liza would sparkle in college. She belonged there. Stephanie would have, too, only …

  Tears stung Kiki’s eyes. She and Stephanie had argued. Often. But they’d never stopped being best friends. Losing Steph was like having an arm or a leg removed. She would never get used to her not being there.

  Kiki rounded another corner, this one leading to the fourth floor hallway outside Mrs. Thompson’s room. Taking Stephanie’s place as chairperson of the prom committee was definitely a feather in her cap. The prom was a very big deal. But in all honesty, she would rather have Stephanie back. No one would believe that, but it was true. It was absolutely, painfully true.

  Stepping carefully, Kiki moved to Mrs. Thompson’s classroom, unlocked the door, and went inside. She knew exactly which desk drawer held the metal box containing the prom funds. When it was sitting on top of the desk, she bent to relock the drawer, and just then heard a soft, padding sound behind her. She smiled. David. He had decided it wasn’t safe for her to be running around up here all alone, after all, and he’d followed to make sure she was all right.

  But the smile was short-lived. Because in the next second, before she had a chance to turn around or say, “David?” a hand reached around from behind her, lifted the box, grasped the metal handle, and slammed the heavy metal box into Kiki’s face so hard, the handle broke and the box fell to the floor. Kiki, lifted off her feet by the force of the blow, sailed backwards ten feet before collapsing on the floor, blood pouring from her shattered nose and a deep gash on her upper lip.

  Hands reached down, snatched up the box, lifted it overhead and would have brought it down once again on the fallen girl’s skull. But voices sounding in the distance interrupted the motion.

  “Good enough,” a voice said over Kiki’s head. Hands lowered the box. “You won’t be taking that face to the prom. Sorry about this, Katherine, but you have something I need. A prom date.”

  The box containing the prom funds left the room in the hands of Kiki’s attacker.

  On the classroom floor, Kiki Pappas continued to lie, bloody and silent, on the wood floor that no longer smelled of varnish.

  Chapter 21

  “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” LACEY said crankily. “We are wasting so much time. I have better things to do than sit here waiting for Kiki forever.” She smiled coyly at David. “I’ll go with you if you want to see what’s taking her so long.”

  Margaret rolled her eyes and said, “Maybe she couldn’t get the door open. Or the drawer where Mrs. Thompson was keeping the money. Lacey’s right. We should go see what’s up.” Because, she thought with a sudden skip in her pulse, the last time someone was missing …

  She refused to finish the thought. Kiki wasn’t missing. She just hadn’t come back into the gym yet.

  But then Beth stood up and said quietly, “I don’t like this. I have a funny feeling.”

  Kiki’s boyfriend, David, stared at her. “What? What?”

  “I don’t know.” Beth’s fair-skinned face went whiter. “I just have this feeling.” She moved away from the table. “Can we please go upstairs and get Kiki?”

  “She’s right,” Liza said, her voice strained. “She’s been gone too long.”

  “Why not?” Mitch agreed, his voice light and casual. Margaret was sure that he was making an effort to ease the sudden, eerie tension that Beth’s remarks had created. “It’s better than sitting around here growing cobwebs.”

  “We could still be playing ball,” Lucas complained, but his mouth looked tense and he stood up, too.

  No one else uttered a word as everyone in the gym headed for the stairs.

  More than once on the way up, negotiating the stairs with difficulty because of h
er knee, Margaret felt Liza’s and Beth’s eyes scrutinizing her, as if they were trying to figure out what Mitch saw in her.

  Big deal, Margaret told herself. I’m not going with them. The truth was, it still hadn’t sunk in that she was going to the prom. All she’d been thinking about was how lucky she was to be alive. But she was going, and with Mitch McGill. Shouldn’t she be shouting it from the roof of the school?

  It was hard to shout joy from the rooftops when someone had just died and she herself had almost done the same. And now Kiki wasn’t where she should have been.

  The bump on Margaret’s head began to throb again.

  What they saw as they turned the final corner into Mrs. Thompson’s classroom was two maintenance men in gray overalls bending over a limp body in a peach silk blouse and gray silk trousers. Even from the end of the hall they could see vivid red around her. Red that shouldn’t have been there. Red spilling down over her face into a liquid pool beneath her head.

  “Oh, oh, no,” Beth breathed. “I knew it, I knew it!” No one else uttered a sound.

  One of the two men was just leaving to summon help. As he passed the group, he told them quickly, “It’s not as bad as it looks. Don’t let all that blood scare you.” Then he hurried off to find a telephone.

  Kiki had just begun to stir when they arrived at her side. What they saw was not a pretty sight.

  Everyone standing around her in a semicircle sucked in their breath when they saw the damage. David was the first to speak. “Oh, man,” he groaned in a low, stunned voice, “look at her face!” He fell to his knees at Kiki’s side.

  “What happened to her?” Beth asked, her voice trembling as she, too, knelt beside Kiki. “Did she fall?”

  Kiki opened her eyes. Both were already swelling and beginning to turn purple. Blood oozed from the nasty cut on her upper lip. But the worst damage had been done to her nose. Her perfect nose, broken now, a lumpy, swollen mass of cartilage and bones, still bleeding profusely. The eyes closed again, possibly because it hurt to keep them open.

  “Doesn’t look to me like she just fell,” the maintenance man said. “Looks to me like she got clobbered, with something pretty darn heavy. George, he’s not just calling an ambulance. Calling the police, too.”

  “Where’s the money?” Caroline asked sharply. “I don’t see any cash box or envelope around here anywhere.”

  The man at Kiki’s side glanced up. “Money? What money?”

  Lacey waved toward the desk. “She came up here to get our prom money. But I don’t see it here anywhere. I hate to be crass, but the prom isn’t going to be canceled just because Kiki smashed her face in, so there are still things to do. The key is still in the drawer. Maybe she didn’t have time to take the box out. I’ll go look.” She did, and when she turned around again, her expression was grim. “Not here. She was hit after she took the box out.” She returned to the group. “We need to know where that money is. Before they cart her off to the hospital.”

  “That is crass,” Liza snapped. No one else said anything.

  Caroline and Lucas checked the hallway for any sign of a metal cash box or an envelope. They found neither.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Beth cried when the pair returned to the group empty-handed. “We’ll find that stuff later. Where is that ambulance? The bleeding hasn’t stopped. She could die …”

  Kiki’s eyes opened again. “What’s the matter?” she murmured through swollen lips. “What’s wrong with me? My face hurts.” Then she added, still murmuring, “Someone hit me. Wasn’t David … wasn’t.”

  Beth leaned closer. “What? What did you say, Kiki? Did you see someone? Who was it?”

  “A voice. Telling me.” Kiki closed her eyes again.

  The wail of an ambulance approached the school.

  “What voice?” Beth asked, flinching as she looked down upon Kiki’s battered face. “I don’t understand.”

  Margaret didn’t, either. For the second time that week, she was looking at a face that, just a short while ago, had been beautiful. Not a mark on it. Nothing to mar its perfection. But not now. Far from it. Even with the blood wiped away, Kiki Pappas was not going to look like herself for quite some time.

  Everyone waited in silence while the paramedics checked Kiki’s condition. “She’s stable,” one of them finally said. “No serious damage done. Needs repair work on the nose, though, and she could have a concussion. Must have taken quite a blow. One of you call her folks, tell them to meet us at the medical center.”

  David rushed away to make the call.

  The EMS carefully loaded Kiki onto a stretcher. The minute they picked her up, Margaret saw the pin. It had been lying underneath one arm. A silver quartet pin.

  She bent to pick it up, then wondered if it might have fingerprints and decided to leave it there.

  She moved over to stand beside Mitch, pointing toward the pin. “Do you see that?”

  But before he could answer, two police officers arrived. They questioned the EMS briefly, then turned toward the silent, white-faced group.

  Another pin, Margaret was thinking as the officers approached. Just like on the deck. But there hadn’t been one outside of the Dumpster. Why not?

  The paramedics finished strapping Kiki in and picked up the stretcher. No one said anything. Kiki looked so awful. Her nose had swollen to twice its normal size, forcing her eyes shut. But she was not unconscious. “I wanted to go to the prom,” she said softly as the stretcher was lifted.

  Hearing her, Margaret recognized her own final thought just before she’d passed out in the Dumpster. Pin or no pin outside that Dumpster, the same person who had done this terrible thing to Kiki had attacked her Friday night. And Kiki’s remarks just now told her beyond any doubt that Caroline had been right, as usual. It was about the prom. A ridiculous, stupid, insane idea, but Margaret knew it was the truth.

  Someone was trying to sabotage the prom. Why? Hoping it would be canceled? Why would someone want that? Because they weren’t going?

  An obscene idea. Or was the correct word insane?

  The scarier thought that immediately followed that one was, maybe it wasn’t the prom itself the attacker was targeting. Maybe it was only people who were going to the prom. Why would someone do that? Because he or she wasn’t going and was angry about it? Or was that much too simplistic? People had been missing out on high school proms for years and years and as far as Margaret knew, they didn’t go around killing the luckier ones.

  She reminded herself grimly that she was now a member of that group. The lucky group. The ones who were going.

  When she quietly told Mitch what she was thinking, he asked if she actually thought someone could really care that much that they weren’t going.

  She said no, of course not. She was tired and she had a headache and she wasn’t thinking clearly. But even to her own ears, that didn’t sound very convincing.

  She wanted, more than anything, to be wrong about what she was thinking. She didn’t want Stephanie’s death, her own attack in the alley, or this newest attack on Kiki to have anything to do with the prom. Selfish of her, maybe, but the thought that the dance she had waited so long to attend could be the reason for all this ugliness was just too depressing.

  “I’d just like to remind all of you,” Lacey announced when the stretcher had disappeared around a corner, “that the funds Mrs. Thompson was keeping for us weren’t just for candles. That money was for everything: the decorations, the caterer, food and drink, the band, the flowers, everything. Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out what happened to it? We’re going to need that money.”

  “I don’t see what choice we have,” Liza said. “We’ll have to wait and find out from Kiki when she’s feeling better. That won’t be until tomorrow. I’m sorry if that disturbs you, but we can’t help it.”

  Lacey stunned Margaret then by smiling sweetly at David and saying earnestly, “I’m sorry. Liza is right. I’ve been callous. I really was thinking of all of you, though. I
mean, I’m not going. I haven’t been asked yet. But you guys are going. I just don’t want you to be disappointed, that’s all.”

  Margaret glared at her. Since when did Lacey Dowd care if the Pops were disappointed about something? She hadn’t already set her sights on David, had she? With Kiki not even at the hospital yet?

  The police seemed to feel the incident was a simple robbery. Their scenario involved someone passing by the room as Kiki lifted the cash box out of the drawer. The thief had hit her with the heavy box, then escaped with the money.

  Margaret pointed out the silver pin. But there were too many people around willing to assert, just as they had at the lighthouse, that the pins were common. No significance there, she read in the officers’ faces.

  They said they would talk to “the victim.” But Margaret felt they’d already made up their minds about what had happened.

  On their way out of the building in the late afternoon sun, Margaret hissed at Lacey, “What were you doing back there? Flirting with David? I could swear that’s what you were doing, but I have to be wrong, don’t I? Because you couldn’t possibly have been.”

  Lacey shrugged. “You know Kiki would never show that face in public. She’s too vain. She’s not going to look normal in time for the prom. My uncle Randy broke his nose once when I was little, and I was afraid to go near him, he looked so awful. As far as I know, David never cheated on Kiki, like Michael did on Stephanie. But even if he were willing to take her to the prom looking as if she just went ten rounds with a boxing champion, she’d never go. So,” she added cheerfully, “he needs a date if he’s going to attend his senior prom, right, Margaret?”

  Margaret was about to say, “Forget David, Lacey. If Kiki doesn’t go, David won’t, either,” when the silver Quartet van suddenly pulled up at the foot of the steps and screeched to a halt. Adrienne jumped out, her eyes on the ambulance pulling away from the curb, her face gray. She hadn’t seen Margaret yet.