by Nancy N. Rue
“You okay?” Sunny said on the way home.
Patrick always asked me that. I guessed his hard work on me had paid off. Now I was like every girl, just the way Alyssa said.
“Tyler?” Sunny said.
I was saved from answering by a text message signal. “I should check this,” I said.
But when I looked at it, I wished I’d just gone ahead and confided in my sister instead.
STAY AWAY FROM THE PROM. STAY FAR AWAY.
The phone number wasn’t the same as the other message. I had a feeling it belonged to another truck driver or something. Or was it even the same person? I did have somebody in every group in the school wishing I’d never started the Prom for Everybody campaign. For all I knew this could be Graham.
No, not Graham. He’d already told me to my face.
“I hope you’re winning that argument,” Sunny said.
I snapped the phone closed. “What argument?”
“The one you’re having with yourself. Look, I’m not trying to get in your business —”
“Did you ever like a guy and know it was never going to happen?” I blurted out.
The pain on her face was so sharp I felt it in my own chest.
“Oh, Sunny — I am so sorry.” My eyes blurred. “Why can’t I talk to a single person without sticking my foot down my throat? Do you want to just pull over and I’ll get out and walk?”
“No,” she said, “I want you to talk to me like my sister. This is one area where I know a lot. More than I want to.”
“Talking isn’t going to change anything,” I said, in a voice I didn’t recognize. I sounded like a girl with fragile feelings.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But it might make you feel better.”
I doubted it, but I just couldn’t hold it in any longer. So as Sunny drove up and down the back roads, I told her everything about Patrick — how feelings about him snuck up on me in spite of all my efforts not to be like all the other girls who, as Ms. Dalloway said, drooled over him.
“You’re not drooling,” Sunny said. “I guarantee you nobody knows how you feel except you.”
“And you.”
“Nobody’s going to hear it from me.” “Do you think that’s true? That nobody knows I like him that way?”
“Why?”
I considered telling her about the text message threats but decided against it. She’d feel like she had to tell Mom and Dad, and I couldn’t put her in that position. Not now that I was actually starting to like her.
“Is this helping at all?” she said.
“You mean am I over it?”
“No, I mean can you still love yourself even though he doesn’t?”
I looked at her sideways. “Are we talking about you or me?” “When it comes to love, sis, it’s all the same. Trust me.” Strangely enough, I did.
And I did feel a little less cobwebby. Enough that when I got up to my room, I could focus on the real problem.
I called the number the text had come from and got a raspy-voiced woman who said she “didn’t text nobody today” because she was working a double shift. I could hear pans clattering in the background and somebody yelling about a fat burger.
So the person who texted me to stay away from the prom was probably the same one who informed me I didn’t belong with Patrick. Whoever it was seemed to be picking up phones wherever and using them to try to scare me.
It was working. Because saying “leave Patrick alone” was one thing; after the prom was over, we would probably go back to our groups, him to the Ruling Class and me to —
Anyway, that was one thing. But saying I shouldn’t even go to the prom … I couldn’t do that. Not now. What was going to happen if I did?
I looked at both of the text messages again, but they were too cryptic to give me any clues. Jackals. They were too cowardly to face me themselves. They wouldn’t even let us post on their Facebook page.
My gaze went to my laptop. They wouldn’t talk about it on there, would they? Or was that really why Egan said we couldn’t be on there?
After seeing Egan dancing with Candace, I didn’t want to believe that. But it didn’t stop me from logging on and going to the Castle Heights Prom page.
“Do people really hang out on here?” I said to the screen.
Evidently so, because the page was basically a photo album of Alyssa and her friends trying on prom dresses at some boutique — was that really New York City like the caption said?— Alyssa and her friends trying on shoes, Alyssa and her friends having each nail done in a different style so they could decide what manicure to have on prom day. The more I scrolled down the more aghast I was. Especially when I got to the bottom, and found a picture of myself. I was not picking out a prom gown.
It was one of the fifty shots Ms. Dalloway didn’t use for the article in the school paper. I was trying to get my balance on the ladder, so my arms were going out in what seemed to be five directions. My legs were worse. But my face was the ultimate. The camera had caught me with my eyes at half-mast and my mouth twisted. Anybody who didn’t know me would swear I’d just downed a whole bottle of wine.
That hadn’t been lost on the creators of the Facebook page. The caption underneath said, Sorry, Brainiac. No booze allowed at YOUR prom.
YouTube went on to comment that booze would be readily available at an invitation-only after party. Show up at the prom. Get your picture taken with your date so your parents’ll think you hung out the whole time. Then come to the real party.
If you get an invitation, Alyssa added in her comment.
My eyes glanced over the rest, all expressing relief that prom night was saved. Only the last one snagged me.
Don’t bother sending me an invite, it said. I think this is juvenile.
It was posted by Patrick.
Somebody else responded: You’ve been hanging out with Brainiac too much.
There were no more comments from Patrick.
At least not that I could see through the fog of tears. I didn’t like Patrick for what “every girl” saw in him. I liked him because he would say that on Facebook. And because that was all he would say.
I turned off my laptop and let myself hurt.
The first thing I thought when I woke up the next morning was that it still hurt. The second thing I thought was that I’d promised to go to Valleri’s church today. It had to be better than staying home with myself. I was sure no bobolinks were going to show up.
Once I was showered and dressed, though, my parents had already left for their own church. Walking there was out of the question in the rain that was now pelting my mother’s pansies to a pulp.
I was staring dismally at the drips running down the kitchen window when Sunny came in.
“Where are you going all dressed up?” she said. “By the way, have I mentioned that I like the way you’re putting yourself together these days?”
“No,” I said. “I was supposed to go to Valleri’s church but — “ I gestured toward the storm.
Sunny finished pouring herself a cup of coffee. “I can take you. How long do I have?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Let me get dressed. Um — “ She stopped in the doorway. “Do you mind if I stay for the service?”
“No,” I said. In fact, it would feel better to have a cohort. Interesting how I thought of Sunny that way now.
We followed Valleri’s directions, but after driving through the downpour past the address five or six times until Sunny was giggling hysterically, we were satisfied there was no church on Sunnyvale Drive. Fifteen fifty-six was somebody’s two-story stone house.
“There are a lot of cars,” Sunny said, still gurgling. “Do you think they meet here?”
“What — like in somebody’s living room?”
“I’ve heard of that.” She shrugged. “All we can do is knock on the door.”
I just hoped nobody was going to greet us in their pajamas and look at us like we were nuts. As we ran up the walkway, bu
mping against each other under Sunny’s umbrella, I imagined somebody poking their head out and saying, “Does this look like a church to you?”
Actually, it sounded like one. When we got to the front porch, guitar music and singing wafted from an open front window — along with the aroma of fresh bread.
“I don’t care if it’s a church or not,” Sunny said. “I’m staying for breakfast.”
She started to knock but the red door flew open and so did Valleri’s arms.
“You both came! I love this!”
I wouldn’t have thought Valleri could be any more bouncy than she was at school, but she virtually had a built-in pogo stick here. She hugged us both multiple times and kissed us each on the cheek and repeated, and repeated, how thrilled she was that we were there, all as she ushered us into a sunny room filled with music and people.
As it turned out, there were only about twelve, but I still hoped while Valleri was introducing them all that there wasn’t going to be a test. The only names I remembered for more than two seconds were Mr. and Mrs. Clare, Valleri’s parents. Her mother was creamy skinned and had a French accent and the blue eyes Valleri had inherited from her. Her father was, to my surprise, a stocky African American with the I-like-you-immediately face she’d gotten from him. She was the two of them put together, and then some.
Somehow we were seated with Valleri between us, and the service started. Valleri clutched my hand through a lot of it. It was the most I’d been touched since I stopped climbing into my father’s lap, and that thought almost made me cry.
Sunny did cry, almost from the opening, “The Lord is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.” Through the singing, the round-robin of prayers, even the lively talk-and-discussion on the Bible reading about giving Caesar what’s his and God what’s His, Sunny wept quietly. I could feel the sorrow seeping out of her. I could feel it.
Toward the end, they passed around that bread I’d been smelling and a heavy pottery chalice of watered-down wine. Each person looked into the eyes of the next and said their name and, “The body of Christ is given for you. The blood of Christ is the cup of salvation.” I’d heard those words before countless times and had yet to really understand them. But when Valleri turned to me and dipped a torn-off piece of the bread into the cup and said, “Tyler, this is for you, from Jesus,” the tears came. The ones I’d been holding back. The ones that washed over the hurt in my chest.
The rain had stopped when Valleri walked Sunny and me to the car, her arms looped through ours. It was slow going, walking attached, and I didn’t know exactly how to do it. I stepped on Valleri’s toe more than once before we got to the end of the driveway.
“I want to come back,” Sunny said.
“And we want you to.”
Valleri squeezed her arm and let go, and Sunny went to the car to unlock it.
“I don’t know,” I said to Valleri. “Don’t know what?”
“Whether I’ll come back.”
Valleri’s eyes clouded, but she said, “That’s up to you.” “I keep telling you — I am so bad at this.”
“At …”
“At feelings. I feel something and I blubber all over the place. I try to talk about it and I make other people cry — or tick them off, or stir up trouble.”
“Well, yeah,” Valleri said.
“I liked the service — I loved it, in fact. It was the first time communion ever made sense to me, and nobody even explained it — it was just there.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “But I’m too much of a mess right now to be in a room with people who get all of it, everything. I have too many questions.”
The big blue eyes blinked. “That’s all we do is ask questions,” she said. “We hardly ever have any answers, except just keep loving.”
“How do you do that?” I said.
“That’s what everybody’s trying to figure out.”
I folded my arms. “Okay, that is just impossible to fathom. There’s a room full of people hugging you at ten-second intervals and feeding each other by hand — and you’re saying they’re still trying to figure out how to love? They look like they invented the concept.”
Valleri’s face burst into a smile, and she threw her arms around my neck. “I love you, Tyler,” she said.
“Why?” I said.
“Because you’re so you.”
When I’d disentangled myself and got into the car, Sunny nodded at me.
“You’re going back too,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “I am.”
Chapter Sixteen
I was surprised to find Mom alone in the sunroom nursing a lemonade when we got home. I was even more surprised that the dimples weren’t in evidence. Usually she loved a few hours to herself, “to think what I want to think when I want to think it,” she always said. That was definitely a gene I’d inherited. So the biggest surprise was when she said, “Come out and join me. I want to talk to you girls.”
I gave Sunny a what-did-we-do-now look. She gave me one back. Not very reassuring.
“Where’s Dad?” I said as I dropped into a flowered chair across from Mom.
“He had a board meeting at church. I escaped. Where were you two?”
Oh. So that was it. I’d forgotten to leave a note.
“We went to church,” Sunny said. “A friend of Tyler’s invited us — it was kind of spontaneous.”
Mom waved a hand at her. “You can stop defending her. It’s fine. A little unexpected, but fine.”
She took an interminable drink from the lemonade, while Sunny and I again exchanged glances. This was about something. Could we not just get to it?
“All right, here’s the thing,” Mom said finally. “I’ve been thinking about your prom project.”
I worked hard not to groan.
“And I would like to offer the house for a preprom party.” Okay — that was the biggest surprise. If I had been drinking a lemonade, I’d have choked on it.
“We’d have hors d’oeuvres and whatever drinks you think — maybe some music — just a chance for your friends to gather and appreciate each other before they get to the prom and it all gets crazy.” She ran a finger through the condensation on the glass. “People could do this instead of feeling like they have to spend a lot going out to dinner. Isn’t that what you’re trying to accomplish?”
It was. And I liked the idea. But there were so many questions.
The first one was, “What does Dad say?” Mom grunted.
“No, seriously. What does he say?”
“That’s what he says. We still haven’t won him over on this, but he’ll come around.” “So you’re won over?”
Mom set the glass aside and slanted toward me. “Tyler, I have seen a huge change in you since you started this. I admit I didn’t like it at first, but most of that was my own stuff.”
I didn’t even know my mother had stuff.
“But I think this is good for you, and for the community, which is what we’re always preaching at you. So I’d like to support you. I really would.”
Which was why I didn’t ask my next question: Who is actually going to come to my house for this?
“We don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” Mom said.
Sunny put her hand on my arm. “Maybe you need to think about it?”
“No,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Because I couldn’t hurt another person I cared about. I knew what that felt like now, and I just couldn’t do it.
Mom said to make up a list of people I wanted to invite, which was still one person long when, after going to my locker, I sat in the school courtyard the next morning before school. Sunny and I had gotten in early so she could prep for our exam in fourth block, which gave me plenty of time to continue agonizing.
Joanna found me there.
She sat at the concrete table across from me and bit at her pretty lip — for so long I finally said, “Was there something you wanted to say?”
“Yes,” she said. And th
en burst into tears.
Could any of us girls do anything but cry these days?
I produced a tissue from my bag and handed it to her.
“You’re going to have to give me more information,” I said.
“You’re the whole reason Patrick hasn’t asked me to prom!”
My chin dropped directly to my chest.
“It’s true!”
“Uh, no,” I said. “First of all, I thought he did ask you. You were wearing it all over your face Saturday.”
“I was sure he was going to, especially since I let him drag me to that dress thing at Hayley’s. I thought for sure that would do it.”
That seemed to be the consensus among the Ruling Class.
“I don’t know what else to do,” she said, eyes filling again. “It’s all about you now with him.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s any consolation, he hasn’t asked me either, and I don’t know why you think he would. I’ve already been told that’s not an option for him since I’m not in your ‘group.’”
She looked at me blankly for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know any other way to talk.”
“No, it’s not that. Patrick’s different around you. Maybe it’s the Help the Kmart Kids thing or whatever, but he’s nicer since he’s been hanging out with you, and he thinks different or something. I don’t know, but I do know he would do just about anything you asked him to, so …” She swallowed as if she were trying to get a wad of bubble gum down. “Could you maybe just tell him he should take me to prom?”
I didn’t know where to start answering that, and even if I had, my mouth was no longer working. First of all, she was confronting me head on — so not the Ruling Class approach. Second of all — what? Patrick would do anything I asked him to? This child was clearly delusional.
However, right now she might do anything I asked her to. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.” She almost came out of the chair. “But on one condition.”
“Anything.”
“You have to tell me if you sent me this text message.”
