Prom. A ritual that involves pubescent teens dressing up for an expensive dance. It’s a magical night where anything could happen. It’s a night that’s supposed to go down as one of the most memorable and happy high school memories when you look back. For me, it was a night I would never forget.
It all started a few months before the big night. I was an inpatient and under-appreciated girlfriend who was tired of her boyfriend ignoring her during studyhalls. To fix this issue, I broke up with him. This breakup happened in the most dramatic way possible any teenager in the late 2000s would do it: through text message.
I furiously typed my dramatic goodbye to my highschool boyfriend while I sobbed my eyes out. It was 2 AM. I thought my life was over.
The next day I had to face all of my classmates, and even worse I had to face HIM at my lunch table. We shared the same friends, and so I could not grieve or talk about the break up at all.
I approached our lunch table.
“Emily, so what are you and Jason doing for prom?” my cousin, and friend, Amber asked.
I turned to face Amber, and I realized she didn’t know that I had just broken up with Jason the night before. For the first time it dawned on me: I don’t have a date now for prom.
I pulled her on her shirt sleeve and said, “Can I talk to you in private?”
We ventured off in the girls lavatory; in front of one of the broken sinks, I confessed what happened last night.
“Did you see my relationship status change on Facebook last night?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “Wait…you broke up?”
I turned the the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. “I just felt like he didn’t care about us anymore, Amber. I mean, we have study halls together, and I keep seeing him talking to other girls. It’s like we have nothing to talk about anymore.”
She leaned over. “I understand. So what are you going to do? You two share the same friends. Are you going to keep sitting with us for lunch? Or will it be too awkward for you?”
“I’m going to try my best to keep things civil. I don’t hate him; seeing him right now is a bit too soon.”
“Right. And what do you want to do about prom? We all agreed to go as a group.” she quipped.
‘I don’t know anyone that I would want to go with as a friend.”
“You can take Adam. He’s never gone to prom before, and this is his senior year with us. You’d be helping out a friend.”
I turned away from the sink and looked at Amber for a moment. Adam was a special needs kid that sat with us at lunch. He had a mild form of Autism that would cause him to not be able to pick up social cues; due to his mom having difficulties giving birth to him, his height was stunted, and he needed a feeding tube the first five years of his life.
“That could work out. Let’s see if he would be up to it.”
We left the girls lavatory, and walked back to the cafeteria. There were no other seats available, so I had to take the seat next to Jason. I scooted my body onto the seat, but I avoided any eye contact with him. Talk about being civil.
“Adam. Would you want to be my date to prom?” I asked.
Adam gave me a confused look. “But you’re dating Jessie.” he replied. (Jessie was the nickname Adam gave Jason when they were both in Pre-Kindergarten).
Jason and I gave each other a look. Together we had to tell Adam and the rest of our group that we broke up. It was as if we were a married couple announcing our divorce to our child.
“You mean, I get to take Jessie’s girlfriend to prom? Awesome! You and me are going to have wild night baby!” he replied. He began to do a pelvis gyrating motion in his seat. Adam had a crush on me the whole I had been dating Jason. And now that I was officially single, everything was open season to Adam.
With my prom date situation taken care of, the next task was to choose a dress. With the help of my mom and my older sister, I searched far and wide for the perfect senior prom dress. It was the late 20000s, and two-piece prom dresses were all the rage at time. In every prom boutique, I saw one, but I wasn’t primarily impressed with the look. I wanted to find a dress that was incredibly unique, and no one would have. The year before, I experienced the fiasco of having a dress another girl was wearing. I did not want that to happen again.
With no luck, I was tempted to just give up and wear a garbage bag to prom, but something dawned on me: I could try on one of my sister’s old prom dresses. If I did that, I would guarantee that no other girl would have the same dress as me. I had a particular dress in mind: my sister’s senior prom dress.
I actually helped my sister pick out this dress in a bridal boutique not too far away from our little home in Pennsylvania. She was also in a similar situation when we found the dress. She was frustrated, and couldn’t find a dress that was unique. She was about to give up when I pulled out this seafoam green beaded dress.
The dress had and open back with just two spaghetti straps that were specifically designed to go under the shoulder blade. And the darker blue beads on the dress were intricate enough to create a beautiful rose design on top of the seafoam green color of the dress. The dress also had a long train that would snap on the dress when the woman wearing the dress needed to dance.
When I found that dress, I demanded my sister to try it on. Within an instant, she fell in love with it, and we packed the dress home with us that day.
I rummaged through our attic, and found the dress. I tried it on, and in a heartbeat, I fell in love with it like my sister did that day.
I presented myself to my mom and dad with the dress on.
“Oh honey, it’s gorgeous on you!” my mom stammered. “But it is a bit big on the top.That’s okay. We can get it fitted. But are you sure you want to wear your sister’s dress? Don’t you want your own?”
“No. I really want this dress, mom. I think it was meant to be.”
“Okay. We will get it altered to fit you.”
The days following the dress discovery meshed and molded into one. Within a week, a rumor caught fire that my ex-boyfriend was taking one of our mutual friends, Carly, to prom. That rumor was solidified when Carly approached me while we were in our ceramics class one day.
“Just so you know, Jason and I are going to the prom together this year; but we are going as friends. I’m not into him at all, but I just wanted to make sure you were okay with the idea.” she said.
“No. I don’t mind at all. I heard Amber was really trying to get you to go this year because you didn’t get to go at all.”
“Awesome!” she grinned. “Would you also be okay if we sat at the same table as you? You know…so everyone is together.”
In my mind, I wanted to scream no;that it would be incredibly awkward for me to sit across from my ex, and that school was awkward enough seeing him everyday in class and at lunch. But I had to swallow my pride. As much as I wanted to say no to her, I needed to consider that saying no to her would be incredibly immature of me.
June rolled around, and before I knew it, the day was here. I ran straight home on our half a day, and grabbed my sister to get ready. I wiggled my way into the altered dress, and paraded around the house while the train on my dress followed me everywhere I went.
Adam and his mother arrived. He was wearing a dark navy blue suit with a lighter seafoam tie that matches my dress perfectly. While looking at Adam, I couldn’t help but notice that he was almost as tall as I was, and that his mother did an incredible job picking a suit out. His mother, a sweet, short woman with a short blonde bob cut looked incredibly happy as she beamed with delight at the two of us standing together.
I introduced Adam and his mother to my parents, and we started taking photos. And as we were taking the photos, I couldn’t help but notice that Adam’s hand kept slipping down to my backside. At first, I thought this was maybe a mistake. He is, after all, shorter than I was, and maybe he just misplaced his hand there. But as the photo session continued at my house, he hand continued to stay there: The sly devil.
I waved goodbye to my parents, and ventured over to my cousin’s, Amber’s, to take more photos. When we arrived, we started to take more prom photos outside. While outside, my uncle accidentally let Bailey, my cousin’s Beagle, out into the backyard. My uncle wasn’t aware that Adam was deathly afraid of dogs, so when Baily arrived in the backyard, Adam could not contain himself.
Bailey ran to Adam to greet him with excitement; when Bailey did this, Adam stepped all over the bottom of my dress and tracked mud all over. Adam screamed as if he was getting chased by an ax murder.
I stood there in disbelief at my now muddy dress. My relatives rushed over to us to see what had happened. Luckily, my grandmother was there, and tried her very best to help me remove the stains quickly. While fixing the dress, she also noticed Adam accidentally broke a pin that helps connect my train to the dress so I could move around and dance better. My grandmother, a sewing fanatic, managed to rescue the damage.
Once my grandmother finished helping me, we went outside to make sure Adam was okay. He was safe. Bailey had been put in a timeout in his crate as a punishment for his jumping. We wrapped up at the cousin’s home and started on our way out to the venue.
When we arrived at the prom, everything had been designed to look like a cheesy prom theme. I believe it was “ A night to remember.” We found our dinner seats and started to get ready in line for the official prom photos.
Once that was done, we started to dance. While we were dancing, a thunderstorm started to brew; but as we were dancing, the power went out. Even the music was cut short due to the power outage. We were left in total darkness.
“Excuse me guys!” our DJ for the night yelled. “ Sorry for the inconvenience, but our power just went out. We are going to try to get it back on, but for right now, could you guys try to get seated and we’ll try to give you your dinner.”
“This is crazy,” Amber cried. “I’m going to cry if we don’t get refunded our ticket money.”
We got to our table, and waited for our food in the darkness.
“Well I got pasta, and I don’t think you can mess that up even if there’s no power.” I said.
“Fuck. I got chicken.” Amber said.
I tried very hard not to stare at everyone at our table, including my ex-boyfriend and his date.
“Well, this blows.” Carly said.
Adam was nowhere near our group. Instead, he kept sitting on the floor and circling around with his legs.
“Adam, are you okay?”
I got no response. We got our food, but my friends at my table said that their chicken wasn’t cooked all the way.
“The power might have went out when they were cooking the chicken,” Amber’s date replied. Amber frowned.
A few minutes after we ate our cold food in the dark, the power came back on, but it was brief. From what I was told by other classmates, our DJ had to use a backup generator from a minivan to keep playing music for us.
And when a slow dance finally came on, I searched for Adam like a hawk so I could dance with him. He kept his body very far from me as we swayed back and forth with each other. Once the slow music stopped, Adam ran back to his hiding corner with the rest of the boys in my class. For the remainder of the night, I danced with everyone in my class. And although this prom was not the night I had expected, it was still a memory I will never forget.
Short Stories
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Okay…..it started out good.Did not like the language.Sorry.:(