21 Proms Read online

  I don’t protest. I simply watch him walk away, relieved. For me, prom is almost over. All I have to do is find Emilie and tell her I’m leaving. I can still get home in time to watch Saturday Night Live.

  Heading toward the dance floor, where I see Emilie’s head moving above the other girls, I tell myself that I’m glad to be rid of Adam and his analytical dismantling of my personality. I want to be alone. I love being alone. At the edge of the dance floor, I position myself to get Emilie’s attention. I assume she revived Gavin, who’s most likely resumed his intake of punch.

  And then I see her. She’s not dancing with Gavin. She’s dancing with Trevor. And they’re not just dancing, they’re talking. He smiles, she laughs. It doesn’t look like drunken, prom laughter. It looks like the real deal. Emilie guaranteed the next time I saw her she’d be in Trevor’s arms, and she was right.

  I think of all the times I told her to forget about Trevor. I think of how she’d just shake her head and say I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  She was right all along. I was wrong.

  What if she’d listened? Where would she be now? But I know the answer. She’d be right next to me, holed up in my bedroom with a pizza and sixty hours of TiVo to watch. Emilie wouldn’t be living. She’d be hiding.

  Just like me.

  My feet start to move. Even in the heels, I make good time as I head toward the gymnasium door, toward the huge painted sign that says thank you for coming to mardi gras. In my peripheral vision, I notice Principal Maughn standing by the exit, at the ready with more beads and a watchful eye for intoxicated students. I blow by him, pushing open the heavy door and bursting into the warm May night.

  The parking lot is a sea of cars and rented limos. I know he won’t be here, but I keep moving anyway. I have to. Even outside, I can hear the band.

  “Ayla?” Adam’s voice comes from behind an SUV with a go raiders bumper sticker. He steps out, and under the parking lot light his skin is pale, almost like he’s an apparition.

  “You were right,” I admit. “About all of it.” He grins. I think he’s not surprised to see me, although I can’t be sure. “I’m ready to tell you … the reason … about why I asked you.”

  I don’t usually speak like this, with hesitation. But what I’m about to say is the truth, and it doesn’t roll easily off my tongue. He nods, encouraging.

  “It’s because you said you don’t dance,” I explain. “I hate dancing.” But that’s a lie. I stop, force myself to rewind and tell the truth. “Actually, I’m scared of it. Terrified, in fact. The idea of everyone watching … thinking I look like an idiot. I couldn’t bear the thought of prom if I had to get in front of that band and … do something. I thought you’d be safe. That you wouldn’t want to dance.”

  He closes his eyes and inhales deeply, as if he’s savoring the moment. “Finally.”

  “And it’s not just that,” I go on, the words rushing out now. “I’m scared of everything. Where to sit at lunch. What to say in class. People.” I take a breath. “I hate being scared.”

  “Then stop.” Adam walks out of the light and into the dark, closer to me. “I’ll help you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I can.”

  I shake my head. It can’t be that easy. Except he has such kind eyes that I want to believe him. I want to live. “How?”

  “Take my hands,” he says softly. “You are a prom queen. Dance, dance, dance.”

  I hold my breath. Every cell in my body is screaming to run. But his eyes, those kind eyes, hold me in place. Inside, the band has transitioned into something that sounds like zydeco music. I picture Emilie, ecstatic, grinning at Trevor.

  “There’s no one to see us,” Adam continues. “I’ll even close my eyes.”

  I know that if I do not do this, I will regret it forever. I reach out, and Adam clasps my hands. His skin is smooth and dry and reassuring. I exhale. I can do this. We can do this.

  Adam and I start to sway. I move my hips, and then my feet. I shut my eyes, and I think he shuts his. I listen to the band, and I imagine that we’re on Bourbon Street in the middle of Mardi Gras. There are thousands of people, and some of them are looking at us. But, for once, I’m not scared.

  As the song ends and another begins, I keep a tight hold on Adam’s hands. I’m free, and I don’t want it to end. This is my prom night. I love my dress. I love my shoes. I love my size 32D underwire Chantelle bra.

  And someday, just maybe, I will love to dance, dance, dance.

  All She Wants

  by Cecily von Ziegesar

  1. Winter break junior year Mum and Dad and Alex leave Brooke behind with chicken pox while they set off to Kauai for three weeks. Happy Holidays! Brooke becomes obsessed with Netflix and even more obsessed with Molly Ringwald because they look alike — except Brooke’s eyes are blue and bigger, her hair is straight and blond, and she is probably shorter, although just as gawky as Molly. Maybe they don’t look alike at all, but she is still obsessed and watches Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club in constant rotation. Just like Molly in those movies, Brooke’s never had a real boyfriend. She doesn’t go to a big suburban public high school with school buses and lockers and a cafeteria the way Molly does, though. She lives in Manhattan and has to wear a kilt to school. Her school lunchroom looks like a restaurant in an Austrian ski chalet, with padded wooden armchairs, cloth napkins, baguettes, and brie. In Pretty in Pink, Andie sits at a table with her friend Duckie in the gigantic, crowded school cafeteria, drinking diet soda out of a straw and moping about the prom. Brooke’s school is called St. Agnes, named after the patron saint of young virgins, and doesn’t have soda or a prom.

  2. It’s not like she doesn’t have friends, but they are all away, snowboarding in Zermatt or flambéing themselves in St. Bart’s. Her best friend, Katherine, is in Namibia of all places, looking at animals through binoculars and flirting with her safari guide, whom she has bragged all about in e-mails. Apparently he is “hung like a zebra,” which leads Brooke to wonder how Katherine would know, since Katherine is even more of a virgin than she is. Plus, she looked it up in the National Geographic Encyclopedia in her dad’s library and zebras’ are actually pretty small, like Shetland ponies’, so maybe being hung like one isn’t really something to brag about. She wonders how old Molly Ringwald was when she lost her virginity for real. Like, was she still a virgin when she played Andie in Pretty in Pink? She seems bitchier in that than she does as Samantha in Sixteen Candles. When she’s Claire in The Breakfast Club she just seems confused, which makes sense. First she was a virgin — Sixteen Candles — then she was thinking about maybe not being a virgin anymore — The Breakfast Club — and then she wasn’t — Pretty in Pink. Or maybe she’s just a really amazing actress, which actually goes without saying.

  3. Brooke is so bored. She’ll do anything to not be this bored. Her housekeeper, Ana, is living with her while the family is away, but Ana would rather watch reruns of The Apprentice and eat spray cheese on Triscuits all day than play Hearts with her. Besides, Brooke is sixteen, she can amuse herself. Of course, she’s basically housebound, due to her illness, but her Central Park West apartment building is big enough — surely there must be someone to hang out with. Like maybe the boy in 1C? Mum is always complaining about the families in the ground-floor apartments, which apparently are rent-controlled. Probably his family doesn’t have enough money to go snowboarding in Switzerland. Probably they have a Christmas tree with presents underneath it. But he probably doesn’t have a prom, either — most schools in the city don’t. Maybe he’ll want to come to her prom.

  4. She knocks on the door to 1C, which faces the building’s laundry room. She didn’t even know the building had a laundry room because her family’s washer/dryer is in their apartment, off the kitchen. Not that she’s ever used them. Ana does all the laundry. Twice a week it appears in her drawer
s, neatly folded and smelling clean.

  Brrrring! The doorbell sounds exactly like the in-between-periods bell at her school. An excessively fat woman answers the door, draped in something that could be called a dress, but could also be some sort of bathrobe-like garment. A caftan? It is black, with shiny silver piping, and was not made by Carolina Herrera.

  “You want my son?” the woman asks in a thick Slavic accent, her fleshy lips frowning beneath her mustache. “Lazy, so lazy! He listens to iPod all day.”

  Brooke doesn’t know what to say to that since she’s been watching Pretty in Pink all morning, trying to figure out if the hair dye she ordered from drugstore.com to match Molly-as-Andie’s would come out looking right, or if it would turn her blondish-brown hair irreversibly magenta.

  “I wondered if maybe he wanted to come upstairs?” she asks boldly. “I’ve been sick and I can’t go out.”

  The woman disappears down a narrow corridor, leaving Brooke standing in the half-open doorway. The apartment smells like boiled lentils and Bounce. The boy comes down the corridor toward her. He’s darker and shorter than she remembered him, but he has this amused-by-life look that she likes. She won’t be shy with him.

  “Hey,” he says. “I’m Taylor.” He laughs, like he knows his name is stupid; his parents just named him that to fit in with their environment.

  She smiles. “Want to do something?”

  5. They don’t even talk in the elevator but she can’t stop smiling. She doesn’t even care that she has little scabs all over her face and hands. Actually, she has little scabs all over her body, but in her jeans and white J.Crew turtleneck sweater, he can’t see them. He can see how much she looks like Molly Ringwald, and he knows the scabs will heal. They sit in the den, on the floor, with their backs against the sofa, eating Pringles, drinking ginger ale, and watching The Breakfast Club. He makes the biggest crunching sounds she’s ever heard. When Molly kisses Judd Nelson and gives him her diamond earring, Brooke sort of lurches in Taylor’s direction and they start kissing. Brooke takes her sweater off. This is further than she’s ever gone with a boy because the only time she’s ever really kissed any boy is at Camp Pokomoonshine in the Adirondacks, where she went for four years. Last summer she was a CIT. Kissing Taylor feels just like watching a great Molly Ringwald movie she hasn’t seen before. He has chin stubble that makes him more manly than Gary from camp, and he doesn’t put her hand on his crotch the way Adam, Gary’s bunkmate, did. Taylor waits for her to put her hand there herself, which she doesn’t, because she barely knows him and it’s only like eleven a.m. and putting her hand there seems more like a nighttime activity. Brooke has the feeling Taylor’s kissed a few girls in his lifetime, but none as Mollyish as she.

  “Can you come over later?” She yawns, Molly-like, pretending not to be into him. “Like, tonight, at eight?”

  6. She spends the entire afternoon in her parents’ dressing room, trying on her mom’s gowns and feeling very much like the doll Edith in her favorite children’s book, The Lonely Doll. Thank goodness she doesn’t live with anyone named Mr. Bear, who would spank her if he caught her wearing the $7,000 Carolina Herrera goddess gown Mum wore two years ago at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is blue, but if she wanted to be specific about the color, she would probably call it Aegean Blue, because it looks like the sea in Greece when the sun is setting and the air smells like ripe olives. She can imagine Taylor touching the dress but she can’t imagine him taking it off without ripping it, because it has about forty tiny hook-and-eye closures down the left side of the bodice. She will just have to take it off herself.

  7. Taylor rings the bell at 7:54 — making it obvious that he’s into her. Ana, the housekeeper, answers the door because Brooke is in her room mixing punch. She can hear him walking down the hall toward her room, his sneakers squeaking on the freshly waxed parquet floor. Her Absolutely ’80s compilation CD is on constant replay. Right now it’s playing Brian Ferry’s “Slave to Love.”

  He knocks on the door. She dims the lights and then opens it. He doesn’t have a corsage or anything. He hasn’t even changed his clothes. She tries not to feel disappointed. He would have if he’d known, but how could he have known?

  Brooke hitches up her gown, which is a size or two too big. “Don’t say anything. I know it’s kind of weird, but I’m pretending we’re at the prom.” Her neck, shoulders, and arms are bare but the scabs don’t look bad with the light dimmed.

  She closes the door behind him to keep her nosy housekeeper from spying on them. How nice her bed looks, so perfectly made with its pretty white seersucker-and-lace bedspread from Tocca Home. She sits down on it. On her bedside table, Maraschino cherries dance in the cut-glass Baccarat crystal punch bowl, which she has filled with ginger ale, Veuve Cliquot, Tanqueray gin, and apple juice. She ladles out a goblet of punch and drinks the entire thing. She’d thought when it got dark, things would feel different. She could pretend they’d known each other all their lives and this was the night. But Taylor just stands there in his dorky Levis and kind of ugly black button-down shirt and definitely ugly white leather basketball sneakers. He looks like Emilio Estevez. Ew!

  “What grade are you in anyway?” she asks, licking her lips with a Molly-esque combination of standoffishness and allure.

  “Tenth,” he answers, folding his arms defensively across his chest.

  He is so out of there. “My parents are coming home in a sec,” Brooke lies with a shrug. “My brother got pneumonia so they’re flying back early.” How anyone could get pneumonia in Hawaii, she has no idea, but it sounds authentic.

  8. The next day she visits the laundry room just because she likes the smell. At least it’s somewhere to go besides the elevator or the lobby. Taylor is there, with another boy who looks a lot like him, only older and taller, folding their laundry.

  “This is my brother, Michael.” Taylor pats Michael’s shoulder like he’s proud of him for being so good-looking and tall. “He goes to Columbia.”

  Even Brooke is impressed, although she knows she shouldn’t be. Her brother, Alex, applied early to Columbia and he’s a total loser.

  “Brooke has a really nice room,” Taylor says like he wants his brother to know that he’s been in her room.

  Michael is folding a pair of black Calvin Klein boxer briefs in a very manly, matter-of-fact way. He grins and hauls a frayed white towel, with the word Florida emblazoned on it in faded orange letters, out of the dryer. “Taylor is in love with you,” he confides to Brooke with an amused twinkle in his nice brown eyes. “He took, like, four showers this morning, he was thinking about you so much.”

  Brooke blushes. She isn’t exactly sure what Michael means about Taylor’s showers, but she doesn’t really want to know, either. It’s not that she doesn’t like Taylor; he just didn’t sweep her off her feet the way he was supposed to on prom night. “I’m so bored,” she tells the boys with listless insistence. “Want to come up and watch a movie with me or something?”

  Michael folds another pair of black Calvin Klein boxer briefs. It’s Christmas Eve and his Columbia friends have all gone home. He’s probably bored, too. “Sure,” he answers for himself and Taylor, who glares at him, like Michael always steals his girlfriends.

  9. “I thought your family came home last night,” Taylor says in the elevator.

  “Well, they didn’t.” Brooke shrugs her shoulders, already annoyed with his forlorn white leather basketball shoes. Not that he’s so bad. He isn’t. He’s nice. He’s a good kisser. And he doesn’t ask annoying questions or assume she’s desperate because she goes to St. Agnes. According to her dickhead brother, Alex, who goes to St. Hugh’s, all St. Agnes girls are smart, nerdy, and horny because they’re all repressed virgins. Alex’s friends actually knock on her door sometimes and say, “Do you want me to get you laid? Because Alex says you need it bad.” Then they laugh, like they’re just joking. But
if they’re joking, why do they even bring it up? Taylor isn’t like that, but there’s something so completely next-door-to-the-laundry-room about him. Like he only emerges to go to school or something. Michael’s sexier — a much more obvious prom date — but even he’s got a little too much laundry room in him.

  10. Outside, it’s snowing. Brooke leaves the boys in the den with the TV remote and heads into her parents’ dressing room to change. At first, she’d planned on wearing her mom’s black Vera Wang with the little mink bow on the bodice. Now that it’s snowing, she puts on the flowing white Oscar de la Renta gown with the mohair corset. It’s a total snow queen outfit, like something Barbie would wear in one of those freaky animated all-singing, all-dancing Barbie movies Brooke used to watch over and over back in first grade. Barbie the Snow Princess of Icetopia. Or, Brooke Fenton, Prom Queen! All she’s missing is a diamond tiara. She heads back into the den in bare feet because her mom’s shoes are all size ten and she’s only a size eight.

  “Holy shit,” Michael exclaims when he sees her. Weirdly enough, the boys are watching The Breakfast Club. Or maybe it’s not weird. Taylor probably thinks he can kiss her again during the Judd–Molly kiss scene. Brooke pads over to the window to watch the snow fall. It’s getting dark already. The bare limbs of the trees in Central Park are stark white.

  The boys scoot apart and she sits down on the sofa between them, fanning the voluminous white skirts of her gown all around her until the sheer white silk touches their jeans. She can feel them trying not to look at her, as if waiting for her cue. To do what, though? She doesn’t even know what she wants with them. It’s just fun to wear a pouffy dress and flirt a little. It might be more fun to be in Namibia riding an elephant with a guy hung like a zebra, but that’s not an option right now.

  11. They watch the whole movie and then they watch Top Gun with Tom Cruise, one of Alex’s favorites and Michael’s, too, apparently. Brooke considers putting her hand on Michael’s leg, just to see what happens, but then he falls asleep just before Tom Cruise’s best friend, Goose, dies. She stops the movie before it’s even over. With its fighter planes and Goose-dying scene, Top Gun has never factored into her prom-night fantasies. She stands up to check out the snow again, ignoring Taylor completely. All of a sudden the soundtrack to Sixteen Candles comes on. Spandau Ballet.