***
I looked at the clock on my bedroom wall – again. It was only six o’clock. There were still three hours before the mall closed and Wayne would be free to leave work and come collect me for the talk I’d promised him. My flesh pricked on the backs of my legs when I thought of it. Was that excitement or dread? What was he going to say? What was I going to say? Instead of making myself miserable wondering about it, I decided to find Jeff and make him miserable.
He was on the other side of the wall, in a cubicle bedroom of his own, hiding from his senior prom. Upton was uncharacteristically full of limousines and satin that night. Jeff had hunkered down in his bedroom as if it was a nuclear holocaust not a ridiculously overdressed school dance that was about to descend on the town.
I rapped sharply on his door, imitating our mom’s brisk knock, hoping to fool him into inviting me inside.
The door opened. “Oh, it’s you. What is it?”
“You’re really not going?” I began as I pushed my way into the musty den of Jeff’s room.
He took up a yellow tennis ball and threw it as close to the ceiling as he could get it without knocking off any of the Spackle. “Doesn’t look like it.”
I sat down on the corner of his rumpled bed. “Someday, you’re going to regret it.”
“Not likely,” he answered, snatching at the tennis ball. “It’s too late now, anyway. No date, no prom.”
I felt myself getting a little bit angry. I sucked in a deep breath and said, “Don’t act like your lack of a date is a result of anything but your own stubbornness.”
Jeff caught the ball and leaned forward to point at me. “I asked someone. You know that. And she turned me down.”
“Jeff, you asked one girl to go to prom with you: the prettiest girl in town, Miss Upton High School herself, the local beauty queen. As if, Jeff. What the heck were you thinking?”
“She’s not really like that. She’s nice.” He seemed embarrassed at the weakness of his own argument.
“Look,” I said, “I didn’t say she wasn’t nice. But these people in this town have known since elementary school who’d be taking them to prom. She’s Miss Upton High School so she’s going with the captain of the basketball team – even if he is a total doofus.”
Jeff rubbed his eyes in that furious way that always made our mother fear for his eyeballs. “Beauty queens and sports heroes – it’s like a lame plot out of a bad movie,” he said. “I thought real life would be different. I believe it should be different.”
I shrugged. “But in the bad movie you’d show them all and win her over at the end, right?”
Jeff growled. “Not here, and not tonight. You and I – we can’t change anything here without a revolution.”
I sighed again. “Instead of a revolution, you could have just asked someone from the eleventh grade to prom. I’m sure there are dozens of girls my age who would have been glad to go with you tonight.”
“Yeah? Like who?”
“Well, you could have asked my Tannis. She’s a sweetie-pie,” I suggested.
“Maybe you’re right. But it’s too late to do anything about it now.”
I knew he was right. It was supposed to take girls days to get ready for a prom and Jeff’s would be starting in about an hour. Finding a date was no longer a possibility. “Okay. Then I think you should go to prom by yourself – out of rebellion, if nothing else. You already have a suit and, as a guy, that’s really all that’s expected of you as far as a formal wardrobe goes. Get dressed and get out there, MacLean.”
“Easy for you to say. I noticed you skipped your junior prom last week, ya big hypocrite.”
I waved both my hands. “We didn’t even have junior prom back on the east coast. It’s a non-event. Anyway, I had to work.” Ben Jones must not have told Jeff about Troy Gibson inviting me to go with him to junior prom – I hoped.
“Well, stop it. You know you don’t have to work so much anymore. Mum and Dad are making enough money to pay all the bills themselves now,” Jeff reminded me. “We just need to work enough to pay for our own expenses.” He was right about that too. I hadn’t given Dad any money in almost two months. But how would I ever see Crystal – or the others – without the constant excuse to be in town that came with having a job there?
“Don’t try to change the subject,” I said as sternly as I could. “Ben Jones is going to the prom on his own, isn’t he? That was probably decided in elementary school too,” I muttered. “And by now he’s so sure he has to go stag that he doesn’t even think for a second about asking anybody to go with him.”
Jeff tuned in to something like disappointment in my voice. “Hey, you would have gone with Jones,” he stated.
I let out a long breath. “Yes, I would have – if he wasn’t the last person in town who’d ever think of me as a date.”
Jeff tossed the tennis ball at the ceiling. “No, the last person in town who’d ever think of you as a date is me.”
In the end, none of my persuading was necessary. By seven o’clock, Ben Jones was at my grandparents’ front door, dressed in the suit he wore every Sunday, making up Jeff’s mind for him. Maybe Ben Jones didn’t want to ask me to go with him to his prom but that didn’t mean he couldn’t drag Jeff along with him.
“Let’s get going, MacLean,” he said in a cheerful and faintly military voice. “Don’t let the – beautiful people – grind you down.”
I didn’t make any kind of satisfied fuss when Jeff came out of his room dressed in his own Sunday suit. Mum was standing uncertainly by the door, holding a camera. “You don’t want a picture taken of the two of you, do you?” she asked.
Ben Jones laughed.
“Nah, Mum,” Jeff said. “Better save it for the ceremony tomorrow.”
“Well, at least take this.” She snapped off the last bloom of a store bought, potted tea rose someone had given her while she was sick and shoved its stem through the buttonhole on Jeff’s lapel. “How late will you be?” she asked as she fiddled with the single flower.
Ben Jones answered for him. “There’s a nice, tame party out at the reservoir after the dance. It usually goes until 3 or 4am.”
Mum frowned. “I don’t know where any reservoir is.”
Ben Jones started giving directions in that terrible, Upton way of his. It was all based on obscure landmarks with none of the highway numbers or street names that could help and outsider like Mum to find anything. “...You keep driving ‘til you pass the Murffits’ old place. There’s usually a blue van parked there...” Our eyes glazed over as we gave up any hope of trying to make sense of it.
“Just be careful,” Mum said. “There’s no way I’ll ever be able to find you if you need rescuing.”
“Hey, aren’t you coming later?”
I looked around. Had Ben Jones been talking to me just now? I felt me face flush. And I wondered if maybe I was angry.
“Me?” I stammered.
“Yeah.”
“At your prom?”
“Yeah.”
“Jones, I’m in the eleventh grade. I need to be specially invited to go to the prom. But I haven’t been.”
“Sure you have.”
I glared at the banister gripped between my fingers. Why now? Why not until it was too late? “No, I haven’t. No one invited me. Who would ever invite me?”
At the bottom of the stairs, Jeff opened the front door. “Just leave her, Jones. She’s going out with work people again tonight anyway. Let’s get this over with.”
My smile was a sarcastic mess as I raised my head. “Congratulations, you guys,” I called from the top of the stairs as they stepped outside, “and stay safe.”
Ben Jones paused in the open door and looked up, staring hard and unsmiling at me. “Same to you, Parakeet.”