“Look after him for me. Will you do that?”
“You won’t need me to look after him, Susannah, you’ll be here to do it,” I said, and I tried not to sound desperate, but it didn’t matter.
Susannah smiled and said, “You’re my girl, Belly.”
After lunch, Susannah took a nap. She didn’t wake up until late afternoon, and when she did, she was irritable and disoriented. She snapped at my mother once, which terrified me. Susannah never snapped at anybody. Nona tried to put her to bed, and at first Susannah refused, but then she gave in. On the way to her bedroom, she gave me a little halfhearted wink.
Jeremiah came home around dinnertime. I was relieved to see him. He made everything lighter, easier. Just seeing his face took away some of the strain of being there.
He walked into the kitchen and said, “What’s that burning smell? Oh, Laurel’s cooking. Hey, Laure!”
My mother swatted at him with a kitchen towel. He dodged her and started looking under pan covers playfully.
“Hey, Jere,” I said to him. I was sitting on a stool, shelling beans.
He looked over at me and said, “Oh, hey. How are you?” Then he walked over to me and gave me a quick half hug. I tried to search his eyes for some clue as to how he was doing, but he didn’t let me. He kept moving around, joking with Nona and my mother.
In some ways, he was the same Jeremiah, but in other ways, I could see how this had changed him. Had aged him. Everything took more effort, his jokes, his smiles. Nothing was easy anymore.
chapter eleven
It felt like forever before Jeremiah spoke again. I was pretending to be asleep, and he was drumming his fingers along the steering wheel. Suddenly he said, “This was my prom’s theme song.”
Right away I opened my eyes and asked, “How many proms have you been to?”
“Total? Five.”
“What? Yeah, right. I don’t believe you,” I said, even though I did. Of course Jeremiah had been to five proms. He was exactly that guy, the one everyone wanted to go with. He would know how to make a girl feel like the prom queen even if she was nobody.
Jeremiah starting ticking off with his fingers. “Junior year, I went to two, mine and Flora Martinez’s at Sacred Heart. This year, I went to my prom and two others. Sophia Franklin at—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You’re in demand.” I leaned forward and fiddled with the air conditioner control.
“I had to buy a tux because it was cheaper than renting over and over again,” he said. Jeremiah looked straight ahead, and then he said the last thing I was expecting him to say. “You looked good at yours. I liked your dress.”
I stared at him. Did Conrad show him our pictures? Had he told him anything? “How do you know?”
“My mom got one of the pictures framed.”
I hadn’t expected him to bring up Susannah. I’d thought prom would be a safe subject. I said, “I heard you were prom king at your prom.”
“Yeah.”
“I bet that was fun.”
“Yeah, it was pretty fun.”
I should have brought Jeremiah instead. If it had been Jeremiah, things would have been different. He would have said all the right things. It would have been Jeremiah in the center of the dance floor, doing the Typewriter and the Lawn Mower and the Toaster and all the other stupid dances he used to practice when we watched MTV. He would have remembered that daisies were my favorite flower, and he would’ve made friends with Taylor’s boyfriend, Davis, and all the other girls would have been looking at him, wishing he was their date.
chapter twelve
From the start, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get Conrad to go. He wasn’t a prom kind of person. But the thing was, I didn’t care. I just really wanted him to go with me, to be my date. It had been seven months since the first time we’d kissed. Two months since the last time I’d seen him. One week since the last time he’d called.
Being a person’s prom date is definable; it’s a real thing. And I had this fantasy of prom in my head, what it would be like. How he would look at me, how when we slow danced, he’d rest his hand on the small of my back. How we’d eat cheese fries at the diner after, and watch the sunrise from the roof of his car. I had it all planned out, how it would go.
When I called him that night, he sounded busy. But I forged ahead anyway. I asked him, “What are you doing the first weekend of April?” My voice trembled when I said the word “April.” I was so nervous he’d say no. In fact, deep down I kind of expected him to.
Warily, he asked, “Why?”
“It’s my prom.”
He sighed. “Belly, I hate dances.”
“I know that. But it’s my prom, and I really want to go, and I want you to come with me.” Why did he have to make everything so hard?
“I’m in college now,” he reminded me. “I didn’t even want to go to my own prom.”
Lightly, I said, “Well, see, that’s all the more reason for you to come to mine.”
“Can’t you just go with your friends?”
I was silent.
“I’m sorry, I just really don’t feel like going. Finals are coming up, and it’ll be hard for me to drive all the way down for one night.”
So he couldn’t do this one thing for me, to make me happy. He didn’t feel like it. Fine. “That’s okay,” I told him. “There’s plenty of other guys I can go with. No problem.”
I could hear his mind working on the other end. “Never mind. I’ll take you,” he said at last.
“You know what? Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “Cory Wheeler already asked me. I can tell him I changed my mind.”
“Who the hell is Corky Wheeler?”
I smiled. I had him now. Or at least I thought I did. I said, “Cory Wheeler. He plays soccer with Steven. He’s a good dancer. He’s taller than you.”
But then Conrad said, “I guess you’ll be able to wear heels, then.”
“I guess I will.”
I hung up. Was it so much to ask him to be my prom date for one freaking night? And I had lied about Cory Wheeler; he hadn’t asked me. But I knew he would, if I let him think I wanted him to.
In bed, under my quilt, I cried a little. I had this perfect prom night in my mind, Conrad in a suit and me in the violet dress my mother bought me two summers ago, the one I had begged for. He had never seen me dressed up before, or wearing heels, for that matter. I really, really wanted him to.
Later he called and I let it go straight to voice mail. On the message, he said, “Hey. I’m sorry about before. Don’t go with Cory Wheeler or any other guy. I’ll come. You can still wear your heels.”
I must have played that message thirty times at least. Even so, I never really listened to what he was actually saying—he didn’t want me to go with some other guy, but he didn’t want to go with me either.
I wore the violet dress. My mother was pleased, I could tell. I also wore the pearl necklace Susannah gave me for my sixteenth birthday, and that pleased her too. Taylor and the other girls were all getting their hair done at a fancy salon. I decided to do mine myself. I curled my hair in loose waves and my mother helped with the back. I think the last time she did my hair was in the second grade, when I wore my hair in braids every day. She was good with a curling iron, but then, she was good with most things.
As soon as I heard his car pull into the driveway, I ran to the window. He looked beautiful in his suit. It was black; I’d never seen it before.
I launched myself down the stairs and flung the front door open before he could ring the bell. I couldn’t stop smiling and I was about to throw my arms around him when he said, “You look nice.”
“Thanks,” I said, and my arms fell back at my sides. “So do you.”
We must have taken a hundred pictures at the house. Susannah said she wanted photographic proof of Conrad in a suit and me in that dress. My mother kept her
on the phone with us. She gave it to Conrad first, and whatever she said to him, he said, “I promise.” I wondered what he was promising.
I also wondered if one day, Taylor and I would be like that—on the phone while our kids got ready for the prom. My mother and Susannah’s friendship had spanned decades and children and husbands. I wondered if Taylor’s and my friendship was made of the same stuff as theirs. Durable, impenetrable stuff. Somehow I doubted it. What they had, it was once-in-a-lifetime.
To me, Susannah said, “Did you do your hair the way we talked about?”
“Yes.”
“Did Conrad tell you how pretty you look?”
“Yes,” I said, even though he hadn’t, not exactly.
“Tonight will be perfect,” she promised me.
My mother positioned us on the front steps, on the staircase, standing next to the fireplace. Steven was there with his date, Claire Cho. They laughed the whole time, and when they took their pictures, Steven stood behind her with his arms around her waist and she leaned back into him. It was so easy. In our pictures, Conrad stood stiffly beside me, with one arm around my shoulders.
“Is everything okay?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. He smiled at me, but I didn’t believe it. Something had changed. I just didn’t know what.
I gave him an orchid boutonniere. He forgot to bring my corsage. He’d left it in his little refrigerator back at school, he said. I wasn’t sad or mad. I was embarrassed. All this time, I’d made such a big deal about me and Conrad, how we were some kind of couple. But I’d had to beg him to go to the prom with me, and he hadn’t even remembered to bring me flowers.
I could tell he felt awful when he realized, right at the moment Steven went to the fridge and came back with a wrist corsage, tiny pink roses to match Claire’s dress. He gave her a big bouquet, too.
Claire pulled one of the roses out of her bouquet and handed it to me. “Here,” she said, “we’ll make you a corsage.”
I smiled at her to show I was grateful. “That’s okay. I don’t want to poke a hole in my dress,” I told her. What a crock. She didn’t believe me, but she pretended to. She said, “How about we put it in your hair, then? I think it would look really pretty in your hair.”
“Sure,” I said. Claire Cho was nice. I hoped she and Steven never broke up. I hoped they stayed together forever.
After the thing with the corsage, Conrad tightened up even more. On the way to the car, he grabbed my wrist and said, in a quiet voice, “I’m sorry I forgot your corsage. I should have remembered.”
I swallowed hard and smiled without really opening my mouth. “What kind was it?”
“A white orchid,” he said. “My mom picked it out.”
“Well, for my senior prom, you’ll just have to get me two corsages to make up for it,” I said. “I’ll wear one on each wrist.”
I watched him as I said it. We’d still be together in a year, wouldn’t we? That was what I was asking.
His face didn’t change. He took my arm and said, “Whatever you want, Belly.”
In the car, Steven looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Dude, I can’t believe I’m going on a double date with you and my little sister.” He shook his head and laughed.
Conrad didn’t say anything.
I could already feel the night slipping away from me.
The prom was a joint senior and junior prom. That was the way our school did it. In a way it was nice, because you got to go to prom twice. The seniors got to vote on the theme, and this year, the theme was Old Hollywood. It was at the Water Club, and there was a red carpet and “paparazzi.”
The prom committee had ordered one of those kits, those prom packages. It cost a ton of money; they’d fundraised all spring. There were all of these old movie posters on the walls, and a big blinking Hollywood sign. The dance floor was supposed to look like a movie set, with lights and a fake camera on a tripod. There was even a director’s chair off to the side.
We sat at a table with Taylor and Davis. With her four-and-a-half-inch stilettos, they were the same height.
Conrad hugged Taylor hello, but he didn’t make much of an effort to talk to her or to Davis. He was uncomfortable in his suit, just sitting there. When Davis opened up his jacket and showed off his silver flask to Conrad, I cringed. Maybe Conrad was too old for all this.
Then I saw Cory Wheeler out on the dance floor, in the center of a circle of people, including my brother and Claire. He was break dancing.
I leaned in close to Conrad and whispered, “That’s Cory.”
“Who’s Cory?” he said.
I couldn’t believe he didn’t remember. I just couldn’t believe it. I stared at him for a second, searching his face, and then I moved away from him. “Nobody,” I said.
After we’d been sitting there a few minutes, Taylor grabbed my hand and announced we were going to the bathroom. I was actually relieved.
In the bathroom, she reapplied her lip gloss and whispered to me, “Davis and I are going to his brother’s dorm room after the after-prom.”
“For what?” I said, rummaging around my little purse for my own lip gloss.
She handed me hers. “For, you know. To be alone.” Taylor widened her eyes for emphasis.
“Really? Wow,” I said slowly. “I didn’t know you liked him that much.”
“Well, you’ve been really busy with all your Conrad drama. Which, by the way, he looks hot, but why is he being so lame? Did you guys have a fight?”
“No …” I couldn’t look her in the eyes, so I just kept applying lip gloss.
“Belly, don’t take his shit. This is your prom night. I mean, he’s your boyfriend, right?” She fluffed out her hair, posing in the mirror and pouting her lips. “At least make him dance with you.”
When we got back to the table, Conrad and Davis were talking about the NCAA tournament, and I relaxed a little. Davis was a UConn fan, and Conrad liked UNC. Mr. Fisher’s best friend had been a walk-on for the team, and Conrad and Jeremiah were both huge fans. Conrad could talk about Carolina basketball forever.
A slow song came on then, and Taylor took Davis by the hand and they headed out to the dance floor. I watched them dance, her head on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. Pretty soon, Taylor wouldn’t be a virgin anymore. She always said she’d be first.
“Are you thirsty?” Conrad asked me.
“No,” I said. “Do you want to dance?”
He hesitated. “Do we have to?”
I tried to smile. “Come on, you’re the one who supposedly taught me how to slow dance.”
Conrad stood up and offered me his hand. “So let’s dance.”
I gave him my hand and followed him to the middle of the dance floor. We slow danced, and I was glad the music was loud so he couldn’t hear my heart beating.
“I’m glad you came,” I said, looking up at him.
“What?” he asked.
Louder, I said, “I said, I’m glad you came.”
“Me too.” His voice sounded odd; I remember that, the way his voice caught.
Even though he was standing right in front of me, his hands around my waist, mine around his neck, he had never felt so far away.
After, we sat back down at our table. He said, “Do you want to go somewhere?”
“Well, the after-prom doesn’t start till midnight,” I said, fiddling with my pearl necklace. I wound it around my fingers. I couldn’t look at him.
Conrad said, “No, I mean just you and me. Somewhere we can talk.”
All of a sudden, I felt dizzy. If Conrad wanted to go somewhere where we could be alone, where we could talk, it meant he wanted to break up with me. I knew it.
“Let’s not go anywhere, let’s just stay here for a while,” I said, and I tried hard not to sound desperate.
“All right,” he said.
So we sat there, watching ev
eryone around us dance, their faces shiny, makeup running. I pulled the flower out of my hair and put it in my purse.
When we had been quiet awhile, I said, “Did your mom make you come?” It broke my heart to ask, but I had to know.
“No,” he said, but he waited too late to answer.
In the parking lot, it had started to drizzle. My hair, my hair that I had spent the whole afternoon curling, was already falling flat. We were walking to the car when Conrad said, “My head is killing me.”
I stopped walking. “Do you want me to go back inside and see if anybody has an aspirin?”
“No, that’s okay. You know what, I might head back to school. I have that exam on Monday and everything. Would it be all right if I didn’t go to the after-prom? I could still drop you off.” He didn’t meet my eyes when he spoke.
“I thought you were spending the night.”
Conrad fumbled with his car keys and mumbled, “I know, but I’m thinking now that I should get back …” His voice trailed off.
“But I don’t want you to leave,” I said, and I hated the way I sounded like I was begging.
He jammed his hands inside his pants pockets. “I’m sorry,” he said.
We stood there in the parking lot, and I thought, If we get inside his car, it’s all over. He’ll drop me off and then he’ll drive back to school and he’ll never come back. And that’ll be it.
“What happened?” I asked him, and I could feel the panic rising up in my chest. “Did I do something wrong?”
He looked away. “No. It’s not you. It has nothing to do with you.”
I grabbed his arm, and he flinched. “Will you please just talk to me? Will you tell me what’s going on?”
Conrad didn’t say anything. He was wishing he was already in his car, driving away. From me. I wanted to hit him.
I said, “Okay, fine, then. If you won’t say it, I will.”
“If I won’t say what?”
“That we’re over. That, whatever this is, it’s over. I mean, it is, right?” I was crying, and my nose was running, and it was all mixed up in the rain. I wiped my face with the back of my arm.