Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (4 page)

Danny shrugs. “Actually Lucas didn’t say anything. So maybe that’s a good sign. Sometimes at games when he gets pissed off he swallows it so he doesn’t go nuts. Then he cools down.”

“Maybe that’s what he’s doing,” I say, and hope makes my voice a bit louder. I look at the tux in the mirror and see my brother looking at me too. “You gotta admit—it’s going to look good.” Josie showed me a photo strip of her and her old girlfriend from a fair at her last school right after the girlfriend had told everyone. They both looked so happy. And when I studied the pictures, I was jealous. Not just because of the old-girlfriend part of the story. But because of the relief I knew they must have felt. The relief Josie carries with her every day.

“You’re kind of wacky, you know that?” Danny puts his hand on my shoulder like he might pull me back from an edge of some kind, but then knows he doesn’t need to. “But I totally think you can rock a tux.”

Danny grins and we fling our items onto the counter while the salesperson raises her eyebrows at my purchase.
I hand over my cash card and look out the window where even the deserted strip mall is sunny. I remember playing touch football with Lucas and how he always thought I looked good in his freshman football jersey. Maybe he’s already getting used to this, just like I am. And things won’t be as bad as I think.

LUKE FOGELMAN, WILL YOU GO TO PROM WITH ME?

These words are written in marker in a speech balloon coming out of the mouth of a photo of Miss Piggy that is taped to my locker. Not sure if Miss Piggy’s face is a reference to the pork round that’s still on sale at Giant Brooks or what.

I grab the paper, crumpling it and tearing it off my locker at the same time. I don’t throw it on the ground because I was raised better than that. I actually walk eight extra steps past a trash can to get it into a recycling bin.

When I get back to my locker, Patrick Schmidt is standing there.

“Dude,” he says as I spin my lock, “what happened?”

“Don’t really want to talk about it,” I say, dumping
textbooks and binders into my bag. I close my locker, spin the lock, and head down the hall.

“Shot down!” Pat says. I know this is what guys do. Another thing that guys do is punch somebody who disrespects them in the face, but I decide that rejected
and
suspended would make for a pretty crappy week. So I just give him the finger as I walk away.

Normally this is the part where I would go talk to Tessa about how crappy I feel, but since she’s the reason I’m feeling crappy and she’s a liar who can’t be trusted, I’m not going to do that.

My phone buzzes.

“You still not talking to me?” reads the text from Tessa. I don’t answer it, which is my answer. She’s called me a few times and left voice mails, but I am not talking to her. This is partly just out of revenge—she made me look stupid, so I’m pissed—but it’s also that I don’t know what to say to her. I feel like our whole friendship was a lie. She’s probably the only person I’ve ever really opened up to, and the whole time she was hiding stuff from me. I just don’t feel like I can trust somebody like that.

I head into the bathroom. I don’t know if the same marker-wielding genius is responsible for the obscene graffiti over the urinal that begins TESSA MASTERSON, WILL YOU … or if the whole town just had a meeting and decided to taunt me in the same way today.

The whole day, I hear people snickering at me. Of course I know the word “laughingstock.” It was in our
eighth-grade vocabulary book. But I don’t think I ever really fully understood it until today.

Mom has Tuesday off, so she’s waiting for me when I get home from practice at six. “Come on, kid,” she says. “Road trip.”

I throw my sweat-soaked, salt-encrusted hat on the table. “Mom, I just want to—”

Mom picks the hat up with two fingers, holding it at the very edge of the brim. “Okay. Take a shower first. You smell. And then we’re taking a road trip.”

“Mom. I don’t feel like—”

“Sorry—I don’t really remember asking you. Did I ask you? Oh, that’s right. I told you. This is my weekend and I’m gonna enjoy it with my favorite person in Brookfield. Only we have to get the hell out of Brookfield to enjoy it.”

I try really hard to stay sullen enough to have a fight with Mom, but she disarms me with the “favorite person” line. Plus, as anyone at Giant Brookfield can tell you, nobody wins an argument with my mom.

So I hop in the shower and a few minutes later we hop into our pathetic little Ford Focus and start driving.

“Mom, I can’t really go all the way to Cincinnati. I’ve got school in the morning and—”

“Relax, Nancy. We’re not going all the way to Cincinnati.”

Mom, who has an affection for Miss Kaboom that is totally ridiculous for a woman her age, makes us listen to the entire
Space Party
album on the way.

“Mom, this is fourteen-year-old-girl music.”

“It’s not either. It’s dance music that anyone can enjoy. And I love Miss Kaboom. She’s just—she lets her freak flag fly, you know? She does her thing and doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks. Tell me you don’t admire that!”

“I mean, when you put it that way, yeah, but I wish she was expressing that idea in better music.”

“We’ll listen to your music on the way back, okay?”

“Fine.”

Miss Kaboom is just finishing telling us she’s fine the way she is as we pull up into the parking lot of the LA Star Casino in Hidden Valley, Indiana.

“Mom, I’m too young to gamble.”

“And I’m too sensible. We’re going to have dinner and laugh at the casino patrons and the Elvis impersonator.”

“Elvis impersonator? Seriously? This is supposed to cheer me up?”

“Wait’ll you see him. He’s definitely late-period Elvis. He’ll make you glad to be eighteen and athletic at least.”

We sit down in the Brown Derby Lounge, which is on the roof of the LA Star Casino, a floating “stationary boat” that sits on the surface of Hidden Valley Lake. It’s a nice cool night and not too buggy, which is pretty amazing. We get burgers and fries, and I’m halfway through my
food and feeling a little relaxed when Mom finally gets into it.

“So you wanna tell me what happened?” she says, all fake casual while she puts more ketchup on her fries.

“Actually, if I wanted to tell you, I would have,” I say.

“Okay. Don’t want to. But do it anyway. You’re kind of crappy company when you’re all sulky, so you might as well spill the beans.”

I stare at my fries. “It’s embarrassing,” I say.

“I wiped poo off your butt for the first two years of your life. It is totally impossible for you to be embarrassed in front of me.” This line is delivered just as our waitress, Denise, who has perfect teeth, long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a rack that’s straining at the boundaries of her Brown Derby Lounge uniform polo shirt, returns to our table to ask us if everything is okay.

“Except for my mom talking about poo, everything’s fine,” I tell Denise. Mom shrugs, her mouth full of burger, and Denise looks at me like I am the weirdest person in the entire tri-state area. I guess I should be used to that by now, but I’m not.

Denise walks away, and though she’s a small-minded idiot who doesn’t appreciate a good poo joke, she does have a fantastic butt that I can’t help staring at.

“Don’t do that. It makes me uncomfortable,” Mom says. “She’s not an object. She’s an idiot, but she still deserves some respect.”

“Yeah, well, I tried being friends with a girl, and that
didn’t exactly work out,” I say. Damn it. Mom tricked me again. Or maybe I really did want to talk about it.

“So that’s it?” Mom says. “Years of friendship down the tubes because she didn’t want to go to Prom with you?”

“It’s not just that,” I say.

“I mean, that’s got to be pretty embarrassing, the thing with the sign,” Mom continues.

“Do you think?” I bark back at her.

“Yeah,” she says. “I do. And I’m really, really sorry.”

On the other end of the roof, guys are banging drums and tuning guitars. A guy in a Brown Derby Lounge apron walks to the mic and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, LA Star Casino is proud to present Ron Ferguson as Elvis!”

The band springs into action and a guy in his late fifties, gut about ready to explode out of his rhinestone-spangled white jumpsuit, strolls to the middle of the cramped stage. “Thank you very much,” he says, and a couple of ladies in their sixties next to the stage actually scream.

“Mom, if the old ladies start throwing their underwear at him, I am going to vomit and leave, in that order.”

“And I’ll be right behind you. So what’s Tessa’s problem? Why doesn’t she want to go to Prom with the best-looking guy in Brookfield?”

“Okay, that makes me uncomfortable. I owe you at least one remark about Denise’s fantastic rack for that.”

“That counts. As a remark about her breasts.”

“No, it doesn’t. That was just a remark about a remark.”

“Whatever. So what’s Tessa’s excuse?”

“This one’s called ‘Polk Salad Annie,’” Ron Ferguson exclaims.

“She’s … she’s … uh, not romantically interested in me.”

Mom stares at me for long seconds. Ron Ferguson gyrates. Old ladies sigh.

“Why the hell not? It’s not like she’s got another boyfriend, is it?”

“No. Not a boyfriend. No. Not a
boy
friend.”

“You mean she’s—”

“Yep.” I stare intently at my plate. Everything’s going cold, and it’s all a lot less appealing than it was before.

“Oh, the poor kid. Her poor parents. And her hair’s so long, too. I never would have guessed it.”

“The poor—her poor—Mom, what about me? What about poor me?”

Mom looks at me. “You’ve had your heart broken. And except for having me as a mom, you’re exactly what Brookfield wants everybody from Brookfield to be. But Tessa’s not. She never will be. The Mastersons took a fair amount of grief for hiring a single mother in disgrace seventeen years ago. How do you think the good folks at First Lutheran and the purity-ring people are going to react when they find out Tessa’s … like that?”

“Who cares?” I take a bite of food.

“I care. And you should, too. If she’s your friend.”

“She’s not my friend, or she would have told me who she really was before I made a total idiot of myself in front of the whole town.”

“Yeah, you’re a guy who makes grand romantic gestures. What an idiot. What girl would want a guy like that?”

“Thank you very much,” Ron Ferguson says. “We’re gonna take it down a little bit with a song from
Blue Hawaii
. This is ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’”

Ron Ferguson starts crooning about how he can’t help falling in love, and stupid Ron Ferguson in his stupid white jumpsuit pretending to be someone he’s not makes me start to cry. “I gotta go,” I say. “I’ll meet you in the car.” I stand up and leave to go sit in the Ford Focus. Mom arrives half an hour later.

“One of the old ladies honest-to-God threw her panties at him,” Mom says. I don’t say anything, and we drive home.

Work at Giant Brooks is way easier than school. A lot of people at work are older and so don’t feel the need to kick me when I’m down the way other teenagers do. Either that or my mom has put the word out that anybody who messes with me in my current state will be looking at the business end of a rolling pin.

Either way, work is pretty bearable. Especially because Tessa’s not there.

I’m taking my fifteen in the break room when Kate Sweeney comes walking in. I used to bag at her register last year before she went to college. I kind of thought Tessa was jealous, but maybe it was because of the attention
Kate was paying to me instead of the other way around. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” I say. “I thought you escaped Brookfield forever.”

“I’m just back for the summer. The Mastersons gave me a few shifts a week, mostly just so I don’t get bored to death.”

“Well. Welcome back. Not much has changed since you left.”

Kate puts seventy-five cents into the vending machine and watches as the wire in slot A4 spins but does not release her bag of Baked Lay’s. She bangs on the side, grits her teeth, and puts a dollar in. The machine spits out a quarter and two bags of Baked Lay’s.

“Want one of these?” she says.

“Nah, I’ve got some cardboard boxes out back I like to chew on. More flavorful.”

Kate smiles. “Suit yourself.” She rips open a bag. “So you’re big news around here.”

“Yeah,” I say. I hope my tone of voice communicates this: “I don’t currently hate you, but I will if this conversation continues.”