Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (7 page)

When I get to school the next day, I notice that the parking lot is full. This has never happened in the history of Brookfield-Mason Regional High School. There are cornfields outside of town that are smaller than our parking lot. When we host football games and our whole school and the other whole school shows up, you can still find parking even after the game has started.

Not today, though. The parking lot is full and there’s a sheriff’s deputy directing traffic. It’s Jerry, known throughout the county as “the only cool one” because he will always call parents before resorting to locking a kid up for a drunk-and-disorderly or a speeding violation. God help you if you’re DUI, though. I have it on good authority that the DUI cases not only get a suspended license and a night in jail, they also get a private viewing of the accident photos from when Jerry’s little brother, Mark, drove drunk and killed himself and his girlfriend. There’s a bench outside of school with their names on it.

Just beyond that bench, news vans line the street. Looks like Indianapolis and Cincinnati both made it here.

Along with a bunch of sign-carrying protesters. PROTECT OUR CHILDREN says one sign. NO PERVERTS AT PROM reads
another. (If they were ever going to try to enforce that one, Prom would be nearly deserted.) STAND UP FOR FAMILIES reads yet another. What the hell is this?

I see a blond woman who might be hot if she were wearing two or three pounds less makeup standing in front of a camera. The cameraman counts down with his fingers and she starts to speak.

“Good morning, Cincinnati. Bridget Kelly reporting live from Brookfield-Mason Regional High School, where the culture wars are raging this morning.”

I could keep listening, but I feel kind of sick. I’ve got that nauseating, called-to-the-principal’s-office dread going through my body all of a sudden. What did I do wrong? How much trouble am I in? Why is there a culture war in Brookfield, Indiana?

I keep walking. I put my head down, but one of the sign carriers stops me. “Lucas?” he says. He’s a red-faced white guy who looks like the collar of his white oxford is strangling him.

“Um,” I say, “do I know you?”

“No you don’t, son, but I know you. I want to applaud your courage for taking a stand for biblical values against the homosexual agenda.” I just stare at the guy. I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be shy, son. You’re a hero. A real prayer warrior. Please know that the people of God are behind you in your struggle.”

“Yeah. Well. Good to know, I guess. Listen, I gotta go. Don’t want to be late to school.” There are cameras everywhere, so I’m pretty sure at some point somebody’s going to jump out of the bushes and reveal that this is all a hilarious prank.

“Like Daniel, he walks into the lion’s den!” the guy yells. The rest of the sign carriers applaud as I walk through them. I’ve been booed on the field before. And it felt way better than this.

I walk into school and everybody stares at me. I thought I got a lot of attention for my sign mishap. I had no idea what a lot of attention was.

Jenny Himmelrath comes up to me and says, “I just want you to know I was wrong about you. You are a great person. Call me.” Great. There’s a shit storm raging outside that I guess I started, though I still don’t really get how, but somehow this seems to have earned me a purityring booty call.

It also earns me this: I’m trying to walk to my locker with my head down when a shoulder hits me and sends me crashing into the lockers.

“Sorry,” Danny Masterson says. “I didn’t see you there.”

I just look at him. I have no idea what to say. Should I say, “What the hell’s going on?” “Why did you just do that?” “I didn’t do anything?” I guess that last one’s not true, but I don’t really understand what I did or how I did it.

“You might want to watch your head at batting practice
today,” Danny says. “My inside fastball’s been getting away from me lately.”

He walks away.

It’s going to be a very, very long day.

“Stack ’em as high as you can without creating a fire hazard,” my mother instructs as she wheels another flat of oversize pineapple-juice cans.

“You know I’ll be lucky to get out of here without falling on my ass,” I say, mainly to myself, but she overhears and gives me the store look, better known as the fires-of-hell look. When Danny went through a phase of sliding in the aisles in his tube socks or when I rolled up the sleeves of my polo shirt, we got the look. Only now it’s hard to tell if the piercing gaze is only due to my cursing or if she wants any excuse to express her disappointment in me.

Left to the task of creating a sale pyramid, I methodically stack tins of juice with their labels facing out. Once
the base is steady I have to use the stepladder and pretty soon I’m placing the few cans near the top—they’re actually empty and just for display lest they bonk someone on the head and we get slapped with a concussion lawsuit. You can’t be too careful these days, my dad always says.

I scan the store: shoppers buying charcoal for weekend barbecues, Britty Hailer studying the nutritional info on cereal boxes, a few parents whose kids run track or play ball, Josie at the deli, helping a guy with a huge sandwich order. The fans move the cold air around, the quiet hum from the frozen-foods cases fills the store like background music. Lucas always tried to figure out what note the hum was but since he has little music ability he never did. I adjust a pineapple-juice can so its green-and-yellow cheery label faces forward and nearly topple off my ladder when I see Jenny Himmelrath standing there with her hands on her hips, staring. It’s the same stare she’s been giving since fifth grade when she became obsessed with “weeding out the evil” in our elementary school and got people to sign a petition stating that they’d burn their Barbie dolls because they had boobs and suggestive clothing. In seventh grade she fully ignored her nickname, the Wrath, and took her place as the golden girl of the purity crowd. Her parties were legendary: elaborate make-your-own candy bags with stuff her parents would order online and arrange in glass jars after they’d rented out the movie theater for her birthday. Of course, they’d show
High
School Musical
every year because
Grease
was just too smutty. Later, there’d be chaste mixers in the Himmelraths’ oversize barn, complete with themes—“The Wild West!” or “Party Like It’s 1999!” or “Heaven on Earth,” to which Lucas wore a shirt with #14 on it and walked around telling everyone heaven on earth was when Pete Rose played for the Cincinnati Reds. I laughed, but Jenny did not find it remotely funny because she wanted people in halos and cherub wings.

Now Jenny studies the cans of pineapple juice as though they are puppies who all want to go find a home with her but she hasn’t made up her mind which to take.

“The display’s not quite ready,” I tell her, trying to prevent whatever poison is going to spew from her bright pink mouth, like I’m defending the puppy pineapple juices.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of touching the display, Tessa.” Her smirk is loud even from up high. I start to climb down, avoiding the pyramid lest I crash into it and draw more attention to myself. I’ve been trying to lie low the past day or so, just in case there’s any reaction to me and Lucas. He’s probably gotten some flak from the guys on his team, but it’s hardly earth-shattering news, me not going with him to Prom. Josie went to a semiformal dance with a guy back when she lived in Philadelphia and he was cool with her “situation.” She said he’d brought her a corsage and everything.

Jenny tilts her head at the cans and I’m about to open my mouth and tell her that the display is really sturdy,
maybe even say something customer service-y like “Pineapple juice has more vitamin C per fluid ounce than any citrus juice” even though I might be making that up, but Jenny stomps on my unspoken words.

“In the future, I wouldn’t be caught dead buying anything from here.” She pauses, waiting for the words to make their mark. “Your parents must be horrified.”

Then she leaves me standing there in shock in the Giant Brooks that normally feels like a second home. I learned my alphabet by pointing to boxes of crackers and bottles of apple juice, drank beer with Lucas here, crushed out on Josie before she knew my name, helped sweep up glass crumbs from the break-in while my mom cried. I liked work. But now, with my stupid pile of cans and the overly chilly air, and Josie too busy piling honey-glazed turkey and Swiss to see that I am on my own here, I do what I’ve never done. I leave early, punch out, and retreat to my other home.

This one’s empty, too. Danny’s playing a rematch against Northern, the team known more for their cheerleaders than for their pitchers, my mother is at a conference of refrigeration suppliers, and my father, knowing it doesn’t get much more boring than guys trying to sell cooling supplies, is in Chicago for two days working the books and visiting off-site food plants. Over spring break he visited some plants and brought back a load of frozen
ready-to-eat items for me to test and I invited Josie over, even though I was so nervous about it. She and I baked cinnamon buns, Cheese Twistees, which tasted like bark dipped in powered cheddar, and Sugar Knots, which were actually pretty good, and Josie laughed because I was so orderly about it all.

“Why do you have to write it all down?” she asked when she looked over my shoulder as I took notes on a clipboard. I hesitated, turning my head because we were standing so close I could feel her breath on my neck.

“Um … it’s just what I was taught to do, you know, write down lists and be organized.”

“Or,” she said, “you could just enjoy the experience of trying all the stuff and then report back from your memory.”

I turned to face her and knew then all the feelings I’d wanted to push away were rising to the surface. “What if I forget my reaction to each pastry?” I asked her, grinning. She put both her hands on my shoulders and said, “Or you could have some faith that the most important things will stay with you, right? I mean, how could you forget the incredibly chewy Sugar Knots?” And then she kissed me. And I asked her about the Prom and she grinned and nodded super-slowly, like she wanted the moment to last longer. And instead of being so nervous and shaky like I’d been with Ben, the lake lifeguard one summer, or Lyle Hughes, who I went out with for four months in freshman year but never touched, it felt good. I felt good. Right.

Now the empty house doesn’t feel right. It feels hollow, or maybe that’s just me. Normally, I’d call Lucas, punching the numbers without even looking because I’ve dialed them for so long. I’d only get out half a sentence before Lucas would say he’d be right over and we’d have a movie marathon or we’d go for a run and he’d be pissed because I’d beat him even though it didn’t start off as a race. And maybe that’s part of the problem; none of this started as anything competitive. It was a friendship. A best friendship. But now, since Lucas won’t return my calls, it’s like we’re trying to prove who is more hurt: me because of him not being supportive when I told him the most personal thing ever, or him because he feels he was lied to.

It hits me hard, right in the middle of the living room, when I realize that I did. Lie to him. Even if it was because I thought he just knew, it’s sort of unfair. Like when you tell your parents you’re going to the lake with a certain friend, only you neglect to mention there’s a group of boys going, too, who have no curfew, and maybe you also don’t mention that you’re camping there instead of sleeping at your friend’s house.

I sigh, realizing I’ve still got on my dorky maroon Giant Brooks apron, and take it off and sling it over the back of the computer chair. If Lucas were here I could hug him and tell him I get it, the lying part. And he could hug me back. I sit down in the computer chair and debate going for a run by myself when I get a text.

I hesitate writing back, knowing she must be on the clock and not supposed to be online except for Giant Brooks-related issues, cake orders and the like, but I type quickly, glad at least to have someone checking on me.

Then I wonder if she means saying no to Lucas so I add.

I untie my shoes, feeling too tired to go for a run, while I wait for Josie’s response.

I’m somewhat baffled by her weather-related references. Sure, it’s a pain, that my personal business is making its way around the Brookfield-Mason gossiping gabs, but storm? Hurricane? Did I miss something during my
short absence? I shrug and cross my legs, first ignoring a framed photo of me and Lucas that catches my eye even though it has been here forever, and then letting myself stare at it. It’s from the same era as the pictures he put on our senior pages—me with giant teeth, him with the front two still out. He lost his teeth late and used to ask me to knock them out so the tooth fairy would bring him a new baseball glove. How do you get from such simple times, when all you worry about is your teeth, to now? Maybe I’m not the answer to all of Lucas’s romantic quests, but I could still show him a little kindness. I search online for the book he’s been wanting about Ted Williams, some big coffee table book, a heavy and expensive one with years’ worth of photographs.

But while I’m doing the online wander, I find two things that change my plans.

The first is that the book Lucas has been pining for is out of print.

The second is a link that leads me right into what Josie must have been referring to when she mentioned a hurricane. Only it’s a Category 5, gale-force winds, and a volcano all at once.

Will One Girl’s Choice of Date Cancel Senior Prom? Brookfield Prom: Possible Cancellation Due to Lesbian Date Indiana Teen’s Infatuation Leads to Dashed Dreams

I click on all of them, each with explosive language, all with mixed messages that leave me slack-jawed. Canceling
Prom? They didn’t even call me. Not that they have to, but still. According to to the
Indiana Banner
, “Parents are outraged,” and are quoted as saying, “Tessa Masterson is making a mockery of a sacred tradition.” Clearly they didn’t quote
my
parents. Not that I know how they’ll respond.

Of course, I want to retort with, “The ‘sacred tradition’ of stealing booze and barfing onto the Embassy Suites bathtubs and having sex loud enough for anyone in the halls to hear? Is that the sacred tradition you mean?” But I don’t. I can’t. Because just when I think I have my anger to hang on to, to cling to like it’s a piece of debris from a shipwreck, I find another link.