Will Work for Prom Dress (2 page)

I was thrilled. Anne was not. This might have had something to do with our last three formals when Ms. Parisi claimed to be so busy that she had to finish Anne’s dress the afternoon of the dance.

This, Anne could deal with. We had fabric swatches for buying our shoes and accessories ahead of time. But suspiciously, despite otherwise exemplary time-management skills, Anne’s mom would always need to sew her into the dress at the last minute. Sewn in, meaning no one still could sample the goods.

“No time for a zipper! But no problem, dear, let me just whipstitch this back closed.”

Ms. Parisi was not a stupid woman.

By the time I panted through the Parisis’ front door, Anne was already sitting with her long, sweaty legs thrown across a velvet ottoman. With one hand she flipped through the
channels. The other held a diet soda. A second can’s sweat was sliding precariously down near the high-gloss wood of the coffee table where it sat, sans coaster. I snatched it up, wiped off the ring, and sat down gingerly on the antique sofa.

Anne laughed at my discomfort.

“It’s a house, not a museum.”

“But still—”

“Don’t be so impressed. Mummy Dear will be replacing all this with the latest trend within the month.”

“What’re we watching?”

“News.”

“No, really.”

“Really,” Anne said. “Didn’t you read my e-mail outlining the Betterment Plan?”

“Betterment Plan? The Plan of Improvement has a new name?”

“Well, you wouldn’t stop calling it POI, which gave me nightmares of my Maui trip and that gray Hawaiian pudding. I could barely down the
poi
, even though I was trying to impress those hot hula guys.”

She shuddered. “According to the BP, learning about current events will help us attract men who are more mature
and exciting. You don’t want to be tied down to high school boys, do you?”

“I think I’ll pass on being tied down to any sort of boy for the moment. Sounds more like your area.”

She threw a small pillow at me, almost toppling a vase so ugly it must have been worth a fortune, which I quickly righted.

“Hardy har har,
Mom
. But really, let’s improve ourselves, shall we?”

She settled on a tabloid-news station. I hid my smirk. After a brief look at the latest little celeb runt named after some piece of fruit or Druid season, a very strange image covered the screen.

“What
is
that?” Anne asked.

I scooted to the edge of the little couch for a better look.

“Looks almost like a piz—”

“Oh my—”

“Holy—”

“Turn it up, turn it up!” I yelled.

I sat, staring at the vision in mozzarella and saw Anne’s dream of a zippered dress slowly melt away. A newswoman stood in front of a crowd of Elvis impersonators. A heavyset
“older” Elvis spoke with passion into the big black microphone and shook the pizza at the camera. The extra cheese of the hairnet had melted up and browned into a very convincing pompadour the King himself would have been proud to sport.

“It’s him. We’ve said for years he was still out there. He’s giving us a sign he’s alive! We’ve been laughed at—ridiculed—for believing. We told you, ‘don’t be cruel,’ baby, but you were. It was ‘heartbreak hotel’ for us, but look at this! You can’t deny it’s him!”

The breathless man in the sparkly white jumpsuit was pushed aside by, well, another man in a sparkly white jumpsuit. In the background, women and men alike clung to each other and wept for joy through their mass rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes.”

“We’ve seen it. And we’re not the only ones! We have another bus on the way to Rockville where they’ve spotted two more. Look at his mournful eyes. ‘Are you lonesome tonight,’ Elvis?” the man pleaded into the camera before turning back to the newscaster. “You can see it—he’s so lonesome he could weep. This is a cry of help from the King. And we
will
find him.”

“Well, there you have it. Our investigative reporting team is on the trail of where these ‘Elvi-pie’ originated. We’ll be back after these messages with footage from Rockville, where Elvis’s faithful have set up a shrine in the great man’s honor.”

The report faded out as the crowd started the first bars of “Love Me Tender.”

Anne clicked the TV off. We sat in stunned silence for three seconds before bursting into laughter.

“Helga will be so happy,” Anne said.

“Yep. This will make her day. We better hit the help-wanted sites.”

I sat in the cafeteria and doodled in my new,
fabric-covered notebook. It was more of a journal than a proper school notebook. A little treat I gave myself after being unceremoniously fired from my first real job. The man actually used the words “possible criminal assault on an Italian food product.”

I thought about correcting him and explaining that pizza originated in ancient Middle Eastern cultures. I might be a C+ student, but I was wise in the ways of pizza. But he was already sputtering and turning a disturbing shade of purple. It would be ironic for a man who made his living filling arteries with trans fats to keel over from a stress-related heart attack or stroke.

I actually felt a little bad for him. The man was still
getting death threats printed on fake memorabilia from the pseudo-Elvi. The throngs of faithful followers took offense, thinking the mess was some kind of publicity stunt exploiting their love for the King. Anne’s suggestion that he give up the frozen-food business and open a Blue Suede Shoe Shop didn’t go over very well.

My journal doodle morphed into a smiling pizza.

I had a weird fetish for brand-new stationery and school supplies. Sadly, I didn’t find school nearly as thrilling as the smell of freshly lined loose leaf. Most days, I stared at the stains on the badly painted walls trying to find faces or animal shapes, like a depressing version of the old cloud game. I counted the minutes until art class, the sole education-related bright spot in my day.

Through much haggling and hard work to keep up my other regular classes, I had managed to eke out space for three art classes in each of my previous schedules. After such a lackluster response to my initial round of art institute applications, my parents decided I should concentrate on academics this semester to secure a spot at a regular college, majoring in the arts. So Print Photography it was, the only course not conflicting with one of the pillars of academia.

Technically, in the photography class, I held the “teacher’s assistant” position—not a true student. I still managed to get my hands into one of my own projects now and then when I wasn’t busy mixing outdated developing chemicals. But without my mental art breaks throughout the day, I felt like a little kid who’d had recess taken away. I let go of the bitterness and reminded myself to be grateful that with Anne’s guidance, I’d talked my way out of PE/study hall and into the TA position. Anne really knew how to work the system.

Her argument, which I copied and pasted from her e-mail into one addressed to my guidance counselor and memorized to get my parents’ approval, argued that I’d had more art classes under my belt than any other student and “teacher’s assistant” would look good on my otherwise skimpy college applications. My first-choice school was still the Art Institute of Chicago, so the powers that be, both at school and at home, relented and allowed me to take on the position.

This was cool for many reasons. The biggest being that one of the students taking the class was none other than self-professed Art King, David Jenkins. I got a smug little thrill each day when he took his spot at one of the studio tables like a commoner, while I took mine on the wobbly stool in the front.

David and I had been competing in every art competition and event since freshman year. He edged me out for last year’s annual citywide show. Each school could place only one artist in the show, so I was out of luck. The $250 prize was cool, but the real thrill was the exposure. Foster Neuwirth came in from New York City every year to act as the judge. She was a Very Big Deal in the art world and came here only because it was her hometown. A nod from Foster Neuwirth could do wonders for your ego … and your acceptance into an elite art school, as she sat on the board of the Art Institute.

Even worse than losing our school’s only spot last year to David Jenkins was the fact that he won. He won the whole citywide art show, and he was only a junior! Sure, it might have been
my
secret plot. But when he pulled it off, it just seemed tacky. This is when he assumed the crown—and that he was a better artist than me. But as Anne and I liked to say, if you assume, you make an Art King out of you and me.

The pizza in my journal had gone from smiling to smirking and now wore a crown. I slid down in my seat and worked on stoking up some pencil-lead flames in a giant doodled pizza oven.

“Ouch. Who are we setting on fire today?” Anne flopped into the seat next to me and dropped a Ziploc bag of baby
carrots on the table next to a tub of hummus. “BP, baby.” She sighed in frustration at my blank look. “BP? Betterment Plan?”

“Oh, right, sure. Me, too.” I pointed down at my plate of broccoli.

“I’m sorry, but having the lunch lady smother your vegetables with a ladle of congealed nacho-cheeselike substance pretty much wipes out any BP aspect of your meal.”

I pushed the plate away. Her observation, though gross, rang true.

She leaned over and nodded in recognition at my doodle. “Ah,
David
. You are so talented. You really captured him. Maybe you should do a study of portraits in pepperoni for your admission portfolio. Mom clipped some of the Helga/Elvis shots from the paper that you could stick in there. Isn’t that what those artsy types like? You could make out like it’s some weird modern art political statement.”

“That’s not really my style,” I said.

That was the problem. I didn’t really have a style yet. I couldn’t even decide what kind of art I wanted to concentrate on. Anne had it easy. She was focused, if not driven. The current object of her focus was a guy named Erik sitting at the drama table across the aisle.

“Erik? A theater guy?” I raised my eyebrows. “This is new.”

“He goes by ‘T-Shirt’ now.”

I muffled my snort in deference to her obvious deep feelings for the guy.

“He’s usually the stage manager. It’s not like he’s up there doing the acting or anything. And lugging around all those sets sure does a body good,” she said.

Anne suggestively swigged her bottle of flavored protein water and zoned in on him. He looked up midsentence from talking with some blonde like he’d lost his train of thought. The girl with
MARIA
, the name of the female lead, printed across her back, turned and shot Anne a nasty look. Having disrupted the world enough for the moment, Anne cracked up and went back to her carrots.

“But isn’t he directing the show or something? Sounds pretty theater-ish to me. I thought you had a strict no-drama, no-wrestlers, no-debate-team rule,” I said.

“Sure. I mean, while there are obvious benefits to the athleticism of the sport of wrestling, who can get past those weird outfits they wear? Ick. I’m sorry, but no one wants to see that. And a debate team guy would be such a drag. I like winning my arguments without having to put out a whole
lot of effort. The ‘no drama’ rule, however, has a little wiggle room.” Anne pointed to the departing T-Shirt. “Besides, he only went for the assistant director job so he could wear the T-shirt around school. You have to respect a guy who can think ahead.”

I watched T-Shirt dump his tray. A bright white stenciled,
ASS. DIRECTOR
stood out across the broad back of his
The Sound of Music
T-shirt.

“Maria” scurried after him, dumping her own barely touched tray and shooting Anne a smug smile over one shoulder as she slid her hand into the back pocket of his Levi’s. Erik looked down in surprise and then shrugged and returned the gesture.

“Classy.” I rolled my eyes.

Anne hummed a few perfectly pitched bars of the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” and batted her eyelashes with exaggerated innocence. “Gosh, I bet T-Shirt, being a theater buff, would enjoy our gig this weekend. Perhaps I should invite him. I’m sure he has a friend he can bring.”