21 Proms (16 page)

Primate the Prom

by Libba Bray

It was going to take a lot of work to get the gorilla to go to the prom. I'd been at it for a month now. I'd had us both measured for tuxes, “just in case.” I posted a prom flyer inside his locker. When we'd pass the mall florist shop, I'd point to the yellow rose boutonnieres and say, “Hey, that's nice. Just like a banana.” Nothing worked. The gorilla was not going public with our status. We were not out and that was that. After all, he argued, things were good with us. Why rock the boat? Why look for trouble?

We'd been keeping a low profile for the whole six months we'd been together. When we passed in the halls, I'd say, “Hey, bro,” and he'd grunt and bump his fist against mine. Simple. Sweet. Not at all suspicious. No one would know we were dating. But that was the point — I was tired of hiding. This was my senior prom. Last dance of my high school career. And I was not going to sit it out watching
Mighty Joe Young
reruns on the Primarily Primates! Channel. About a week before prom, I couldn't take it anymore. We were at his house playing
King Kong Road Rage III
. He'd won as usual. I consoled myself with a bag of Cheetos and started the prom argument again.

“Come on. You never want to go anywhere,” I said.

He scratched his privates and sniffed his fingers. It was a nervous habit. Sometimes I found it charming. Sometimes.

“We could rent a limo. Stock it with a little contraband. Some champagne. In-N-Out Burgers. Banana extract.”

He pounded his chest, screeching loudly, then took his meaty paws to a papier-mâché replica of the Empire State Building. The Barbie Fay Wray flew off, ass over teakettle, and stuck fast in the wall-to-wall carpeting.

I rolled my eyes. “That's not impressing anybody, you know.”

This made him sulk. He took the TV remote, manipulating the buttons with his toes. It was something I found unbearably cute when we first started dating. But now, I could only think about what it would be like to watch him do that on prom night, and I was pissed. A traffic jam of afternoon talk shows blared and snapped from the screen. He settled on
Judge Justice
, pretending to watch intently as the ex-Marine-turned-TV-guru dispensed quick sound bites like “Do the crime, do the time” and “If you sue, you might boo-hoo” and, worst of all, “Apes and Man — that ain't the plan.”

“I thought we were going to make a statement,” I said. He grunted in response. “Fine. Stay home. I'll go stag.”

With a toe, he changed the channel to music videos. I had one card left and I put it on the table.

“They'll play The Smiths.”

He looked at me longingly, and for a second I wanted to say, fine, you know what? Who cares about the stupid prom? Let them keep it to themselves. We won't go where we aren't wanted. But I couldn't do that. Not this time. And if the gorilla wouldn't go with me, well, maybe he wasn't the ape I thought he was. So I left. The next day, I put a box of his stuff on the front porch — some Smiths CDs, a small beanie chimp, a banana pillow that read
somebody at the portland zoo is ape for me
, and a British import punk magazine he'd given me on our first date. He watched me from the window. As I left, I heard him trashing the living room and howling like an animal.

 

Here's how the gorilla and I met. It was a Monday afternoon in November. My refusal to join in organized extracurricular activities, i.e., sports for Dad or band for Mom, had resulted in my being banished to the thankless world of after-school minimum-wage slaving. “If you're not going to be part of a team, son,” Dad had said over some barely nuked takeout being passed off as dinner, “you can earn an honest buck.” Dad was big on blowhard pronouncements. He liked to say things like, “There's no
I
in team.” That's true, but there's no
I
in assholes, either, and I'd met plenty of those on various teams. And for the record, when did bucks become honest? But I digress.

Dad speared some soggy broccoli and pointed it at me. “Jim Brent needs an assistant at the Ye Olde Yogurt Shoppe. I told him you'd be there Monday after school.”

Mom smiled. “Oh, I love their soft-serve. So good — and historical, too.”

Ye Olde Yogurt Shoppe was one of those unfortunate marketing plans that assumed people wanted an Elizabethan experience when they ordered a frozen yogurt sundae. I guess if you can pretend that frozen chemical liquid doesn't taste like a Chernobyl-size mutation in your mouth, you can pretty much get down with anything, including employees dressed in tunics and tights, and walls adorned with posters of Queen Elizabeth I dipping into a waffle cone, the words
Forsooth, that's royally good!
in heavy script underneath. The pay was crap, but at least it got me out of the house. Plus — and this was the genius part — I got two fifteen-minute breaks a shift as mandated by law.

After I'd served my last customer a Sir Walter Raleigh — vanilla yogurt with a bloody cherry topping — I ripped off my tunic and skipped over to the potted plants to smoke a cigarette. That took all of about four minutes, leaving another glorious eleven minutes to fill. I spent it at MegaMusic — music, movies, books, and more, more, MORE! It was like a megalomaniac had gone into retail. I made my way past the headphone kiosks and countless bins of CDs to the magazines in the back. I liked to thumb through the import UK garage band reports without plunking down my life's savings in British sterling. I'd just picked up a slick pub on the British neopunk scene when I saw him, a big, hulking brute rocking a Morrissey T-shirt and a Kangol hat. His arms were about the size of my head and covered in silky black fur. I wished I didn't have on tights. It didn't make me feel manly. He caught me staring and I fumbled the magazine back into the stand, mumbled something about being late to work, and took off.

I came back on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday. By the next week, I'd learned his name — Carter. I knew he was from Akron. His folks had just split and his dad was back at a nature preserve. He liked old '60s spy shows from the BBC and stylish, chronically depressed singers backed by a tsunami of guitar and drums. He worshipped,
worshipped
, The Smiths. I was hit hard. And the first time Carter kissed me out behind the Orange Julius garbage cans in back of the mall, I was gone. Sure, it was a hell of a kiss, but it was more than that. It was the kind of kiss that told me who I was and made me feel okay about it.

I suppose there had always been clues about me and my ape tendencies. There were the monkey pajamas I wore till they fell apart. The nature shows on a Friday night in the dark privacy of my own room. The time my mom caught me blowing kisses to my Curious George books. I watched the entire King Kong oeuvre millions of times. I'm talking stinkers like
King Kong versus the Backup Singers from Mars
and
It's a King Kong Fourth of July!
(That one was a variety show where Kong screeched and pounded his way through a bunch of comedy skits, a couple of patriotic songs, and one rap number with a big teen pop star named Justin Time. Kong wore a backwards cap and break-danced in front of a new theme park. It was Ape Old School, and the crowd dug it. They turned the fountains yellow just for the occasion. It was all cool till the fireworks went off and freaked Kong out. But truthfully, Justin Time was so over, and his CDs sold like crazy after they had to put him in that iron body cast thing that breathes for him.)

I never told anybody how I felt. When I turned eleven, my dad threw away my
National Geographic
collection and handed me a baseball glove in its place. That night, while my parents slept, I dug them out of the trash and stored them under my mattress. When the house was still, I'd pull them out and stare at those pictures of apes in the wild. I'd imagine myself with them, grunting and grooming, scurrying through thick jungle on leg-hands, banging my chest in defiance.

I suppose it would have been all right if I hadn't left the e-mail from Carter lying around. It was pretty innocent, really. Just a big Photoshopped picture of Carter and me hugging, with “Gorilla My Dreams” in the subject line. Of course, there was the fact that their son was cozily arm in arm with a primate. Any illusions my parents had about my “cute Curious George” obsession pretty much vanished then. They called me down for a family meeting. We sat around the kitchen table while Mom tried to run interference.

Mom: There are so many nice, um,
people
you could date, honey.

Dad stared at me, his fists balled up on his knees. I could hear his jaw clenching like bone machinery.

Mom: Sometimes kids go through a phase. It doesn't mean it's a life choice.

Dad's fingers uncurled, revealing themselves like the small animals that live inside shells. He gripped his knees. He looked pale and murderous.

Mom: I'm sure those magazines under your bed belonged to someone else. Just because you have (whisper)
National Geographic
s … doesn't mean you're …

She couldn't finish. Dad stood, his fingers balled again and hanging at his sides.

Dad: No son of mine is going to be a Gorilla Lover.

When I got up to my room, the magazines and e-mail were gone, and in their place was a book called
God Wants to Fix You
. It had testimonials from other people my age, about how they'd completely kicked their unnatural, ape-loving urges. There were glowing, happy pictures of them being all popular at school and shit, pictures of them dating the right species. They wore a lot of sweater vests. I thought they looked creepy and sad and terribly lost. I tore out the pages and used them to make chap books of poetry. Then I IM'd Carter.
Things suck here. Miss you.

Twenty seconds later, he sent me back a photo of him in his jeans jacket that had
highly evolved
across the back.
Miss you, too
, it said.

My parents made a date for me with a girl named Yvonne. She was the daughter of a neighbor's best friend's sister in Ottawa.

“Oh, she's a sweet girl,” Mom chirped one morning while wiping the breakfast dishes clean with a cherry-print dish towel till they gleamed like a beauty queen contestant's runway smile. “She's got a little endocrine problem. Excess hair. You'll like her.”

Yvonne and I met at the food court in the mall. She had on a
kill barney
T-shirt, camo pants, knee-high lace-up boots, and a large rhinestone clip in her dyed-black hair that made her look like one of the Seven Samurai with a secret obsession for Claire's Accessories. She also had a faint beard and mustache. I liked her instantly. She was funny and smart and she had an interesting theory about global warming being caused by an overabundance of pop stars singing bad songs. It was like an ecosystem gone wild. There needed to be a correction, like a giant squid that only ate people with hair extensions and pimp wannabe track suits. Yvonne was easy to be around, and I wondered if I could date her. I wondered if maybe I could be wrong about the whole ape attraction thing.

A crumb of moo shu pork landed in the tufts of fuzz on her chin. I went to wipe it off. She held my fingers playfully in hers. I swallowed hard and concentrated on her slightly furry forearms. They could be sort of apelike. If I squinted.

“Something in your eye?” she asked.

“No,” I said quickly.

She licked her lips. “Do you want to kiss me?”

I stared at her for a few tense seconds, trying to imagine her nose wide and hard, her body covered in soft, black fur, her forehead pronounced as the ridged plastic packaging that hold cheap toy cars in place.

“Um, I … sort of?” I said to be nice.

She grinned wide and licked the rest of the moo shu off her fingers. “Yeah, me neither.”

And just like that, we were best friends.

 

It was Yvonne who talked me into going to prom. We were lying around in her room doing reader's theatre of bad song lyrics when the subject came up. Yvonne was taking a DJ named FlashGordonFive who only spun Queen songs from the movie
Flash Gordon.
Trust me, you have not lived till you've heard a camp classic aurally Benihanaed by a vinyl scratch master.

“Ryan, you so totally have to do this.” She'd been babysitting two ten-year-olds down the street, and her language was becoming Tweener Than Thou by the day.

“So totally?” I mocked. “OhmiGOD, Yvonne!”

She threw a pillow at me. “Shut your piehole, shithead. Better?”

“Much.”

“Flash told me about this movement. It's called Primate the Prom. It started in Kansas, after what happened to William Lamb.”

William Lamb was a band-boy-cute seventeen-year-old from some small town in Kansas. He had a gorilla boyfriend named Johnny. The two of them tried to make a statement by crashing their prom. A mob of kids in tuxes and prom dresses beat them bloody and tied them to the flagpole. They shaved Johnny of all his fur. And William Lamb ended up with serious brain damage. He won't date another ape. He won't date at all.

Yvonne pulled her hair out of its clip. It stuck out in all directions. “This year, nobody's sitting it out. Every ape couple across America is suiting up. Nick and Chimp are so there. Sally Bowers? From Dayton Day School? She's been dating a baboon for like, forever, and they just bought matching prom gowns.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Sounds cheesy.”

She slapped my arm. “It's social activism!”

“Okay, it's social activism cheesy.”

“Come on! It'll be sooooo fun! I'll be your bodyguard. Anybody messes with you, I will so totally kick their asses.”

I put a hand to my chest in mock horror. “The things they teach ten-year-olds to say these days.”

Yvonne stared at me for a long, uncomfortable thirty seconds. She shook her head. “You can hide but you can't run, Ryan. Not forever.”