A Dangerous Dress (37 page)

Josh tried to smile back. I could tell he wanted to be encouraging, even though he didn’t believe it. “I should have thought of that,” he said.

“But you didn’t,” I said. “So I guess I cannot trust you to do my show without me.”

“I guess not,” he said. “Ready for the prom?”

“Wait,” I said. I had another idea. “Do TV shows have fashion consultants?”

“Sure,” he said. “Costume designers, anyway.” Then he figured out where I was going. As I told you, Josh is a pretty smart guy. “But I’m not sure somebody with Celestine’s fashion credentials is necessarily the perfect costume designer for a show about Kirland, Indiana.”

“Oh.” I guess I looked disappointed.

“Although she did spend a year at Purdue,” Josh said.

I brightened up. “Plus she always loved wearing my boring Midwestern clothes,” I said.

Josh smiled. “Ask her to come for a vacation. We’ll see what we can figure out.”

I tried to picture Celestine on the loose in Kirland. Boilermaker boys, watch out.

“Thank you,” I said to Josh. Then I kissed him again. Only very carefully this time. Because I really didn’t want to have to keep fixing my makeup.

When I finished kissing him, he said, “Okay, ready?”

“Wait.” If Josh was getting tired of my ideas, it didn’t show. He was looking at me like I was the most interesting person on the planet. “
Survivor
doesn’t have writers, does it?”

“No,” Josh said.

“But somebody created
Survivor,
right?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think the person who created
Survivor
is rich?”

Josh laughed. Then he held up both hands. “Okay.”

“Okay, it can be a reality show?” I asked.

“Okay, I’ll think about it,” he said.

“Okay,” I said to Josh, and I hooked my hand under his arm. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” Josh said.

He stepped back and gave me a long look, from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Which made me instantly self-conscious. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Absolutely nothing. You’re perfect.” At which I relaxed. Because a guy cannot do much better than to tell you that you are perfect. “I just had an idea. If we did a reality show—”

Now he had my absolute undivided attention.

“—maybe we could do something about your dress. Like a contest. Whoever can figure out how your Grandma got it wins. It must be a great story.”

As I have told you, ever since I inherited it, I have been dying to know how Grandma got the dress. But I couldn’t figure it out. “I researched it,” I said. “I couldn’t find the answer.”

“You weren’t competing for a million dollars,” he said.

Which was true.

“If my Grandma’s dress is on the show, does that mean I have to be on it, too?”

Josh shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably. You’re part of the story.”

Hmm.
Notwithstanding my brush with TV stardom on Fox News—or perhaps because of it—I was pretty sure I did not want to be part of anybody’s primetime lineup.

I think Josh read my mind. Because he immediately said, “Maybe it doesn’t have to be about your Grandma’s dress. There must be other dangerous dresses out there. And other stories. Maybe we could go looking for the best dangerous-dress story.”

Wow.
I don’t know about you, but
I
would watch a TV show full of dangerous-dress stories. “Will the network buy that kind of show?”

Josh smiled. “We won’t know until we ask them.” Then he gave me a perfect tiny little kiss on the lips.

“Okay,” I said. “Now let’s go to the prom.”

W
e walked in.

Reinhardt’s restaurant is a huge place. If every seat was filled, it would probably hold ten percent of the population of Kirland, Indiana. Do not ask me what made old Mr. Reinhardt such an optimist to think that one in ten Kirlanders (which if you think about it is a much more dignified term than Bumfuckers) would show up at his restaurant every night. Most nights, there are an awful lot of empty seats. But it is the perfect size for high school proms. Which probably explains why the Kent prom is never held anywhere else.

The place was overflowing with color: colored balloons, colored streamers, and miles of colored tissue paper. I suppose the decorations for every prom are colorful, but this was like somebody put a giant Spiral Art in the middle of the floor, turned it on high, then dumped out the entire contents of Joe Vajda’s paint store and let everything fly everywhere.

Looking around that vast color-stained room, a new thought occurred to me. New, as in, a thought that I am absolutely sure had never occurred to me, ever, in my entire life. I wondered,
What would the Kent high school prom at Reinhardt’s restaurant look like on TV?

I’m not sure if Josh read my mind, but he looked around, too. “Nice,” he said.

A big banner at one end of the room said THE COLORS OF YOUR LIFE, which explained the overstimulated decorations. Obviously that was the theme of the prom. Every prom has a theme. Not just in Kirland. In America. I believe it is a federal law. I tried to think what song “the colors of your life” is from. Because in Kirland the theme is always a song lyric. And I did not recognize the lyric. Right away I felt old. Only twenty-five, and I was already so out of touch that I didn’t know what song the prom theme came from.

As Josh and I walked across the floor, I got a better look at the banner. In the bottom right corner, it said FROM “INVISIBLE,” BY CLAY AIKEN. Clay Aiken, as in
American Idol.
I guess Kirland is a very Clay Aiken kind of place. But I didn’t feel so bad anymore about not recognizing the lyric. Actually I felt kind of relieved.

Walking across the room made me remember my own prom. Everybody and their dates were color-coordinated. If the boy wore a powder-blue tuxedo, the girl wore a powder-blue dress. If the girl insisted on wearing a magenta gown, well then, her boyfriend was obligated to find magenta formal wear. For reasons I cannot explain, almost nobody wore black or white. I got stuck wearing brown. To match a boy I didn’t even like. The brown dress is yet another aspect of my prom that was undistinguished. But that is neither here nor there. Looking around, I saw that color-coordination was still the rule. For some reason, that made me happy.

Then I wondered if prom dates across the country color-coordinate. And if TV audiences would find this interesting. I bet they would. In fact, suddenly, everything about Kirland struck me as considerably more interesting than it had ever been before.

Okay not everything. At that moment, Mrs. Zuback walked up to me. She was my Social Studies teacher in the tenth
and
eleventh grades. She was not interesting in the tenth grade. She was even less interesting in the eleventh grade. And even seen through executive-producer eyes, she was still not interesting.

She recognized me. “Jane?”

“Hello, Mrs. Zuback,” I said.

She seemed puzzled. “Not your prom, is it?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Then she looked at me. “Nice dress,” she said, and walked away.

Well, even if she was not interesting, she got credit for noticing my dress. Although how could she not? I looked around at the seniors and their dates. Suffice it to say that among all the lilacs and mauves and taupes and limes and burnt siennas, nobody was wearing a dress like mine.

I wondered how many compliments I would get. A lot, I was sure. I was not being immodest. On the contrary, I think I am a pretty modest person, and ordinarily I do not expect to attract much attention. But this was not ordinarily. I was wearing my Grandma’s dress. Which, if I have done my job at all in writing this story, you understand by now is a dress the likes of which no one living in Kirland, Indiana has ever seen, excluding of course my immediate family. It is also, as I hope I have conveyed to you, a grown-up, sexual, dangerous dress. Just like it says in Josh’s screenplay. Even Scarlett Johansson dressed up for the Oscars would not look better than I looked in Grandma’s dress.

Okay maybe she would look a little prettier. Because I think Scarlett Johansson is prettier than me. But I don’t care whose dress she wears to the Oscars, even if it is from Mister Giorgio Armani himself, it could not look any better than the dress I had on.

No offense, Mister Armani.

In any event, I’m quite sure nobody at the Roger Wells Kent senior prom ever saw such a dress. Much less
me
in such a dress. Much less me in such a dress accompanied by very very handsome Josh Thomas, who was wearing, as I said, an incredibly dashing tuxedo (which if you are curious in French is
le smoking
) and shirt (
la chemise
) and bow tie (
le papillon
), all by, as I said, Mister Giorgio Armani. So I was certain we would attract attention.

Only we didn’t. Because you are not going to believe who was there, getting all the attention.

Nick Timko.

Cousin Mary’s Nick Timko. Nick Timko who got all sticky with Tina Kaminski at their senior prom twenty years ago, Nick who broke Mary’s heart and ran away and played baseball and never came back.
That
Nick Timko. Only now when people talk obsessively about Nick Timko—which, as I told you in the very first chapter, people still do—they can’t say he never came back. Hell has frozen over. Pigs have flown.
Nick Timko has come home.

Suddenly my idea about Marty the UPM did not seem crazy at all. Suddenly I knew that my uncle really
would
like Marty.

I looked at Josh. “I can do the show. I really can.”

He could tell I was serious. He gave me a huge hug.

In the middle of the hug, somebody tapped me on my shoulder. “That’ll be enough of that,” said a voice I remembered. I unwrapped myself from Josh and turned around. Mr. Demjanich, the high school principal, had his arms crossed and was looking at me disapprovingly. Then he recognized me. “Miss Stuart?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Not your prom, is it?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “You’re chaperoning.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Nice dress.” Then he told me about Nick Timko.

I already told you that Dave Stankowski died. And that Dave was the baseball coach at Kent forever, which means of course that he was Nick’s coach. Somehow Nick heard. He came back for the funeral. And I guess twenty minutes in the major leagues and twenty years in the minors is enough for anybody. At least it was enough for Nick. I mean, he’s got to be, what, thirty-eight years old? Although I must say, he looks awfully good for thirty-eight.

Even if I didn’t tell Josh that.

But anyway, apparently Nick is staying. He’s taking Dave Stankowski’s job coaching the baseball team. He’s also going to teach math. And as his very first official duty as an employee of Roger Wells Kent High School, he is chaperoning the senior prom.

Which is more than a little ironic, if you think about it.

I wonder if my cousin Mary knows yet.

I wonder if my
Uncle John
knows yet.

All of a sudden, because of Nick, things with Josh are just the littlest extra bit more complicated.

Do not get me wrong. Even though Nick is still a very handsome man, my interest in him is purely professional. Nick Timko moving back home is very possibly the single most interesting thing that has happened in Kirland. Not recently. Ever.

Imagine that somebody hired you to make a TV show about Amelia Earhart. Who as you probably know was a famous aviatrix. Which by the way has always sounded like a dirty word to me even though it isn’t. Anyway she went off on some historic flight, then she disappeared and was never heard from again.

Now imagine that after all those years, Amelia came flying back into town. You wouldn’t leave, right? You’d stick around. You’d want to find out where she had been, and what she had done, and you’d want to see what happens next.

I am not saying Nick Timko is any Amelia Earhart. He’s not. Then again, to a town like Kirland, he is. He is our hero and our villain, our Forrest Gump and our Freddy Krueger, all rolled into one. He is our very own prodigal son, and I know my grade school nuns are proud of me for remembering that story and using it appropriately in a modern context. In the Bible, the prodigal son is welcomed back with open arms. In Kirland . . . well, I am not so sure.

If Josh and I are going to create and executive produce and technical-advise and cowrite a whole TV show about Kirland . . . well, we can’t leave
yet.
First we have to see what happens. About Nick Timko, of course. But it’s not just Nick Timko. I know this is an odd thing for me to say. But all of a sudden, somehow . . . Kirland is a lot more
interesting
than it used to be.

I don’t know if our show will be a dramedy like Josh wants, or a reality show like I want. Maybe we’ll invent a whole new kind of program. After all, Kirland, Indiana is different from anyplace I’ve ever seen on TV. But whatever we do, I know a few things for sure. The show will be romantic, and mysterious, and glamorous. There will be wild adventures. I also suspect that, one way or another, Nick Timko will be in it. Also cousin Mary. Mary’s daughter Paris, too. Probably even Uncle John. Not to mention Marty the Hoosier, and Celestine. Perhaps even Josh and I might make an appearance.

And oh. Grandma and Grandma’s dress will absolutely, positively be in the show. Maybe they will even be the stars. Because let’s face it, without them there would be no story at all.

So. I have been to fabulous places. Josh has been to those places, too. We have survived Paris, and New York. Now we can go back to those fabulous places and do all kinds of fabulous things together. And who knows where the dress and its magic will take us next?

First, though, we have to survive the fabulousness of Bumfuck.