How I Found the Perfect Dress (2 page)

“Santa's not
really
real, though, is he, Daddy?” she'd asked, about a week before the holiday. The three of us were in Christmas central, a.k.a. the East Norwich Mall, shopping for presents for Mom. “He's more
magic
real, right?”

“Of course he's real.” No way was Dad gonna be the Santa-killer; Mom would go ballistic. “Where do you think all the goodies come from?”

“Santa's—workshop?” Tammy answered hesitantly, looking around. The sickening quantities of merchandise heaped everywhere we turned seemed to suggest otherwise, unless Santa had a serious collection of credit cards.

“
Is
he real, Morgan?” Tammy turned to me, desperate for a straight answer. In my sixteen and three-quarters years on the planet, I guess I'd acquired a reputation for being blunt. “Is Santa Claus true or not?”

Dad gave me the evil eye, but I had no intention of being the Santa-killer either. Not if I wanted to survive junior year. “Lots of things are true that people think are not,” I'd answered, not looking her in the eye. I was kind of the wrong person to ask at that point, though, after what happened to me last summer in Ireland. No biggie, just me riding a bike across the Irish countryside, finding out I was a legendary half-goddess, undoing a bunch of magical faery enchantments and oh, yeah, finding the love of my life. Colin. He'd probably forgotten all about me by now.

Maybe it was the snow on the ground or all the Christmas-in-Connecticut décor everywhere, but my summer adventure in Ireland was starting to feel very long ago and far away, as if I'd dreamed the whole thing. Maybe that's why all I'd wanted to do on Christmas Eve was stay up late by the twinkling lights of our Christmas tree, reading and rereading the book Colin had given me the day I left Ireland.

The tree was adorned from top to bottom with angels and cherubs and winged, fantastical beings of every kind. The book was called
The Magical Tales of Ireland
.

Great read, if you believed in faeries. Even better if you'd actually met some.

 

 

“
Ч
ou Couldn't get her a basketball hoop for the driveway? A paint-by-numbers set? A board game that wasn't about
princesses
?”

“She gave me a
list,
Helen. She gave me her list for Santa and that's what she wanted and that's what I got. That princess stuff is all they have in the stores anyway.” Dad was driving, and he pulled away from the red light just extra-fast enough to show he was annoyed. “Next year,
you
do the Christmas shopping.”

Always a pleasure to be trapped in the backseat, listening to the marital discussions. They'd been particularly juicy the last couple of weeks, ever since Dad had been downsized from his job. It's not like we were out of money or anything. First Bank of Connecticut doesn't lay a vice president off right before Christmas without giving him a fat goodbye check. But who was used to having Dad around all the time? Not me. Not Tammy. And definitely not Mom.

“That's
not
all they have.” I could hear Mom shifting into higher gear along with the Subaru. “They have blocks. They have Legos. They have—I don't know! Decks of cards! This princess thing has become an obsession. It's not healthy.” Mom nodded in my direction. “Morgan was never like that.”

That my mother should hold me up as the poster child for healthy psychological development was a sign of just how much things had changed in my house since the summer.

“Morgan was obsessed with other things.” Before I could say,
Make a right
, Dad flipped on the signal and turned onto Sarah's street. I was surprised he remembered where it was. “What about Lamb Chop?”

True. I loved Lamb Chop as a kid.

“Exactly!” Mom would not be stopped. “Lamb Chop was age-appropriate. It wasn't a show about a giggly princess whose goal in life is to twirl around in a flowy pink dress, waiting for some muscle-bound prince to show up.”

No,
I thought,
it was a show about a middle-aged woman who kept a sock on her hand for company.
“What's wrong with flowy dresses?” I threw out, just to keep the argument stoked after I left the car. “A dress is just a dress, you know? It's your attitude that counts.”

Mom slammed her lips shut, but I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that Tammy wouldn't grow up to be president now because her plastic princess tiara was slowly turning her brain into glitter.

Dad pulled up in front of Sarah's house. “We'll pick you up at six.” He sighed. “When do you take your road test again?”

“I can't take it until May, Dad.” We'd been over this a zillion times and I knew the rules by heart. “I have to have my permit for, like, four months before I'm allowed to take the road test. And I still have to do my fifty hours of driving instruction. And even if I pass the road test, I can't have any friends in the car with me for the first six months of my license because I'll still only be seventeen.”

“For Pete's sake, why don't they just raise the driving age to thirty?” Dad grumbled. “Soon you'll have to be eighteen to cross the street unescorted. . . . Damn bureaucrats keep adding new rules every day. . . . G
rumble grumble grumble. . .
”

“But think of senior year!” Mom cut Dad off in midgrumble. “By then you won't have to depend on us for rides everywhere.”

“Does that mean I'm getting my own car?”

Deafening silence from the front seat of the Subaru. I got out.

“Have fun with Sarah,” Mom called after me. “Play with some power tools or something!”

p
ower tools?
p
lease.
m
Ч former best-friend-forever Sarah was in charge of the planning committee for the junior prom, and that's what this get-together was all about.

A bit of background, here: The East Norwich senior prom was typically held at one of the local snooty country clubs. It was thrown by the PTA in full überprom style, with stretch limos, formal wear, photographers, the whole nine yards.

The student-thrown junior prom was originally a baby version of the senior prom, but over the years it had evolved into a kind of half-prom, half-prank spoof of the seniors' ritzy event. The eighties fashion prom was tolerated by school officials, even with all the slutty Madonna outfits (the boys were no better; most of them came as Michael Jackson or Prince, take your pick). The bathing-suits-only prom was more controversial, with parents complaining about all the skin and students complaining that the pool was kept off-limits.

Strangely it was last year's ASPCA benefit prom, where every attendee went home with an adopted puppy or kitten, that sent the school administration over the edge:

 

Or so said the memo from the principal, distributed to all juniors the first week of school. “‘Eccentric'? ‘Subversive'?” Sarah had gone wild when she'd read it. “Just because we might throw a prom that's actually
interesting
?”

With the prom planner on board to make sure this year's bash was nothing more or less than your typical annual festival of teenage girls in flowy princess dresses and teenage boys in search of a six-pack, the prom committee was reduced to offering opinions about food, music and décor, and selling tickets at school. I didn't care. To me, being on the committee was just a way to get some face time with Sarah. Now that she had a boyfriend, her fascination with couples-oriented social events had skyrocketed.

Last year I'd been the one with the boyfriend. I'd been the one who acted like a jerk. To her credit, Sarah had hated Raphael from the start.

I didn't get how right she was until after Raphael dumped me on the last day of sophomore year (after which I hacked off all my hair in a broken-hearted tantrum). It would have been nice to have Sarah's shoulder to cry on about that, but I'd let the friendship slide because of my all-Raphael, all-the-time attitude. Now we were slowly building it back. Going to prom committee meetings was a small price to pay.

Sarah's boyfriend, Dylan, couldn't have been more different from Raph. He was a junior like us, smart and nice and genuinely crazy about Sarah from what I could tell. His only flaw was that he could be very solitary sometimes. We'd all learned that when Dylan went off on his own, you didn't follow him around asking what's wrong. He just needed his space.

Also—and I don't mean to sound mean about this, because it's just the truth—he was kind of short.

Now, personally, I have no problem with short. It's just that short guys tend to go after short girls, which Sarah most definitely was not. Sarah was tall—five feet ten-and-a-half inches in her bare feet, with good posture to boot. So it was just funny that she ended up with Dylan. Some kids made cracks about it, but most people thought they were all the more cool for not caring about the height difference. Sarah was one of the star players on the girls' intramural basketball team and Dylan played drums in a band, so that helped in the coolness department too.

(I don't know how it is at other schools, but at East Norwich, if you're already a little bit cool, like Sarah and Dylan, and then you do something potentially uncool, it just makes you cooler than you were before. You have to have that starter cool first, though. Otherwise, no matter what you do, it's just a downward spiral.)

Anyway, Sarah having a boyfriend made her a bit more forgiving of my atrocious behavior last year. Still, when the fall term started, we were awkward with each other for weeks. I guess she wanted to be one-hundred percent convinced that Raph and I were permanently broken up and that I was, maybe not the same old Morgan but a new, older and wiser version of the person she used to think was worthy of being her best friend.

That's BF, not BFF. I was pretty sure the forever part was history now.

Snacks Were another big draw of the prom Committee meetings, and the other members, Clementine and Deirdre, were halfway through a huge bag of Cheez Doodles by the time I arrived. Clementine and Deirdre were the kind of slightly creepy best friends who were always, always together. They'd been that way since middle school. At the moment, they even had matching orange lips.

Let's talk about corsages,
I prayed, as I took my seat at the dining room table. Unlike my family's oversized, open-plan house, Sarah's house had a nice cozy dining room with French doors at either end so people could sit and talk in privacy.
Let's pick color schemes. Anything but the big, bad question . . .

“So, who's taking everybody to prom?” Deirdre squealed, like she didn't start every meeting by asking the same fekkin' thing.

“I think Tommy Vasquez is gonna ask me,” Clementine confided. “His friend Jordan told me that Tommy wanted to know if I had a date yet. If he asks me, what should I say? Should I say yes?”

“Tommy
is
cute,” Deirdre said. “But don't say yes right away. 'Cause nobody knows yet who Mike Fitch will ask. And if he asked you, you wouldn't want to be taken already, right?”

“Oh my God, Mike Fitch!” Clementine fanned herself and pretended to faint. In terms of popularity, Mike Fitch was definitely the rock star of the junior class, but in a good way. Unlike Raphael's egomaniacal reign of terror over the seniors, Mike actually deserved to be popular. He was funny and kind and gorgeous, with pale blond hair and big brown eyes, plus he was the lead guitarist in Dylan's band. The fact that it was a Kiss tribute band just added an extra touch of ironic sex appeal to the guy. Who would guess a good egg like Mike could do such a killer Gene Simmons impersonation?