How I Found the Perfect Dress (4 page)

“What a racket,” my dad muttered, palming the wheel of the Subaru. “They cancel all the driver's ed classes at your school, and now this guy wants five hundred bucks! Maybe I should teach you myself.”

A few weeks had passed since the vampire Santa incident, and Dad and I were more or less on speaking terms again. But this “maybe I'll teach Morgan to drive” kick was a new development and one that I wasn't too thrilled about, frankly. It was because Dad found out that Kappock's charged five hundred dollars for the mandatory fifty hours of training. In his words, “Five hundred bucks saved is five hundred bucks earned,” and since his job search was going nowhere fast, refusing to pay for my driving lessons was going to be the most money he'd earned in a while.

But he actually had a point about the driver's ed classes at school. The way Dad explained it to me, the whole original purpose of driver's ed was to make new drivers safer. Then someone figured out that the way to make new drivers safer is to make them older, since eighteen year olds have far fewer accidents than sixteen and seventeen year olds. So the school canceled the classes in the hopes that sixteen and seventeen year olds would continue to take the bus and nag their parents for rides until senior year, at least.

Follow the logic, if you dare: There's no driver's ed in my high school anymore, because the whole original purpose of driver's ed can best be achieved by not having it. Proof that logic does not always make sense.

Anyway, today I was going to Kappock's to see the required gruesome don't-let-this-happen-to-you movie about accidents caused by drunken drivers, but my actual behind-the-wheel training would have to wait until Dad got either a job or a lot more patience.

“I can wait for
real
lessons, Dad,” I answered, sweet as pie. “You'll get a job soon and then the money won't matter.”

Dad laughed a single loud snort of a laugh, the kind that meant
The money won't matter when you're the one earning it, kid
. “There are the rules in a book,” he said, pulling up in front of the driving school, “and there are the rules of the road. Books and classes can only teach you so much. Remember that.”

“I'll keep it in mind, Pop.” Before I dashed out of the car I kissed him on the cheek, which shut him up. My dad's pretty funny sometimes. Mom says we're exactly alike, but personally I don't see it.

 

 

U
npretentious would be one WaЧ to describe Kappock's Driving Academy. Skanky would be another. Metal folding chairs, gray carpet and stained linoleum on the floor, a pull-down movie screen mended with clear packing tape.

“Looks kinda bullet-riddled, doesn't it?” I could hear the familiar smirk before I turned around to see it with my own eyes. “It's good to see you, Morgan.” Raph grinned at me like old times. “Ready to get behind the wheel?
Vroom!
”

If I could have
vroomed
far, far away from him, I would have. I'd been doing a bang-up job of avoiding him at school all year. Now it was the first day of February. Would there be six more weeks of winter or an unexpected thaw? Only the groundhog knew for sure.

“What are you doing here?” I said, not very nicely. “You already know how to drive.”

“I racked up some points on the ol' license-a-roonie,” Raph said, spinning a metal folding chair backward and straddling it, facing me. “I ran a red light in Danbury and got busted. My dad said I had to take a defensive driving class before the insurance on the car goes up.”

Like his dad couldn't afford the car insurance. Raph's family was pretty well off, even for East Norwich.

“Good thing we're not in the same class,” he added. He had an out-of-season tan, like he'd been on a beach vacation recently or in a tanning booth. “That'd be gnarly, huh?”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“You look nice,” he said. “Sophisticated.”

I stopped myself before the old Morgan-on-cruise-control panted a grateful,
thanks
. From most people, a compliment is a compliment. From Raph, it was a judgment passed down from the ultimate position of authority.
You look nice
meant
You usually don't look this good; why don't you try harder?
It meant,
My opinion about how you look is more important than yours
. It meant,
The way you look is not about you. It's about what I think of you.

And you could never complain about the condescension, because then he'd just say: “Most girls like it when a guy says they look nice! What's wrong with you?” It was a tricky game, and one I'd always lost.

For the record, Raphael had reacted with undisguised horror the first time he saw me with my hair chopped off, back in September. “What happened? Did you have chemo or something?” he'd blurted out. Then he inched away, like he thought I might be contagious or still radioactive.

By now my self-inflicted buzz cut had grown into a soft, short pixie. Mom said I looked “gorgeous, like Mia Farrow.” The reference was lost on me, I have to admit.

Raph's compliment hung in the air between us. I glanced around. A few other students had wandered into the room, but there was nobody I recognized except Mr. Kappock himself, visible through the glass wall of his office. “Kar-Krazy Kappock” was an East Norwich celebrity, mostly because there were advertisements with his picture on them plastered all over town.

Raph rocked the metal folding chair back and forth, which made an annoying metallic squeak. “I went out with Terry Lindsey a few times, but she talks too much,” he offered, like I would care. “So, are you seeing anybody?”

I looked him right in the eye. I was cool, calm, one-hundred percent goddesslike in my ability to gaze without blinking.

“Not a soul,” I said. “Right now, I don't see anyone at all.”

He got it, after a minute.

 

 

 

sarah had a basketball game the next daЧ. i Went, of course. It was a big deal to Sarah, and anyway, what else did I have to do with my Saturday night?

I did have a paper due for social studies on the differences between Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, but every time I sat down to work on it, I kept writing stupid stuff instead:

 

So basketball it was. Girls' basketball was kind of a big deal locally, since UConn was famed for its women's basketball teams and there was real scholarship money at stake for the top high school players. Saturday night's game would be a good one: East Norwich against Old Southport.

“Go, 'Wiches! Go, 'Wiches!” Our girls jogged onto the court, fists in the air, and the East Norwich battle cry went up. It made me imagine the whole team whipping out their broomsticks and pointy black hats and flying around the gymnasium. Why not? Stranger things had happened. At least, to me they had.

I'd spent twenty minutes waiting in line for a hot dog, so I still needed to find someplace to sit. I looked around the gym for a familiar face. Clementine and Deirdre were there, together of course, sitting one row behind Mike Fitch and his A-list crowd of guys. Tommy Vasquez—the one Deirdre thought might ask her to prom—was with Mike's group, but he didn't seem interested in anything except devouring the extra-large carton of popcorn in his lap.

“Morgan! Hey! Sit over here!”

It was Sarah's boyfriend, Dylan. As usual, he was defying conventional notions of coolness by sitting apart from his friends, all the way down front—the better to cheer for his woman.

“I saved you a seat!” he yelled to me. At least I thought that's what he yelled. The pregame noise in the gymnasium was deafening. But then he patted the balled-up coat on the bleacher next to him and made a “come on down” gesture. I fought my way through the crowd to where he was sitting, and he pushed his coat over to make room for me.

“Awesome,” he said. “Sarah told me to make sure you got a good seat, if you came.”

I smiled, but my feelings were all over the place: I was pleased to know that I still mattered that much to Sarah, sad to think that she thought I might not come, embarrassed to admit that I almost didn't. “That's nice,” I said. “Thanks.”

“No prob!” he said, eyes locked on the referee. “Sarah says you're like a rabbit's foot: You always bring her good luck—okey dokey, here we go!”

The ref blew the whistle and the first half began. It was a good game from the start, but more interesting to me than the game itself was watching Dylan watch Sarah play.

“Shhhh!” he hissed when Sarah was trying to get possession of the ball, as if a high school gym packed full of crazed fans could be shushed quiet. “Go Sarah! Get it get it get it get it, she got it, go baby go baby GO!” When Sarah jumped high and slam-dunked the ball into the net, and the home team crowd screamed and chanted,
Go 'Wiches, go 'Wiches!,
Dylan looked like he was about to go airborne with pride.

Either the dude really digs basketball or this is a man in love
, I thought. He couldn't take his eyes off her. Sarah was oblivious, her concentration totally on the game.

Forsaking my usual too-cool-to-act-like-a-fool attitude, I followed Dylan's example and cheered my brains out for the'Wiches. When Sarah scored we bounced up and down and slapped high fives. At halftime, Mike Fitch came down to deliver a couple of extra-large Cokes, unasked.

“Nice lungs on you two.” Mike handed us the drinks. “You must be parched. Drink up.”

“Mike, you know Morgan, right?” Dylan said it in the most casual way, but the odds of me knowing who Mike Fitch was were much greater than the odds of Mike knowing who I was.

“Not well enough.” Mike grinned. “We should hang out sometime. Later, sports fans!”

Another girl might have read something into that exchange, but I knew better. Mike was always nice to everyone. Being charming was part of his charm. Go figure.

The 'Wiches won, largely thanks to Sarah's fierce play. I watched Dylan hug her afterward, as she stood panting in her sweat-soaked uniform, and felt something heavy form inside my chest. You could call it jealousy, I guess, or your standard third-wheel feeling. It's just that I wanted somebody to look at me the way Dylan had been looking at Sarah all night. With that kind of devotion, so strong and so real that it wouldn't matter if we had to wait a year or two to be together, even if there was an ocean of oceans keeping us apart.

In the not-so-distant days when my parents were getting along better, my dad used to call my mom Apple—“because she's the apple of my eye,” he'd explained to Tammy, who still found it confusing that Mom's real name was Helen and not Mom. I'd always thought that expression sounded gross—who'd want to put an apple in his eye? But now I understood.

I'm always looking at you,
is what it meant.
When I gaze out at the world, you're in the middle of everything I see.

Sarah, Dylan, the girls on the team and all their respective boyfriends went out to celebrate, but I caught a ride home with Sarah's parents. They were chatty and friendly as always, but as they drove off and I stood in the dark on the frozen lawn in front of my house, I felt invisible.

I was the apple of no one's eye.

 

 

When i got inside i sat down at mЧ Computer and did something I'd wanted to do for a while, but hadn't had the nerve.

 

 

Kind of a sucky beginning. Groundhog Day, the totally bogus holiday. Yet maybe it was fitting, since it was a totally bogus e-mail I'd written so far:

 

 

I deleted all that crap and started over, leaving out my pathetic true feelings this time. But then I didn't know what to say, so I looked up groundhogs on the Internet.

 

 

Delete, delete, delete. Then, kind of without thinking, I wrote this.