Prom (4 page)

“A little help, please, Ash,” Lauren said.

I put my hand on Nat’s arm, the way that lady cop had done to Crane, and gently tugged her to her feet. I put her purse over her shoulder and picked up her books. Before I led her away from the table, I snatched the Krimpet for myself.

Halfway through my last class of the day, Amer Gov, all us seniors had to go to the auditorium for an emergency assembly. It was hot there, and as loud and mean as a club where the headliner act is two hours late because the lead singer is passed out in the dressing room. Boys were itching for a fight, girls were hungry for blood.

Principals should put this on their wall: Don’t Mess with Prom.

Our class was the last one there, so I had to take a front-row seat. Big Mike Whelan tapped my shoulder. He asked me for gum and I said I didn’t have any, then he told me that Miss Crane had secretly married a South American drug lord and the prom money bought them new silverware for their house in the Bahamas. The guy next to him, Hoang Tran, said that was stupid. Drug lords got their silverware for free.

The curtains finally opened. Most people cheered, some booed. Natalia and the prom committee sat in folding chairs on the stage. They looked like wrinkled paper dolls. Banks stood in front of the microphone, with Gilroy next to him. Two security guards walked out of the wings and stood at the front corners of the stage. They were already sweating.

Banks tapped the mike. “Quiet, people.”

The crowd got louder.

“Listening is an opportunity, people.”

A Hacky Sack landed on the stage.

Gilroy grabbed the mike. “You have two seconds to settle down or you don’t find out what’s going on with your prom. Your choice.”

The noise died. I turned around. People were leaning forward in their seats, girls who spent a ton of cash on their dresses, guys who scored really good limos or were pissed that a sure-thing date just blew up.

“That’s better. Listen up and be respectful.” Gilroy handed the mike to Banks.

Banks kept it short. Miss Crane had been charged with misappropriating (aka stealing) most of the money for our prom. She had been having personal problems (that got a laugh) and the stress of the situation got to be too much.

“Are we going to get our money back?” a boy shouted.

“Is the prom cancelled?” demanded a girl.

Questions flew out of every part of the auditorium: why couldn’t there be a prom, how could this happen, could the students sue the district, was Crane out on bail, what did she spend it on, did Mr. Boyd steal money from the baseball team, was this whole thing a hoax, wasn’t it a law we were owed a prom, was Crane coming back to give the final, did the prom committee pocket any cash, why did our school suck so bad?

Nat slid down in her seat a little. She looked like an eighteen-year-old girl strapped in the electric chair, waiting for the warden to throw the switch.

Banks raised his hands and Gilroy walked to the front edge of the stage. (That’s when he saw me, I know it.) The questions quieted down.

Banks said the administration and the prom committee were “exploring their options,” which was a fancy way of saying we were screwed. He warned us all not to get emotional. Then he cleared his throat and he apologized.

“I am so sorry that this has happened to you. You all deserve better, much better. I am proud of each one of you in this room. You show up for class, you do your homework, you follow most of the rules, most of the time. Your lives are hard, but you keep showing up, doing what’s right, working for a better future. The very least we can do is to make sure you have a prom to celebrate. We will do everything we can to make that happen.”

Was he lying? I couldn’t tell.

Banks and the committee girls disappeared off the back of the stage and Gilroy took over the microphone, armed with his clipboard. He read off the list of people who had detention, including me.

“If your name was on this list, you need to proceed directly from the auditorium to the cafeteria when the bell rings and sign in for detention. And I see you, Ashley Hannigan. No excuses. You are running out of days to make these up.”

Busted. That’s why front row seats stink.

“I want everyone to remain seated until the bell. Thank you for your time and attention, ladies and gentlemen.”

He walked off. The security guards folded their arms over their bellies and dared us to make them reach for their walkie talkies.

Is there anything stupider than detention?

No, there is not. Thank you.

The first thing I did when I finally got out of detention was to look for Nat’s car. It wasn’t in the parking lot. It wasn’t crumpled up against any telephone poles, either. That was good. I used a pay phone to call her house, but all I got was a busy signal, over and over and over again. I guessed that was good, too. Either Nat was on the phone sobbing to one of her prom comm friends, or her grandmother was making crank calls to the government again. I hoped it was Nat.

I grabbed a nerd coming out of the building, one of those kids who stays after for fun, and asked him what time it was. He told me and I cursed, and he ran away juggling his books and his backpack and his Mace pocket spray.

Shit.
I had missed the bus and was going to be late for work. Third time in a week. Very bad. If my life was a movie, I could hitchhike and get a lift from a nice old grandma who would die the next week and leave me a million dollars in her will because I was polite. But really, if they turned my life into a movie, it’d be a horror/sick comedy/depressed teen/gurl gonebad flick. Besides, nobody picked up hitchhikers in my neighborhood. So I was going to be late, and I’d have to scrub toilets or pick the diapers out of the ball pit.

Detention always wrecked everything.

And then . . . my knight in shining armor honked.

Okay, so TJ wasn’t riding a horse, he was driving his buddy’s rusted El Camino, the one with a plastic window and the missing third gear.

“Your ma told me you had to go to work—” he started.

He stopped for a sec because I crawled in and kissed him.

“—and you might need a ride.”

Silence . . . almost silence, with wet kissing sounds.

“Good idea?” he finally asked.

I buckled my seat belt. “Awesome idea. You’re the best and I’m sorry I was a bitch this morning. Now, drive or my boss’ll kill me.”

He floored it and I grabbed the dash. We tore through the light at Bonventura just as it turned red and didn’t hit anything. TJ shifted like a NASCAR driver, so smooth you could hardly tell about the third gear. We made it halfway there before we had to stop at a light that was really, really red.

“Here.” TJ tossed a brown paper bag in my lap.

I unrolled it. “What’s this?”

“I thought you might be hungry. I made you a sandwich.”

A peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich with the peanut butter spread all the way to the edges the way I liked, and cut into two triangles. Hiding underneath the sandwich was a small yellow flower, a marigold.

“Stop, honey, I can’t shift with you in my lap.” He tried to sound cranky but he wasn’t.

I sat back and ate my perfect sandwich and tucked the marigold in my hair. We only had a couple blocks left. I asked if he could pick me up after work, but he couldn’t because the car had to be back by eight. That was cool. We’d have our own car soon enough. He promised not to go out and party, because he was beat and needed to sleep.

We wound up making out so long in front of work I was really, really late, but it was totally worth it.

That was me.

You’ve probably been inside an EZ-CHEEZ-E, but just in case you are one of the lucky ones, let me describe it to you.

Take a warehouse. Cover up the asbestos with duct tape. Throw paint at the walls. Lay cheap linoleum over the concrete floor. Stick a kitchen out by the back door. Build a plastic gym with tubes and bouncy rooms and a ball pit by the front window. (Do not go near the ball pit. I warn you.)

Fill the left side of the room with arcade games, the louder the better. Cram fifty tables and three hundred chairs into the other half. Now shove ten of those tables together and build a platform against the far wall. That’s the EZ-CHEEZ-E Showtime Stage, where they force the waitresses wearing animal costumes—Rompin’ Ratty (me), Happy Hamster, Buddy Bunny, Mighty Mole, Helpful Hedgehog, and Pretty Possum—to sing and dance. All for minimum wage.

The rat costume sucked. The fur was matted down like the shag carpet around my grandma’s toilet. It smelled like old cheese and mothballs on the outside and sweat—other people’s sweat—on the inside. I didn’t have to wear the paws, but the head was required—a hollowed-out foam block with fake eyes, felt ears, and wire whiskers. When the head was on, I looked out through the nostrils. Being seen on the floor without your head would get you fired.

It was tempting, let me tell you.

And the tail. I hated that tail. Kids see a rat’s tail and they just gotta pull it. So the tail was reinforced with a metal plate, which meant my rear was always drooping. TJ never worried about anybody hitting on me while I was dressed as Rompin’ Ratty.

A new Merry Mouse costume was on order. I was hoping they’d give it to me. Merry Mouse had a lightweight head that turned from side to side, fur that sponged clean, a short tail, armpit vents, and a quick-release bathroom flap. When I told Ma how psyched I was about all this, she looked at me funny and said I should not go around telling people that I was excited about being a mouse instead of a rat.

“Hannigan! Table eight is hungry!”

The manager was gone before I could look out my nostrils.
“Ocho!”
shouted the cook.

Happy Hamster, aka Junie from school (who got the cutest costume because she fit into a size two) grabbed my pies. “Hold out your arms,” she said.

I put my rat arms out straight and she loaded me up with two pepperoni, one cheese, and one sausage for the birthday girl.

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t they order two cheese?
Dos con queso
?”

The cook shook his head. “No. One cheese. Four pizza. You tell me.”

“Okay, whatever. Somebody point me at the doors.”

Happy Hamster twisted my shoulders until I faced the right direction, then gave me a little push. “Watch your tail.”

I romped into the dining room. That’s what rats did. Rats romped.

It was mad busy for half an hour because a couple of baseball teams and some obnoxious kids from the suburbs came in, but then it slowed down. The birthday party at table eight was a pain in my tail every five minutes. They sent back three of their pizzas, claimed their soda was flat, and whined that their ice cream had freezer burn.

When I gave the bill to the table eight dad, he lost it, screaming at the top of his lungs that I had screwed up their order and he wasn’t going to pay for a thing. His face was red and pig-sweaty.

I wanted to ask him why he was too cheap to pay for his daughter’s birthday party, but I couldn’t do that, not with his kid and all her friends watching. I told him if I comped him the food, it would come out of my paycheck, and besides, they ate every bite so how bad could it have been?

His wife was trying to get my attention, shaking her head “no” just a little, trying to get me to back off. I knew that if I pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, I’d find black-and-blue marks. He was that kind of guy.

The dad started yelling to a family coming in the front door that they should leave while they could, that EZ-CHEEZ-E was a rip-off. I told the dad that maybe we should talk about this someplace else, that his kid was crying. The dad yelled even louder, telling the whole world that I had ruined his daughter’s special day.

My manager knocked over two chairs trying to get to us. While he was trying to calm down the dad, somebody pulled my tail. I turned around to see who it was and knocked over a pitcher of root beer, which flooded the table and poured on my sneakers. I turned around the other way to see what happened and knocked what was left of the birthday cake off the table.

I got sent home early.

Junie stole bus fare for me from the tip jar.

It was almost seven o’clock when the bus let me off at the end of my block.

Technically, we lived just over the city line from Philly. This let our parents pretend the schools were better. It was a decent neighborhood. The houses were small, but most of them were in good shape. They weren’t row houses; each family had its own yard. This was a big deal.

On that quiet, normal street, our house stood out.

Ever seen somebody with nice-looking hands, strong hands, except right on top of the biggest knuckle there’s a nasty wart like some kind of mutant cauliflower, and it’s oozing, and it has a black hair curling out of it? You know how it makes you feel to see something like that?

My house could make you feel like that.

Hundreds of dead toy soldiers were scattered on the steps and the porch, some melted in battle. Easter lights were still tacked up around the front window, another horrible idea my mother stole from some horrible magazine in her doctor’s waiting room. A stack of comic books and a crumpled package of Oreos were on the porch swing.

Don’t think it was quiet. Noise tied the house together like duct tape around a busted water heater: TV in the living room, hammering in the basement, a radio somewhere, and, over the top of everything, my parents yelling. Not yelling at each other. No, they were just yelling to be heard.