Prom (16 page)

I stood up, nodded like I was listening, and reached for the door.

“Oh, and Ashley—”

Now what? I stopped by the door.

“What do you think of the new Math substitute?”

“The insurance guy? He’s a hardass. Shouldn’t be allowed near kids.”

Mr. Banks smiled. “Glad to hear it. When you see Natalia, remind her that we’ll need an authorized excuse form tomorrow.”

Cell phones are no good if the person you’re calling doesn’t answer. I dialed Nat’s number so many times the battery wore down. At least I think it was the battery. TJ said the phone didn’t come with an instruction book.

As soon as the last bell of the day rang, I bolted. Didn’t stop running until I got to Nat’s.

I got there just in time to help her father carry her inside.

“It was the shoes,” Nat said slowly. She was lying on her couch with her right leg propped up on pillows. A light blue cast started at her ankle and kept going until it disappeared under her shorts.

“I came home to check on Grandma, then boom, the shoes and the stairs.” She waved her hand at the staircase. “Shooze ’n’ stairs. Stairsnshooze . . .”

“How many painkillers did they give you?” I asked.

She shrugged and giggled. “Don’t know.” She pointed to her cast. “Look, it matches my dress. You should break your leg, too, Ash. Then we could be twins.”

Nat’s father came downstairs with an afghan. He covered Nat with it. “Poor baby.”

Nat closed her eyes.

“How long until she can gimp around?” I asked.

“No walking. She needs a wheelchair.”

“Great!” I said. “So she’ll be at school tomorrow. That’s awesome. I can drive her if you want, if she’ll let me use her car. And I’m sure they’ll let me push her around from class to class. They’ll give us the elevator key so we can get up to the third floor.”

Nat’s dad sat down in the chair across from me. “Ashley.” His voice was slow and quiet, like he was getting ready to talk to someone who wasn’t quite there or didn’t speak English. “Natalia will not be at school tomorrow. Maybe Thursday, for a little while. But I’m not promising you.”

“But she has to be. The prom. What are we going to do?”

“Dance, dance, dance,” sang Nat, who had pulled the afghan up over her face.

“Everybody’s counting on her.”

“The prom will be fine. You and the other girls will do a good job. It’s just a dance.”

Nat’s hand came out from under the afghan. It pointed to the pile of books at the bottom of the stairs. “Take the notebook. The pink one.”

Mr. Shulmensky went through the pile. “This one?” he asked.

No answer from the afghan. She was out cold.

“That’s it,” I said as he handed it to me. The thing weighed a ton. “Who’s going to take care of her tomorrow? I could come and stay with her.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll take a sick day.”

“What about Grandma?”

He pointed overhead. There was a deep hum from the second floor, a vibrating machine sound like a metal cat purring. “My mother’s sewing. Natalia will sleep all afternoon. You might as well go home.”

As he closed the door, Nat started singing again.

The pink notebook was the biggest pain I ever had in my life. As soon as I touched it, the curse entered my veins. I was doomed.

Nat’s to-do list went on for pages, including:

I should have strapped on Nat’s shoes and thrown myself down a flight of stairs.

Instead, I turned to a blank page and wrote out my own list:

It was two-thirty Tuesday afternoon. Prom started at seven-thirty Friday night. We had almost eighty hours to pull this thing off, as long as we didn’t sleep.

I called Lauren and had her grab everyone for an emergency prom meeting. Six girls showed. I gave each one of them their own list of things to do from the pink notebook. I wound up being stuck with the gross stuff, like dealing with teachers and Gilroy and administrators. I told the girls that if I had to deal with that dumbass, I would quit right there, right then. Lauren volunteered for Gilroy duty. He liked her. She was a success story.

By the end of the meeting, we had seventy-five hours left.

Wednesday was a blur of phone calls and begging and making notes and making promises and getting promises. Every time I crossed an item off the list in the notebook, I had to write down something new. We bagged the idea of a coat check. The fire marshal was cool with our plan. Helium balloons were out. Streamers were in—the cheerleaders had extras from a pep rally that got cancelled. On and on and on. I didn’t have time for lunch and forgot to eat dinner—actually forgot. It suddenly made sense how all those girls in the prom magazines got skinny enough to fit into their dresses.

Ma kept my dress hanging in the kitchen where she could talk to it and touch it as often as she wanted. Whatever kept her happy and off my case. Dad scored the car he promised for Persia Faulkner. I gave Malcolm the details, he met the guy, saw the car, and told me that if I ever needed anything in the way of air-conditioning duct cleaning, he could get me a good deal with his dad. I was just happy Persia wasn’t going to poke out my eyeballs with her nail file.

I was on the phone to Nat every hour. The best time to talk to her was twenty minutes after she took her pain meds, after the pain stopped, but before the serious buzz began. I really should have only called her every four hours, but it was fun to listen to her when she was all messed up. She kept her grandmother baking pastries and was able to make a couple of calls for me. She also explained the whole “thong discussion.” I told her that it was nobody’s business what underwear girls had on, and it didn’t matter if they banned thongs in the Midwest somewhere, this is Pennsylvania, yo, cradle of liberty and all that, and we were not checking thongs at the prom.

Ashley Hannigan, prom organizing queen and defender of thongs. Who knew?

The worst thing was when Nat’s so-called prom date Jason gave me a note in the hall that said he couldn’t take Nat to the prom, because wheelchairs freaked him out, because his brother was in a wheelchair before he died of blood cancer. I heard from Monica that he was taking Evelyn Choo, who had two working legs and one of the cutest butts in school.

I waited until Nat was totally cooked on her meds to drop the bomb. She laughed and said she was pretty certain Jason was gay, and the only reason she was going with him was because she knew he wouldn’t bug her to get laid. Then she cried because she was going to be stuck in a wheelchair for her night of magic moments.

You can learn a lot about your best friend with the aid of legal pharmaceuticals.

TJ showed up all excited after dinner. He pulled me out on the front porch to talk.

First, we had a long kiss. Then he said, “You are the most babelicious, awesome girlfriend in the history of the world. Of the universe.”

“Wow,” I said. “What finally convinced you?”

“This.” He picked up a cardboard box from the porch swing. “It came to the apartment.”

“You opened it?”

“Yeah.”

“But it has my name on it.”

“So? It’s
our
place, right?” He reached in and pulled out a handful of condoms in colorful wrappers. He poured them back into the box like they were gold coins and kissed me again.

“Um, TJ, you don’t understand.”

“Ashley Hannigan, you are the hottest.”

The look on his face reminded me of a Labrador retriever again.

“Give me that.” I snatched the box out of his hands. There was a short note inside from the doctor at the free clinic. He wrote that I couldn’t tell anyone where these condoms came from or he’d get in trouble. There were one thousand condoms in the box. The doc hoped that would be enough.

I looked at TJ. “These aren’t for us, moron, they’re for the prom.”

He looked like I had smacked him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. “Can’t we keep some of them?”

“How many do you want to keep?”

“How about, ah, two hundred.”

“Ten.”

He sighed, grabbed a huge handful from the box, and stuffed them in his pocket.

I folded up the flaps of the box. TJ wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me close. “Want to come back with me and use a couple?”

“I can’t. I only have forty-seven hours left. You can stay if you want, but if you do, you have to help us fold the origami flowers.”

Just before I got to school the next morning, a 32 bus pulled into the curb right next to me. The door popped open, but nobody got off.

“Ashley? Is that what you’re wearing today? You’re going to catch your death.”

That voice again.

You think it’s embarrassing when your mother pulls the minivan over to talk to you, try having her behind the wheel of a full-sized city bus. There was no point running into the school and hiding. She’d find me.

I turned to see her in the driver’s seat, her belly bumping up against the wheel. “Yes, this is what I’m wearing, Ma. It’s summer.”

“It’s only May and it’s chilly. Come here, young lady.”

I stepped up into the stairwell. The passengers stared. A couple waved at me.

“You remember Mrs. Meadows?” Ma asked.

“Hello, Ashley,” said the black lady sitting behind the driver’s seat.

“Hello, Mrs. Meadows,” I said. She was a regular. “Nice to see you again.”

“I hear exciting things about your prom,” Mrs. Meadows said.

“I’m sure,” I said.

Ma pulled the sweater off the back of her seat. “Put this on so you don’t look cheap. Your boobs are spilling out.”

Mrs. Meadows smiled. “Your mother has a point, dear.”

I folded the sweater on top of my books.

“Don’t forget you need to make time for pictures tomorrow night,” Ma said. “Your aunts are all coming with their cameras.”

“Maaa!”

“Pictures are important,” Mrs. Meadows said.

“And your aunt Sharon wanted me to ask if you filled out those applications she got for you.”

“I’ve been a little busy, don’t you think?”

“I hear they’re hiring again at the soup factory,” Mrs. Meadows said.

The school bell rang.

“I’m going to be late,” I said.

“Did TJ pick up his tux yet?” Ma asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you better check,” Ma said. “Knowing him, he’ll ‘forget’ to pick it up or some other crap.”

Mrs. Meadows shook her head slowly. “I’ve heard about that boy.”

“She talks to you about TJ?”

“Mrs. Meadows understands,” Ma said.

“I raised seven of my own,” Mrs. Meadows said.

“Hey, lady,” shouted a guy from the back. “I got places to go.”