While admiring the Spring scenery around me, I fetched the car keys from my bag and was feeling ready to get back home. But when I arrived at my car, something was preventing me from doing so.
Aaron Ingram—dark hair, Christmas green eyes and all—was leaning on the driver’s door of my car. He had his hands behind his back and was resting on them casually. He was looking up toward the sky, that hint of daydreaming written on his face, but then he noticed me and smiled.
“Hey, there you are,” he said, as though we had made plans to meet here.
“Hello,” I said back, my voice skeptical. Aaron and I were by no means complete strangers to each other. We had known each other for years. We’d had some classes together, some school projects, some chats here and there. Still, a nervous tickle found its way along my skin at the sight of him standing there, the sight of him smiling at me.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Not bad.” I quickly tried thinking of something else to say. “I always feel braindead after days like this.”
“Yeah, I hear that. Can’t wait to get out of here.”
He seemed so at ease and like this was normal, like we talked to each other every day. I tried to come off as relaxed as he was, but my mind was racing, trying to figure out what was going on.
“So,” he said. He adjusted his position a bit while still leaning back on his hands. “I was talking to some people, and I figured out you were free.”
What Aaron had just said made no sense to me. He’d been talking about me? With other people? I couldn’t think of what to say in response, the confusion erasing any potential words.
Aaron adjusted again, but this time he brought his hands out in front of him. He was holding a bunch of flowers—an assortment of wildflowers that grew around the school. The collection of poppies and little blue blossoms immediately captured my attention. When I realized how his eyes were on me intently, the confusion I’d been experiencing transformed into a daze.
“Drew, do you want to go to Prom with me?”
Aaron Ingram was asking me to Prom. A mix of emotions began swirling around in my body, like there were dancers in there, pirouetting rapidly. The daze remained with me, and now, on top of that, I was beginning to feel elated. But then, a reluctance surfaced suddenly.
“Wow. Prom. Well, the thing is . . .” My words came out fast and uneven. “I had plans to go with Riley. You know, as friends.”
I knew the rule Riley and I had agreed upon: that it would be okay to bail on the other person if we were asked to be someone’s date. It still felt weird to me though, not quite right, to force her into a third wheel position. Especially when she seemed so excited about the dance.
“Riley?” Aaron was grinning. It seemed like he was on the verge of chuckling. “She’s got other plans now. I talked to River.”
“River. Wait, what do you mean?”
“River and Riley are going together,” he said.
“To Prom?”
“Yeah.” Now he was laughing, if only a little. “River asked her during our indoor soccer class. Her aerobics class was using the gym next door, and he just ran over and asked her.”
Something in me suddenly felt a little panicked. Or maybe thrown off balance. I wasn’t sure which.
“Anyway . . .” Aaron held out the tangled grouping of wildflowers toward me. “What do you think?”
The display of that messy bouquet in Aaron Ingram’s grasp brought me back to the moment and set a spark of something within my chest. I cleared my mind and focused on Aaron.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
“Okay? Sure? Is that . . . your final answer?”
I stepped toward him and took his flower offering into my hands. “Yes. I would love to go.”
A slow smile lit up his face. He said, “Great,” and then he pulled me into a hug, the wildflowers pinned between our bodies.
Suddenly, I was thinking maybe Prom wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Chapter 2
The night of the dance, I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom and wondered if I looked weird. I definitely felt weird.
For one thing, I had hours of studying to do that weekend, and it was not easy for me to set all that aside and ignore it for an entire evening. It was like telling a goldfish not to swim in circles or instructing a spider not to spin a web.
But, on top of the lack of studying, even more than the lack of studying, I was feeling weird in that moment due to the dress I was wearing. The one I was staring at in the mirror as though it actually was a giant spider enshrouding my body.
This dress was not my usual style, not by a long shot. It was not what I had envisioned myself wearing if I had ever entertained the idea of going to a dance. I guess I had always figured that, if I ever attended a dance, I would either wear something ultra-feminine or something that simply blended in; something pink with sequins and poof, or something black and plain with chiffon.
Instead, I’d chosen a dress that was not frilly or girly and definitely did not blend in. It was cherry red. Thin straps created a crisscross pattern over the skin of my back. And, it was tight.
As I gawked at myself in the mirror, I thought I felt a panic attack coming on. I must not have been in my right mind when I selected this dress. It was by far the flashiest and most revealing article of clothing I’d ever worn. It even had a slit in the skirt, displaying a generous sliver of my right leg.
Aaron Ingram. That, I remembered, was the reason I had picked out this dress. I was still having a hard time believing he’d asked me to be his date. After years of admiring him from afar, suddenly he was taking me to our senior prom. I was over the moon about it, but I was also nervous. I wanted to make sure I looked good enough for this night, good enough to be his date. I had decided, for maybe the first time ever, to dress to impress.
Now I was wondering if maybe I’d gone a little overboard.
A hard knocking at my door gave me a start, and then Riley was there, bursting into my room. Because our dress-shopping plans had fallen through the previous weekend (my doing, as I’d decided I wanted to shop on my own) this was the first time she was seeing my prom dress. When she saw me standing in front of the mirror, her eyes got huge.
“Woah,” was all she said. She looked me up and down.
“Does it look horrible?” I asked. She started circling around me, continuing to eye the red garment that was my outfit for the evening.
“What? No. You look like a . . . like a mermaid . . . dragon.”
Whether that was a compliment or not wasn’t clear to me. “Seriously, Riley. I feel so awkward.”
“Don’t. You look amazing, dude.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking when I got this dress. It’s too much, isn’t it?”
“Nope. I think you should dress like this every day.”
A nervous laugh escaped me, and then I turned my attention away from my attire in the mirror and onto Riley’s. She had shown me pictures of her dress three weeks ago—but what she was wearing now was something different. The original dress had been a velvet halter top with a red-and-blue floral design. It was what I would expect from Riley. Something unusual and distinct, more along the lines of what I’d ended up selecting. But now, standing in my bedroom, Riley was in a light blue number that was made of a soft and flowy-looking material.