This was the time when we had all just received American Girl dolls. I had Felicity, the colonial one, whose red hair was like Sandra’s. This was where I got the idea for the party.
Sandra threw me the perfect old-fashioned birthday party. She actually made the salmon for us and laid it out on nice plates with asparagus and lemon wedges on top. She made little canvas bags and filled them with white street chalk, jump ropes, and paisley bonnets. One for me, one for Susan, one for Heather, one for Corvis. She built a fire and got one of her boyfriends to loan us a phonograph. None of us liked the salmon or the asparagus, but it was beautiful, and we enjoyed not liking it.
We sat at the dining room table, cloth napkins in our laps.
“Alas,” I said. “My father died of cholera.”
Susan put a sympathetic hand on my leg.
“My horse ran away,” she said.
“I think I’m catching smallpox,” said Corvis.
Heather leaned in, the bonnet slipping down her forehead, and she rearranged her face into a snotty expression.
“We are orphans,” she said solemnly. “It’s a good thing we have rich grandmothers to adopt us.”
Even though it was eighty-eight degrees in my living room, we didn’t use the air conditioner that night. Sandra laid out plain white sheets over the couch cushions, and even got us linen nightgowns to sleep in. We sweated and complained, and Sandra said, “You can’t use what isn’t invented yet, girls.”
What Sandra gave me was a gift, a gesture in trying to understand me. Even though Sandra insisted I call her by her first name, she was my mother. I belonged to her.
The Prom
I carried the letter around with me—everywhere I went—in my wallet. Sometimes, in the secret bathroom, I took the plane ticket out and ran my fingers along the smooth edges of it—over the typed flight number, over my name.
Taylor Garland. Destination: Los Angeles.
Of course, Heather and PJ forced me to join the prom committee, and we had less than one month to make it “perfect.” Susan wasn’t on the committee, because Heather had taken my side.
I wasn’t positive, but it seemed like Susan and Brad were together now. They sat together alone at lunch, and they didn’t come to parties anymore. They floated through the halls like beautiful ghosts. Sometimes Brad held Susan’s books.
Miss Donovan, the cheerleading coach, was our faculty advisor. We met in the health classroom on the first floor, and the prom, as always, would be held in the gym.
The health classroom was decorated with posters that made you want to puke. For example, one had two kittens on it, sharing a ball of yarn, and it said TEAMWORK! in pink script across the bottom. Another poster had an unnecessarily graphic explanation of gonorrhea. I tried not to look at them.
At our committee meetings so far, I’d started suggesting the worst prom themes I could think of. The plane ticket made me feel reckless.
At one meeting that took place after last period one Tuesday, we pulled the desks into a circle. Everyone had an Emmylou’s cup in front of them—some, like Heather, chose no whipped cream, because they were watching their calories. Others, like PJ, went for whipped cream and chocolate sauce.
Because PJ was a peripheral member of our group, it was her job to do the Emmylou’s run. She sat with her spine straight, shoulders back, waiting for instruction. Miss Donovan, who smelled metallic, like cheap hair spray, looked like she needed a cigarette.
“Since we had ‘An Evening in Paris’ at homecoming, why not an evening somewhere more exotic this time?” I said.
Heather crossed her arms and looked at me.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like . . . ‘An Evening in Detroit’!” I said enthusiastically. Everyone was still obsessed with Eminem.
“You’re insane,” Heather replied. She had a notepad in front of her, because she was mostly in charge. She did not write down “An Evening in Detroit.”
I suggested “Prom on the Moon.”
“We can put trampolines everywhere,” I said. “We can eat astronaut ice cream!”
Heather didn’t write that down either. She glared at me, tapping her manicured nails on the table.
That was how, a week later, I got the committee to land on “Hollywood Dreamland.” The “Dreamland” part wasn’t my idea, but still, I liked the idea of Hollywood. We could make cardboard mountains, with the Hollywood sign on one of them. We could put posters that said the words Director and Producer over the restroom signs, which would confuse everyone, which meant I could go into the boys’ room just to see it. We could have spotlights going back and forth, and a red carpet.
Our budget was crap, though. Miss Donovan showed up with a few cardboard boxes of dusty streamers, paint, Christmas lights, and felt, and told us to make the decorations from that. The stuff in these little boxes was supposed to decorate the entire gym.
PJ, unloading the contents of the boxes, frowned. She held a string of Christmas lights and looked at Miss Donovan.
“We were promised spotlights,” she said. PJ, being the theater girl, wanted it to look realistic. She had been talking about the spotlights for days.
Duxbury, the rich town next to Hopuonk, had agreed to loan them to us from their theater department, but Miss Donovan now explained that since our lacrosse team beat theirs, all bets were off. We called them Deluxe-bury. They called us Hop-poor-onk.
“But . . . we were promised spotlights,” PJ said again.
PJ was actually looking at me when she said this, like the whole thing was my responsibility, and therefore my fault. It didn’t matter that I was not a lacrosse player, that I didn’t even want to go to prom—the theme was my idea, and even if it hadn’t been, I knew that everyone considered it my job to make things magical.
Not going to prom was not an option. Without the spotlights, everyone would have to try harder to imagine that they were in Hollywood, and while they were good at imagining, the gym was still the gym.
“Why are you looking at me?” I said to PJ.
“Can’t you do something?” she said.
“I’m not a magician.”
PJ slumped in her chair.
“This is so unfair,” she said.
“Well, tough shit,” Heather said. She leaned back and tossed her long blond braid over her shoulder like a whip, then folded her arms over her chest. “You’d better get used to it.”
* * *
—
The red carpet was a long roll of paper, which was destroyed by high heels as my classmates walked through the door.