~ My High School Prom ~
I secretly always looked forward to senior prom even though I made a point of reminding everyone I interacted with in high school that I was angry all the time.
I bought my prom dress at Reformation in SoHo the spring that I came to visit my future college in New York, when I met my first college friend in the basement of the Diana Center and then thought she didn’t like me since we didn’t Facebook message all summer, even though she would eventually teach me who Roland Barthes was and pat my head and give me homeopathic medicine for my stomachache when I got too drunk on Election Night.
The dress was black and a halter-top and altogether not so bad. I took it to the tailor because I thought it was too long, so he made me try it on, and we discovered that it was actually a size too small and did not fit right in the chest and I would need to return it for the next size up so that my chest did not tear open the unlined synthetic crepe fabric (described on their website as having a “dry hand-feel�) like the Incredible Hulk on prom night.
I could not return it like a normal purchase because items bought in-store had to be returned in-store and online purchases got processed at a different facility somewhere in Southern California. I called the store and got very lucky that the girl who helped me when I bought the dress was working, and she remembered me because when I was buying the dress we talked about film festivals. She offered to let me mail the dress to her so she could return it for me in-store. I mailed it back but she never got the package, but she gave my mom a refund anyway because the USPS tracking said it had been delivered. She was extremely nice to take us for our word.
My mom made me email the girl from Reformation a picture of me wearing the dress to prom. In the picture, I am standing next to a boy who wasn’t my date but was on the debate team with me and it looked like a nice classic prom photo, as opposed to all the other ones where we are all doing ironic “rap squats.” She responded to the email saying I looked beautiful but I know she was just being nice because she is a model who was in W magazine and I was wearing too much lipstick.
I was so excited to get my makeup done on prom night. I made an appointment at the salon where my mom used to get her hair cut, where all the stylists are glamorous but in a slightly trashy way like rhinestones and camouflage and bad boob jobs in low-cut t-shirts. I did a poor job of anticipating what I would look like wearing eyeshadow. The stylist filled in my eyebrows too dark and I tried to wipe my lipstick off when I got home but it was the Kat von D kind of liquid lipstick that is explicitly meant to stay on your face.
I knew I was only comfortable with my hair up, but insisted on having it curled and wearing it down. I had short bangs to be subversive but the length disagreed with my cowlick. Against my loose, wavy hair, which was not pulled up like I like it to be, they (my bangs) were spiky and separated into v-shaped clusters on my powdery made-up forehead.
I went to prom in a “prom group” to obscure the fact that I didn’t go with a date, since nobody really took dates anymore, except for my best friend, who was dating my other best friend from middle school.
We took some pictures in my living room, then went to the park to take some more. Everyone in every high school in my hometown takes their prom pictures in the same park. There was another prom the same night as ours, and we all intermingled in the pavilion in the park where everyone takes their obligatory prom pictures. Even though I lived a block away from the park, we drove there, since the grass was wet and we did not want to trudge through it and ruin our nice prom shoes.
On the way over, I saw my friend who had graduated a year earlier and yelled at him from the car window, silently writhing because I wished he had been my date. He was angrier at the world than I was so he did not go to his senior prom, except he went to one at a different school with his art school girlfriend, who he very quickly realized he hated.
We stood in the park for an hour while various parents took photos of us in various arrangements. I did not like anyone’s dress better than my own, except for maybe one girl’s and maybe one other was wearing better shoes.
After all this pageantry, we took my middle school friend’s Prius to a sushi restaurant downtown where we ate in the dark in almost perfect silence. After dinner, we drove around in the Prius, circling the same block, drinking RumChata straight from the bottle. No one could hazard more than a couple of sips. Only four of us could fit in the car at once, so we left half the group waiting by a bridge and promised to collect them later so they could have their turn. After driving around the block several times, we could not remember which bridge we had left them at.
Finally, we found them on the downtown side of a bridge across the river. We were all in the car together, laughing, five of us squeezed into the backseat. When we got to the dance, nobody was even tipsy anymore, which was a relief since none of us had brought our school I.D.’s, which apparently were required for entry, and I had to negotiate with the vice principal to let us in anyway.
I slow danced with a Swiss exchange student who tried to teach me how to say “turnt� in French. He was probably a full foot taller than me. Between the loud music, language barrier, and great distance between our heads, communication was a challenge. The dance ended 45 minutes later.
I sat outside, lamenting the boy in my calculus class who was dating a girl I went to kindergarten with even though he seemed to like me in January in the library when he helped me with integrals during our off period. He had said he would come to the restaurant where I hostessed but he never did, while I spent every shift staring out from behind the hostess stand towards the motorcycle repair shop across the street.
I couldn’t find my best friend because she and my middle school friend had commandeered his car to go have sex in, and the rest of our group had to call an Uber to take us back to my house where we could change out of our special prom outfits and into more practical clothes for the after-prom.
Everyone put on pajamas and we tried to think of somewhere we could go to get high. Some of my friends wanted to smoke pot in the high school parking lot but I was too chicken so I went upstairs to wash my face instead, and got mad at two of my friends for spilling vodka out of their Nalgene bottle and on my floor, ruining the stain on the hardwood.
We all rallied. Someone was still sober so he drove us back to our high school for the after-prom, a series of festivities designed to stop all the teenagers from wandering drunkenly into the night. I sat on the main staircase with the Swiss exchange student, who let me lean on his shoulder but told me he wasn’t flirting and was just being nice, and the next day when I saw him by my locker I pretended I had been too drunk and apologized, although I’m still not sure for what.
The after-prom wasn’t much. I think they rented a DeLorean and parked it outside, for spectacle. I sat on a bench in the back hallway because I was tired and kind of sad, and watched people take pretend wedding photos with an Elvis impersonator. My mom volunteered to help clean up so she sat with me, and I leaned on her shoulder, and she did not try to disclaim me like the Swiss exchange student had. She finally drove us home where I slept with two friends in my queen-size bed, two more on the floor.
I saw the girl from Reformation the first weekend of my sophomore year of college, while my new friend and I were outside Film Forum, trying to decide if we were good enough new friends to go get food together or only friendly enough to sit together in a movie in silence. She didn’t recognize me until I told her my name but then was characteristically very nice. I desperately wanted my new friend to think I was cool and maybe he might’ve since I knew this cool model on the street, except probably not since at first she didn’t remember me, and then I had to tell him the story about buying the wrong-size prom dress.