rivers_bend

I don't know if it was Grey's Anatomy last week, or what, but I got this idea in my head to write a story about Prom night. 2,500 words, teen rated for one use of language.


James Montgomery Davenport has been my best friend since the third grade, when Sukie Johnson threw the dodgeball at my head, an act shortly followed by Jimmy throwing a fist at hers. A little cliché, hero riding to my rescue, but I was eight, what did I know?

Looking at his name, I bet I can guess what you're thinking. He must be one of the McMansion kids, an only child in a six-bedroom house with a pony and a Porsche, but he's from the wrong side of the tracks, just like me. We don't live in the trailer park out by the cemetery, but none of us who live behind the mall were exactly expecting a new car when we turned sixteen. Jimmy might have had that Porsche in a different life; his dad did come from money. Mrs Davenport used to say, 'He's one of the East Coast Davenports, but he's the black sheep of that family. We'll never see a penny from them.'

When we were little, I always wondered what she meant. You've never seen a whiter man than Mr Davenport. Jimmy takes after him, with eyelashes and eyebrows so pale you can hardly see them, and a baseball cap on his head all summer so his nose doesn't burn and peel. Jimmy's always been jealous of my skin that tans and my dark hair. My grandfather's from Mexico, and while I got too many of my father's Russian and Polish genes to have my mother's looks, I did get her skin and hair.

Jimmy plays with it sometimes, my hair, in Algebra II where he sits behind me. I'll be working out the value for x if y=3, and I'll feel the tug at the back of my head that means Jimmy has a lock of my hair wrapped around his finger, that he's rubbing his thumb over it while he works out his own equations. It bugged me at first, it was distracting as hell, but he says he doesn't know he's doing it and he can't stop. I'm used to it now. The same way Jimmy's used to bringing an extra bag if his mom packs potato chips in his lunch. He knows I'll just eat his, so he won't get any if he doesn't.

We never have chips at home. Mom's a cardiac care nurse, so she worries constantly about cholesterol. Though I have, I admit, been laying off the chips lately, for reasons of my own.

Spring is here, and if you're seventeen that means one thing. Prom. Missy Heartlove - I swear to god that's her name, it's not even short for Melissa, her parents named her Missy - anyway, Missy Heartlove, she's in charge of decorations. If you guessed she was a McMansion kid, you'd be right on the money. She's old money though. Her parents didn't make their millions on the internet, it came down the line. Not that it bought them taste. Their house looks like Tara. That'd be fine if we lived in Georgia, but it's a little out of place in Northern California.

She picked the theme for this year's Prom. Well, supposedly the Prom committee picked it, but she's head cheerleader, student body president, in charge of the committee, you get the idea. People do what Missy wants, and I heard her telling Jenny that she'd decided the theme for prom should be, get this, Two Hearts Beat as One. Sounds like a perfectly good prom theme, I hear you saying, but that's cos I haven't told you Missy's boyfriend's name yet. Stuart Gayheart. See what I mean? It's disgusting.

Now before you get distracted by the gay part of Gayheart, Stuart was never one who was going to suffer at the hands of bullies. I've gone to school with Stuart since we were five years old, and I'll tell you right now, he was popular back before any of us knew what the word meant. The fastest runner, the best speller, the star of his soccer and little league teams, plus, his mother always brought these little chocolate cupcakes to school and made sure everyone in the class was invited to Stuart's birthday parties. She had a thing about no one getting left out. Okay, I'm not saying he always followed her lead, he was a kid, but he was nicer than a lot of the McMansion bunch. Anyway, no one teased him about his name.

I wasn't so lucky, which is partly my own fault. When I was seven, my mom and dad went on vacation and left me with my Aunt Lucia. I love Lucia, but she was only twenty at the time, so maybe it didn't occur to her to wonder why her niece was wearing lipstick to school in the second grade, to tell me that I had to wash that off my face right this instant, the way my mom would have done. I'm sure I thought I looked pretty, or grown up, or something, but my classmates just used it as an excuse to start calling me Lips. Anabelle Lipinski, you see. It was the obvious choice. I suffered the embarrassment for the rest of the year, but Jimmy somehow made it sound special, and once I started liking the name, the other kids got tired of it. Now everyone calls me Anabelle, or Ana, except Jimmy, who still calls me Lips.

But I'm getting off the point, which is Prom. Mitch Highland, the boy I'd been lusting after since the beginning of the year, broke up with Cassidy Wells last month, and he's talked to me three or four times in Spanish class since, so I had hopes he'd ask me to go with him. I had my eye on a dress in Sabrina's. She's a friend of my mom's and she said she'd hold it for me, but it was a little bit small. Hence the moratorium on potato chips. So I'd been good, and then the Friday before Prom, my friend Becky told me that Mitch had asked her, at which point I figured, who needs the dress anyway?

He's her lab partner in Advanced Bio, and apparently he asked while they were skinning their rat for dissection. She wasn't put off by the gross factor, and as I hadn't let her in on the extent of my own crush on the guy, I can't really blame her for saying yes.

By now maybe you're wondering why I started this story with Jimmy, since I seem more pre-occupied with Prom, but here's why. That same Friday, at lunch, after he'd spent all of Algebra pulling on my hair, he asked me. 'Lips,' he said, 'go to Prom with me.' Now, I’d been sure he was going to ask Angela Telasco, and I said as much, but he denied it.

Then I was worried that he was asking me out of pity.

'Ana, you're my best friend. Who else am I going to want to go to Prom with?'

I said yes, cos he's right, he is my best friend, plus there I was, thinking, he's probably going to look pretty good in his tux. He's got these really green eyes, and the dress I want is green and aqua and blue. I bet he could get a vest that matched his eyes and my dress both, and we'd look great in the pictures. I'd had one hand on the Lays when he asked me, and I dropped them like a hot potato. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

It was a busy week. Sticking to mom's lunches - carrot and sprout sandwiches on multi-grain bread with a piece of fruit for dessert - paid off so I had no trouble with the zipper on my dress. I went with Jimmy to pick out his tux, and I was right about the green. We went to the florist and ordered the corsage and boutonnière. Sunday, dad cooks this big family dinner. We were debating whether to waste the money on a limo when Aunt Lucia's boyfriend pipes up and says he has a '66 Eldorado convertible and he'd be happy to take us. I think he's trying to get Lucia to see he's the type of guy she should marry, but I wasn't going to question his motives. I will put in a good word for him though. Cut to prom night, the man turned up in a chauffeur's uniform, having gone to pick up Jimmy first so my parents could take pictures, and he held the door and everything.

Prom's at the Marriott, and there's a policy, no one from the school can get a hotel room. I guess it would look like they were encouraging underaged sex. I don't know if it was the hotel or the school that insisted, but the long and the short of it is that the Sheraton up the road is getting all the post-Prom business while the Marriott has to be satisfied with the price of the ballroom and the catering.

We got there not long after the doors opened and got in line for pictures. I wasn't going to risk spilling dinner on my dress, or getting my hair sweaty dancing beforehand. Angela was in front of us with a college boy, not that I would have noticed anything other than that I didn't recognize him, but she made sure to tell us. They couldn't keep their hands off each other. I looked over at Jimmy to see if he minded, but he was busy laughing at Bill Phipps, who'd just been slapped when he tried to put his hand down his date's dress as the photographer snapped the photo. Bill isn't much in the brains department, and a couple of beers make him think he's irresistible. Last year his dad married a twenty year old girl who works on the make-up counter at Macy's. Maybe Bill thinks he has something to prove.

Obviously Jimmy didn't care about Angela, and I admitted to myself I was glad. Something about seeing him in that tux, and the way he'd smiled when he saw me in my dress, made me happy that I had really been his first choice Prom date. When he put his arms around me for the picture and I leaned back against him, he whispered, 'You look fantastic,' in my ear. They show you the pictures right away on the computer screen. I have this ridiculous grin on my face.

Dinner was nothing to write home about, we had a choice of chicken or pasta, and to tell the truth, I've eaten better on airplanes. We were sitting next to Becky and Mitch, but to my surprise I wasn't jealous. Jimmy had us all rolling with laughter, but Mitch? He's actually pretty boring. When Becks spilled pasta sauce on her skirt, it was Jimmy who grabbed a waiter and got some seltzer to soak the stain out. Mitch just told her not to worry about it. Out on the dance floor, Jimmy and I had the moves. Sure, we've been dancing together since we were twelve, but still, it was obvious that I was having a lot more fun than most of my friends. We danced right to the end of the night, under the paper hearts and heart shaped balloons, though we did take a break and went for a walk while Stuart and Missy were named Prom King and Queen.

I know by now you're wondering, Did Anabelle realize that what she'd been looking for was right under her nose the whole time? Well, I won't keep you in suspense. I did. I'm willing to admit that by the time the last slow song played, I was clinging to Jimmy and hoping he'd kiss me. However, he was a perfect gentleman, and when we got to our hotel room, I found out why.

'Did you have fun tonight?' he asked.

'It was the best night I can remember.'

'You weren't too disappointed that you weren't there with Mitch?'

'There's no one I'd rather have been there with than you.' As I said that, I took his hand and leaned in to kiss him.

Our lips touched, and just for a second I thought everything was going to be ok, but then I realized he wasn't kissing me back.

'Fuck,' he said, and pulled away, putting as much room between us as the bed allowed. I knew this was big, cos Jimmy doesn't swear. It's his own peculiar teen aged rebellion; his father's black sheep status comes from running off at seventeen to join a motorcycle gang. For all his wife's influence, he can swear a blue streak.

I wanted to sink through the floor, even though this was Jimmy and he knew everything about me. I hadn't been embarrassed in front of him since we were eleven and I dove into the pool and lost the bottom of my bathing suit in front of the whole class.

'God, Anabelle, I'm sorry.' I'd been trying to get an apology of my own out, but he interrupted me. 'It's not you.' They always say that, right? It's not you, it's me…

'I just thought,' I said. 'I didn't mean to-'

'Lips, I'm gay.'

That's what he said, 'I'm gay.' Now, maybe you were expecting that, but I sure wasn't. Nearly ten years we'd seen each other every day, done everything together. Not once had I seen him linger over pictures of Justin Timberlake, he never seemed to be looking at his team-mates on the swim team, and when I had that crush on Elijah Wood, he just made fun of me.

'Why didn't you tell me?' I'm ashamed to admit I shouted at him. I was angry, surely you can understand that. It's a pretty big secret to keep from your best friend.

'I don't know. I was worried you'd hate me.'

Like I'm one of those no-brained assholes on the football team or something. There was nothing I could say that wouldn't just confirm his fears.

'Lips, say something.' He was shaking, not just his hands, but his whole body, like he was gonna have a fit or something.

Sure, he'd lied to me, and kept this huge secret, and this all came as a pretty big shock. Part of me wanted to walk right out of the room and not look back. That's not how I was raised though. As hard as this was for me, it was obviously just as hard for him. I couldn’t bear to make it harder. 'I don't hate you, I love you. How could you think I'd hate you?'

'I love you too, Lips,' he said. That's when he came back over to where I was sitting and hugged me.

'You still should have told me.' I said the words into his neck.

'I know.' I felt him reach up and brush my hair away from his face.

We stayed like that for a long time. Eventually we got up and changed out of our formal clothes. The room had two beds, but we shared the one, sleeping holding on to each other.

James Montgomery Davenport has been my best friend since what seems like forever. One night, I thought there might be more, but, you know? I'm glad there isn't.



Thanks to karaokegal, my most exacting critic, for beta, and to tigertrapped who knows the perfect prom metaphor when she sees it.