The second girl of any significance was Dee. I was in grade 11. I was on the Prom Committee with Dee, a girl I had known most of my life. Yes, I know, Prom Committee, I was a nerd. I was also on the Yearbook Committee. Remarkably, I wasn’t in the Chess club or the AV club. I wish I had known it. I wish I had embraced my own nerdom. It would have been much better. Insert life principle here: Regret Nothing. I did the best I could at the time.

Prom Committee. Dee and I got on well. She was a nerd too, but she had more sense than I did. She was funny and sarcastic and delightful and I loved her take on everything. She also knew weird things that she would insert into conversations and it always threw me. We were not dating, not really. We were pals. It seemed even more so because we had known each other since we were children. In the weeks before prom we worked together quite often. And neither of us had been intending to go to the prom. She had recently ended things with a guy from out of town, a guy I hadn’t met. She trusted me and confided in me about this broken love. And while she laughed it off it was easy to see that it was more trouble than she would let even me know. One stunning night, as I was painting vines or grapes or grapevines or some cheap prom prop, and she was doing something, mostly entertaining me, all to the soundtrack of Billy Idol’s Vital Idol, I asked her to be my date. She smiled and laughed at me. I was crushed. But she saw that I was serious and gleefully said yes. And then we danced around to Mony Mony.

Then we pretended to the school that we were horribly serious about each other and that we had been keeping our love secret for ages. It was a fun game. But it was also a hard game because I really did have feelings, whatever they were, for Dee and it was very troublesome having any kind of honest talk with her. We were all theater. Even to each other.

I had not much sense of self-awareness when I was 15 or so. And my sense of irony was not nearly sharpened and so I rented a powder blue tux. I was so lost and confused. I should like to say that I wore that tux out of irony. But that’s just not true. It’s endearing and charming now remembering how lost I was. But not then. It took some convincing to get some cash from my dad to fund my prom night. I think it was called something horribly tacky like An Enchanted Evening or something. That wasn’t my idea.

When I showed up at Dee’s house in my power blue tuxedo, she tried really hard not to laugh at me. She would have been right to laugh. I looked ridiculous. But still, I felt bad. I bought the wrong kind of corsage too. It was the kind that pinned, not the kind that went on her wrist. She wouldn’t let me pin it to her because she thought I would poke her. And she was irritated that she had to put a pin in her dress. I was disturbed. I had never seen her in a dress. She was not that kind of girl. It wasn’t just that she was in a dress. She was acting like a girl in a way that I hadn’t seen before and that made me unhappy.

It got much worse. By the time we got to the gym that we had helped transform, she was already shrugging me off. Perhaps it was the electric awkwardness my tuxedo was emitting. And all of that just made me uncomfortable and stupid. There was no theater anymore and no joking anymore. The sardonic and funny tom boy girl that I knew who so delightfully and scathingly dismissed all of the ridiculous high school customs, she had become a girl who cared about her dress and her hair and her makeup.

We stood stupid and silent beside each other for a long time. The first dance I danced was with another girl. Mostly I just wanted to go home and I was sorry to the cow who had given up its useless life to pay for my horrible tuxedo and the offending corsage and my too-tight shoes.

Not long into the horror of this Disenchanting Evening came in a boy. Or, rather, a man. He swaggered in. He was wearing a classic black tuxedo. He had a full grown beard. He had a jaw. He had strength in his arms and confidence in his eyes and he came right up to Dee. He walked right past me. I was invisible powder blue neon. He leaned into her as I had wanted to do, as I had thought that I might, and said something. Something a man who looked like that and walked like that could say. And she looked, in turns, in the flash of the lights, surprised, happy, angry, relieved, repossessed. And he led her by her arm away.

She didn’t come back. Not the whole night. And really, not ever after. We were mad at each other for weeks and didn’t speak. Her mother, even, was mad at me and I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. When, months later, we finally spoke again, we were cordial but never funny. No one apologized for anything. And when she broke up with him again or he broke up with her, it wasn’t me she told. And at least at high school, I never went to another prom. And there isn’t enough irony in me yet that would let me wear a powder blue anything.

SS