It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (10 page)

After a year together, they bought a house in Medfield, and Mom, Paul, and I moved under the same roof with an almost seamless transition. Nicole lived there part-time, and Katie and Caroline, his two youngest daughters, came over for dinner once a week and slept over two weekends per month. By then, I loved him. I loved him for the pure and decent man that he was, for the good, kind soul within him. I would have been content to just adore him as Mom’s partner, but, blessedly he chose to love me back. He packed lunches for me to take to school in the morning; he made sure we had dinner as a family at night; he drove me to and from the doctor, the dentist, the orthodontist; he treated me the same as his own daughters. He provided stability in a home that for so long had lacked it. Not a day went by that I didn’t marvel at my
luck to have him around. Not a one when I didn’t have to wonder who this man was who treated me with such profound kindness. I didn’t take him for granted as I’d often done with Mom. Paul was a gift.

But not everyone felt that way. Anthony struggled with Mom’s new relationship. He butted heads with Paul, feeling threatened that another man had stepped into such an important role in his family. At twenty-four, Anthony was too old to be fathered by him, and too hurt from our own dad to trust another one. They fought constantly. The same things that I was grateful Paul could offer us—stability, structure, and security—Anthony resented and rebelled against. Oftentimes, Paul’s rigid sense of order and rightness washed over Anthony as judgment. I could see that Anthony never felt he could be fully himself, at least not without a worry that he might be perceived as weak or inferior or lazy. Whenever he’d live at home—which was usually for brief periods of time in between jobs and apartments after moving home from Arizona—shouting matches would ensue. The painful part for me wasn’t seeing Mom torn between the two of them; it was seeing Anthony’s eyes when he believed she was choosing Paul over her son. It was that he sometimes looked at me as if I were a traitor, and that he hated me for the way I’d taken to loving Mom’s boyfriend. It was the sadness that I had found a father figure and he hadn’t.

And Anthony wasn’t the only one who struggled. Nicole, too, had trouble seeing Mom and Paul together. She pulled away from me, distressed by seeing her dad moving on and not knowing how to reconcile that her relationship with Mom—the woman she’d come to love as a second mother—was changing, too. She resented me when it felt as though her dad were becoming mine.
She wasn’t ready for all the changes, and my heart ached, knowing that one piece of my life was coming together while another was falling apart. The only reason our relationship survived high school and into college was because we both tried desperately to ignore the changes going on around us and continue as the friends we’d always been. We pretended that everything was all right—even when it wasn’t.

In late March, Nicole’s mom went away for the weekend, leaving an empty house. Nicole, Kate, and I did what any seventeen-year-olds would do: we threw a massive party. We invited thirty friends over, locked up the valuables, and bought jumbo packs of red Solo cups. That we were in a house rather than the woods of Noon Hill was already a step above the usual Medfield nightlife. There was confidence in my voice as I reassured us, “We’ll just clean up so well tomorrow morning that no one will ever find out.”

Now, having seen all those high school rom-coms, one would think that at least one of us would have anticipated the debacle when fifty people showed up to the party, nearly doubling the original count. None of us foresaw the beer caps that got flicked far out into the yard off the back deck, to be discovered later by a gardening parent. None of us expected the mess created by sloshing booze-filled Solo cups across the kitchen linoleum during rounds of flip cup and beer pong. Instead we forged on, temporarily muting that annoyingly accurate sensibility alarm, and one hell of a party was had by all.

We awoke the next morning bleary-eyed and disheveled. We cleaned, we scrubbed, we scoured the yard for cans and caps and Mike’s Hard Lemonade bottles. We disinfected and deodorized
as best we could. In an hour, the three of us had turned the place from Animal House into an HGTV model home. And when we were done, we decided a greasy breakfast at Bickford’s diner at one thirty in the afternoon was just what we needed. In Nicole’s bedroom, we changed out of our party apparel and into whatever we saw first in her dresser, not having brought our own change of clothing. For Kate and Nicole, choices were cute graphic tees, hooded sweatshirts, and yoga-type stretch pants. I, with blurred vision and a keen internal radar system that helps me detect the biggest sizes among heaps of clothing, picked up a badly beaten mauve thrift shop sweatshirt with a crew neck and a few worn holes that was loose and clearly four sizes too big for Nicole. To match, I pulled on charcoal sweatpants—the kind with tapered ankles that your nana might own in seafoam, lavender, and beige. I would have loved to have made a joke about them if they hadn’t been so tight, but they fit almost in the same snug way that the yoga pants fit Kate. My look was a curious mix of bohemian meets mistake. Chubby and boxy, I’d have been better off in something a little more fitted than that sweatshirt. Big has a funny way of only growing bigger when it mixes with baggy.

After brunching on Belgian waffles with home fries and maple sausage links at the diner, the three of us headed to the high school lacrosse game to say hello to friends. By the time we arrived at the field, the game was half over. Our friend Alexandra, a striking, leggy blonde, stood across the field, waving for us to join her. I squinted to make out the faces of the rest of the circle, realizing Mike Oppel was among them. Walking over, I felt that familiar fat girl dread. In my head spun,
Of all days to forgo makeup, this had to be the one, huh? Suck it in
.

I hated the feeling of walking toward people, and of walking away from them even more. I was aware of my rolls, the way the elastic waistband of Nicole’s pants cut into my fifth layer of love handle. I thought of Mike’s eyes—everyone’s eyes—watching, running up and down my body, seeing the flabby parts of me that I would kill to photoshop in real life. The indigo undereye circles that Dad had genetically gifted to me. The extreme roundness of my face, only made more moonish by the fact that I’d not yet deeply side-parted and straightened my hair that day.

I was unprepared. I couldn’t have been further from the ideal I’d like to present to anyone, much less Mike Oppel. The field seemed threatening now—to me and my quite unhelpful mauve sweatshirt.

As we approached, the group turned to welcome us. Of the six that stood before us, I was casually friends with each. Alexandra let out a sweet “Hey!” and we returned a chorus of weary “Heeeyyys.” Chatting about the night before and the now half-over game, I began to feel less uneasy. By that point, I’d reconciled with the fact that there was no more that I could do to make myself look better in that moment than smile and be kind. We’d only be there for a few minutes anyway.

Nearly back to the car, I felt the pat of a hand on my shoulder. I swung around to see Mike; he’d jogged to catch up to us, trying to get my attention. I let go of a small giddy squeal and smiled wide before panicking at the realization of what an overeager weirdo I’d just been. I was altogether too exhilarated to be stopped by him, considering he probably just had some question about class.

“Andrea!” he said. “Hey! How’s it going?” He stuffed his hands into his pockets.

“It’s going pretty good. A little slow moving today.”
What is this?
“How about you?”

“Good. Things are good.” He looked down, searching the ground as if to find another topic of conversation, and when he spotted one, he looked up again. “So, I was wondering—are you going to the prom?”

“Um … well … yeah. I mean, I don’t know … but I’d like to,” I said hopefully.

“But you’re not going with anyone yet?”

“No.”

“Cool.” He nodded and paused, thinking on it.
Well, this is an all-time low
, I thought. I wished I could have sprinted off the field, done anything to escape the awkwardness of not only admitting to Mike Oppel that I was dateless but also showing him how gross I could look on random Saturday afternoons.

“Will you be my date?”

I flatlined.

I jolted back to life just in the nick of time to answer his question with the most mortifying three words: “Are you kidding?”

The confusion on his face introduced me to my own absurdity. “No … ha. Why would I be kidding about that? I want to go to the prom with you.”

I scanned his expression, picking it apart for a hint of an impending smile that would expose the ruse. My head whipped around to look across the field, certain this wasn’t actually happening. I felt a curious mix of vulnerable and high. As the tiny hairs on my arms stood up with a tingle, I lost the ability to control the deep smile that made its way from my belly to my heart to my head. Completely disarmed, I looked down at my sneakers, wiggling my
toes before raising my eyes to meet his once more. “Uhh. Y—yeah. Of course. I’d love to.” My face flushed rosy.

“Great. Awesome.” He smiled.

I bashfully tucked my hair behind my right ear and made one last pitiful error in playing it cool. “Thank you,” I said, sincerely. He laughed while shaking his head. “No, thank
you
. It’ll be fun.”

I pivoted on my left leg, swiveling around to face the parking lot, where my friends sat in Nicole’s car, anxiously waiting. I walked to them in a dreamy, bouncy stride. My whole body felt warm and fizzy like a shaken bottle of soda. My smile continued, unrelenting and uncontained. What had just happened was outrageous, a little too high-school-coming-of-age-film to feel true.

For the month leading up to that sunny May prom day, I went about my life in pure, almost transparent delight. I moved through the halls of Medfield High with a new level of confidence.

Yes, there were moments of panic, times when I second-guessed and self-sabotaged and stalled my own happiness. Mike Oppel’s asking me to be his prom date brought all sorts of insecurity to the surface.
Is he sure about this? Do you think he regrets it? Have his friends teased him or made jokes about the date he chose?
It was easy to pick apart.

But I chose to feel lucky. I lingered on my high. I felt lustful just imagining the possibility of more joy than I was already experiencing. A month before the big day, Mom and I headed out to a bridal shop that sold plus sizes forty-five minutes away from home in a small town on Boston’s North Shore. After finding not one forgiving fit at Macy’s, Filene’s Basement, JCPenney, or David’s Bridal, this was our last hope.

We walked into a tiny store jam-packed with gowns in every
shimmery shade standing tightly in single-file lines along every wall. Rows and rows of taffeta and tulle snaked around us, ranging from hot-tamale-red silk to jade-green satin, and all manner of sparkle and sequin.

The owner emerged through a draped door at the back of the shop. Warm and smiling, standing a petite five feet tall, she looked me up and down, nodded, and said without hesitation, “We find something, my dear.” Her thick Italian accent, her reassurance—they rubbed the back of the hopeless girl in me. I smiled.

She and Mom sent me to the dressing room—which was more of a sewing room, with barely a suggestion of a door—with three dresses in tow. I eyed each and stopped immediately, gasping at the blue silk one. Floor length and strapless, the dress flowed smoothly, gradually changing from a sapphire hue to indigo to topaz to where the hem flared into an icy blue A-line. I set aside the other two dresses, not even noticing color or cut, and took my clothes off. The weight of the dress Hula-Hooped around my head, swirled down my neck and back, and then settled at my waist. It was two sizes too big—a twenty-two when I’d normally worn an eighteen. Still, I loved it. I knew it would be perfect.

Before I could even spin to see all sides of me in the mirror, the shop owner had flung open that whisper-thin door, took one look at me, and tossed her hands up in the air. “Thee one,” she cooed, tilting her head to the side in contentment.

I pivoted back to the mirror, beaming. I took in the image of me in that blue. “Yes. The one.”

Mom wrote a check for the dress without even blinking. At $250 before significant alterations, it meant three weeks of overtime and sleep deprivation just so her baby could be the belle of
the ball. When I hesitated at the register, swallowing the price like a handful of rocks, she took my face in her hands. “You can’t put a price on feeling beautiful.” I looked into her eyes, so loved and in love with her, and smiled through tears. She pressed her plum lips to my right temple and whispered, “You are worth every penny I have, baby. Every last one.”

The drive to prom with Mike felt seconds long. Our chatting, laughing, sparring back and forth with playful jabs was effortless, comfortable. I was myself and he, himself, regardless of social status. And what I won’t ever be able to forget is the feeling of strolling into the prom venue, arms linked with Mike Oppel,
the
Mike Oppel, and for the first time experiencing exactly what I’d wanted.

To be seen.

To be seen as beautiful.

It was a strange feeling. Foreign. The heads—polka dots of slick crew cuts and hairsprayed updos—turned as we walked past. Friends ran up to say giddy hellos, each leaning into my ear to whisper “You are gorgeous!”

Our entrance and pure kindness from everyone we encountered as the evening began sent me spinning. We ate dinner, danced, and then, just as the lights dimmed, our principal took to the microphone at center stage to announce who had been voted prom queen. Our class nominated only a queen, and whoever her date was became her king. All of us gathered on the dance floor, whispering in anticipation. I looked around, pausing to admire all the girls in my junior class—each absolutely radiant in some shade of spring. I wondered which would be crowned queen, grinning as I eeny-meeny-miny-mo’ed my way through them. Turning to Mike,
I leaned into his ear. “Who do you think it’ll be?” He leaned back, looking me in the eye, his pupils scanning mine back and forth as if to answer silently. He let out a sweet laugh. I narrowed my eyes, searching his for more information.
Did he know already? Could he know?
I felt jealous if he did. I returned my gaze to our principal, my mind trying to select someone immediately so that I’d at least be a betting woman before the announcement, even if only with myself.