Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (14 page)

For about thirty seconds, Lucas was my boyfriend. It was summer, two years ago, the tail end of it, when people spend their mornings buying binders and new jeans but then wind up meeting at the lake to soak up every bit of sun and water, flirting as much as they can before being herded back to the linoleum and poster-lined classrooms.

I had worked a double shift, cleaning out the entire freezer section so we could make way for a new, supposedly greener unit that would leave less of a carbon footprint while prominently displaying the squeezy tubes of iced raspberry lemonade. I was tired but tan, and my hair had gone all coppery white at the front, so maybe I looked pretty. A group of us from the cross-country team had planned to meet for a casual lake swim but somehow while I’d been sticking my hands into the permafrost, my
fingers aching and red, our outing had become an opportunity to dress up and drink.

As a result, I showed up at the lake but was redirected to the yacht club. Lake Markunmakee is the only large body of water for hours, and from May to September is populated by the wealthiest kids from Indianapolis and Chicago, who summer at their enormous houses and dock their boats at the club.

“Looks like it’s just you and me,” Lucas had said when we’d parked by the communal beach. The sand was poorly kept, with razor-sharp clamshells making it hazardous to walk barefoot. As we padded along the waterline, toddlers in their soggy diapers plopped in the sand, fussing while their local parents looked bored and annoyed.

“We could just get a root beer float,” I said, and Lucas and I were halfway to the Shake Shack before a blue Mini Cooper convertible swerved up and stopped short. Lucas raised his eyebrows at me.

“Hey there, hot one,” said the driver. I squinted and realized he was the tall, blond guy who had come into Giant Brooks while I was working and made some joke about squeeze pops being his main squeeze or something lame like that.

“Did he seriously just call you that?” Lucas’s words came out tense. I put my hand on his arm to keep him from saying something that would inspire a summer fight. With only boats, tubing, and beer for kicks, fights were common. Very masculine.

“Hey,” I said brightly, shielding my eyes from the hazy sun. “We’re just getting a float.”

“No you’re not—you’re coming with us.” He smiled and motioned for us to hop in the backseat. “Your teammates sent me to collect you.” He looked directly at me to make the point that he was getting me, not Lucas.

“Where are we going?” I asked, with the emphasis on “we” so he’d get that Lucas was part of the package.

“Yacht club formal!”

My face must’ve fallen, because the blond guy immediately shook his head and pushed his body partway out of the driver’s seat so he could face us. “Just kidding. It’s a luau. You know, pig on a spit, pineapple … grass skirts.”

“I like a grass skirt,” Lucas said, and I thwacked his arm.

When we got to the club, the sun was half slung into the lake, and ripples of pink and yellow appeared on the wide porch where people were dancing, eating from china plates, and looking like they’d spent more on their grass-skirt-and-bikini-top ensembles than Lucas’s mom did on her rent. Lucas went right for a big plate of grub and I stood there, feeling totally underdressed in my flip-flop and shorts, thankful I’d at least shoved a clean shirt in my bag.

“Want to dance?” the blond guy, whose name I still didn’t know, asked. I shrugged. That’s how I was feeling back then—like, um, not really, but if you really want to, I will. Like it was expected of me so often I just went along with it, shrugging over questions about which boy
I liked, about Valentine’s Day crushes, about dates I didn’t go on.

So I shrugged my way onto the dance floor, my worn-in flip-flops tracking sand onto the high-gloss wood. All around me, Hawaiian-print sarongs and string-bikini tops pressed themselves to boys with summer-ripped chests, bright polo shirts. The blond guy held me first at arm’s length. Then, as the song shifted to something slower, closer, his hands moved down onto my waist. I closed my eyes, trying to pretend I was somewhere else. With someone else. Then his grip tightened and his fingers began to roam, making what I’m sure he thought were slow, sexy circles on my shouder blades and then trying to creep toward the front.

“Um, those are my breasts,” I said because I couldn’t think of any clever way to get my point across.

Blond guy grinned and whispered into my ear. “Yes, they are!”

I have decent boobs. I know that. I have to special-order good running bras. This does not mean that I wanted some summer boy attempting the creep-and-crawl to feel them.

So I pushed away.

And he pulled back.

It was like a less fun version of row, row, row your boat, only by the time I’d pulled back yet again, the guy was getting annoyed, and his friends and my slightly inebriated teammates clearly thought we were meant to be
hooking up on the dance floor because they were not helping me.

And then came Lucas to my rescue.

“Hi, Sweetie,” he said. He didn’t grab me or rudely push this guy aside in some overly manly show of strength. He just stood there, calm, on the dance floor, and knew exactly what to do. He tilted his head, looked at me—at the two of us—in such a deep way that the blond guy stopped swaying and wrestling with me.

“Hi,” I said, not knowing what would happen next.

He turned to the blond guy. Oh God, I’d thought, here’s where things get ugly. Punches would be thrown. Stitches sewn into eyebrows, noses broken.

But no. Lucas sighed as though he had nowhere he had to be, nothing to do except finish eating his pineapple-encrusted pork barbecue. “Thank you kindly for watching over Sweetie—I call her Sweetie, see, because we’re betrothed—you know, meant to be together.” I fought laughter but the blond guy and everyone around us listened seriously. “I have a blood-sugar condition that requires me to eat every two point two hours, but I’m finished now.” He wiped his mouth on the napkin and then held his plate out for the blond guy. “If you wouldn’t mind throwing this out for me while Sweetie and I enjoy one last dance?” Lucas never broke from his stance—only I knew he was bs-ing his way through everything—and the guy actually accepted the dirty plate and balled-up, sauce-covered napkin as Lucas stepped closer to me.

I didn’t want Lucas to gloat later—he loves a good gloat—so I added my two cents. “See, Lucas and I, we’re—”

“Boyfriend and girlfriend?” the blond guy questioned, disappointment on his face.

“Oh, more than that,” I said. “We’re saving ourselves for marriage! For each other!”

I thought I’d done well. That I’d one-upped the conversation.

And for about thirty seconds, we were a couple, with Lucas’s hands on my waist, mine linked over his shoulders. It felt good. Safe. Both of us laughed under our breath.

“So you’re, like, virgins together?” The blond guy stood with Lucas’s plate in his hands.

I blushed. Lucas looked like he’d swung hard and missed big-time.

“We’re … you know, we’re … ,” I started to say, but by the time Lucas got around to saying, “We’re as pure as baby unicorns on freshly fallen angel snow,” the guy and his friends had dissolved into a swell of laughter.

Lucas and I left, and walked the three miles back to the Shake Shack and split battered onion rings and a large root-beer float.

“So, you like it when I come to your rescue?” He’d elbowed me as the mosquitoes dove for my bare ankles. “Did I save you or what?”

As I leave the school board meeting, the faces of the board members convey what I already know. They won. I lost. Was there even a fair fight?

“This isn’t over, Tessa,” Mr. Wekstein says, and goes off to find my parents.

I’m caught in the wave of bodies edging for the door. There aren’t many of us now, but we get clumped together on the steps that lead to the parking lot. I notice Lucas’s sneakers before I see his face. His Nikes were a point of contention with his mom, who insists that brand names are for suckers and that when he was young, Zips were just fine. I stood up for Lucas on that one, saying how all the real athletes had good shoes, how important it is to feel like one of the team. Now of course, I’m not really part of any team. I look up and see Lucas, remembering how at the yacht club he’d delivered his speech with barbecue sauce on his upper lip, how he’d wanted to be my savior, how I’d wanted it, too. I swallow as I recall the words he said tonight. How they seemed so small. Yes, he tried and for that I give him a nod. But that’s all. His voice wasn’t powerful enough, he wasn’t able to cut in and protect me, and now he isn’t able to even make me forget about my worries with vanilla ice cream and sweet soda.

Last year, when we sat on the picnic table swatting at the bugs and finishing the onion rings, Lucas had slung his arm across my shoulder and said, “Was I great back there or what?”

“The best,” I said, overly loud, and let my head drop onto him.

“Right back at ya,” he said, and slurped the last bit from the waxy root beer float.

Now, in the parking lot, our eyes meet, and I say, “Um, thanks.” And those words, too, are small in the big night air. We stand there for just a second. Then we walk to our separate cars and drive out different exits.

I go home after the board meeting and crawl into bed. Saturday morning I’m up early for my shift at the supermarket. The crowd outside is bigger and angrier than before. The good news is that people holding pro-Tessa, pro–Giant Brooks signs are out in force too. They’re still outnumbered, but they’re here.

The anti-Tessa protesters yell at me as I walk into work. Stuff about God, stuff about Prom, stuff about evil. I know I shouldn’t do it, but I stop and try to talk to one. “Do you think it might be evil to try to throw people out of work in a town where not too many people have jobs?” I ask a woman with a sign that says STAND AGAINST EVIL.

“Christ threw the money changers out of the temple,” she replies. “I suppose you’d have wanted him to protect their precious jobs.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

“Well if you learned your scripture, you might understand something about right and wrong,” she says. “Your ignorance of the Word just shows why we need prayer in schools!”

“Lady, I don’t need to read the Bible to know that it’s wrong to hate people. If you think your religion is telling you to come to our town and stir up hate, then either you or your religion or both are really stupid.”

This actually manages to shut her up. I walk away while she’s still making gasping fish faces and head into the store.

Business has been slow here lately, but it’s dead today. Saturday. Which is bad. Unless there’s a basketball game, people around here do their shopping on Saturday and their churching on Sunday. A few people wander the aisles buying stuff, but for the most part the place is eerily quiet.

I see Tessa’s dad walking through the store. He looks worried. I guess when your business depends on making money from stuff that tends to go bad quickly, a few days like this one can pretty much wreck you.

On break time, I buy a bag of pretzels and an energy drink at the front and take them back into the break room, where Josie is sitting alone at the table.

“Hey,” she says. She’s eating a sandwich and doesn’t really look at me.

“Hey,” I say. I can barely look at her, I’m so ashamed. I’m trying to think of a way to get out of here, but since I
obviously came back here for my break, I can’t just turn around and leave. I’m the one who created the awkwardness, so I’m gonna have to deal with it. I sit at the table across from Josie.

I open my bag of sourdough pretzels. It’s pretty noisy, and Josie gives me an annoyed look. “Pretzel?” I say. “Makes a nice accompaniment to a sandwich.”

“Bad carbs,” Josie says. “I’m only eating whole grains right now.”

I pause at that for a minute. “Guess that’s why your sandwich roll is so brown.”

Josie looks at me like I’m stupid. “Yep. Whole wheat.”

“So, uh, do they make whole-wheat pretzels?” This is horrible. When I got braces in the eighth grade, they had to take a couple of my teeth out. That sucked way less than this conversation.

Josie gives me the are-you-stupid-or-what? stare again, then looks back at her sandwich. “Look,” she says, “you were Tessa’s best friend for years. There must be a reason for that, so I figure I should try not to hate you, just out of respect for her. You know?”

“Um. I guess.”

“But it is a daily struggle for me not to punch you in your stupid face.”

“Yeah. I pretty much want to punch myself in my stupid face most of the time these days. But I’m too pretty to mess up my face, so I usually just go for the ribs. Hurts like hell but doesn’t leave any marks.”

Josie stares at me again.

“That was a joke,” I said. “I don’t really punch myself. I just have to kind of live with the guilt.”

“Tessa said you spoke up for her at the meeting,” Josie says, wiping the corner of her mouth with a napkin. I’m actually kind of excited to hear that Tessa thought enough of my lame speech to mention it to Josie.

“Yeah. I did.”

“She said it was nice, but ineffectual.” And there goes the excitement.

“Right again.”

“So what else are you going to do?” She takes a big bite of her sandwich.

“I-I don’t know. I mean, it looks like we’re beaten. I guess I thought I would try to stop anybody who was trying to beat her up at school.”

Josie smiles. “So you could get that punch in the face you’ve been craving?”

I laugh. “Maybe.”

Josie folds up the deli paper that had held her sandwich and stands up. “Tessa told me about how you got that creep to leave her alone at a dance one time.”

That story. I’m surprised she mentioned it to Josie. Hopefully she didn’t mention how awkward my dancing was, since I was trying to both slow dance and disguise the fact that I had a boner from dancing with a girl who was supposedly just a friend but was still, you know, a girl.

“Yeah.”

“At one point in your life, you knew how to do the right thing, and that it wasn’t about fighting. So figure something out. Or don’t. I don’t really care. But I guess I kind of wish you would. ’Cause you still mean a lot to Tessa, and I’d rather not hate you. So maybe you can make it easier for me.” She throws her paper away and heads for the door. “I left the mustard. You shouldn’t eat pretzels without mustard,” she says. “Just bring it back to the deli when you’re done.”

“Thanks,” I say, but she’s already out the door.

I spend the rest of my shift thinking, and I only come up with one thing. So when I get off work at four, I swing by the library and get there at four fifteen. “We close at four thirty,” the librarian says.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll only be a minute.”

I log on to Facebook and go to the “100,000 Strong for Tessa Masterson” page, which has suddenly got 12,076 members. I wonder if the school board meeting made the national news or something. I post this:

Hey everybody. If you care about this at all, please come to Brookfield and buy some groceries at Giant Brookfield Market. Tessa’s parents own it, and it may close due to boycotts and protests. Thank you.

I start “liking” pretty much every gay and lesbian page I can find and posting a version of my message on every
one. I guess this will make my Facebook profile look pretty gay: Lucas Fogelman likes “Gay Hoosiers,” “Valpo GSA,” “Lesbian Avengers” (that one sounds kinda scary, but what the hell), “Out and Proud in the Midwest”—well, you get the idea. I wonder what my future teammates at Purdue will make of this. I imagine it might make for some locker-room awkwardness. And I don’t care. At least, I try really really hard not to care. I guess that’s a step.

After my thrilling Saturday night with the Xbox, Mom wakes me up early. Well, okay, it’s ten thirty, but I was killing zombies until three, so it feels early to me. “Come on, kid, we gotta go.”

“What? Are we like suddenly going to church or something?”

“You wish. No, the Shillito’s in the mall is going out of business.”

“I guess I’m still not clear what makes this a wake-Luke-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn-on-Sunday-morning situation.”

“First of all, dawn cracked about five hours ago. Second of all, they open at eleven, and you may not have noticed that we haven’t had new sheets or towels in four years, but I certainly have. Linens are very expensive, and this is our chance to get some dirt cheap.”

“See, again, I’m kind of confused about why this needs to involve me.”

Mom sighs and wipes her brow with the back of her hand. “Because I want your company, okay? You had to force me to say it?”

“Uh. Lemme get showered and dressed.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Okay.”

Shillito’s is packed with bargain shoppers. They’re mostly Mom’s age and older. It’s hard to move through the aisles and displays, and twice somebody throws an elbow at me when I’m reaching for a sheet set.

Mom watches this with amusement, and then annoyance. “Okay, go wander the mall—you’re clearly not cut out for this.”

I wander the rest of the mall. It’s kind of a sad place, though not as sad as the street where I live. But MegaMart has done its share of damage here too. About a third of the storefronts are covered over with painted wood and signs that say COMING SOON! ANOTHER GREAT BUSINESS FOR MASON MALL CUSTOMERS!

I look around at GameStop but don’t see anything I like enough to pay for. I see plenty of things I like in the window of Victoria’s Secret, but I don’t really have anyone to buy them for, and I’m pretty sure that’s a creepy gift anyway. I come to Wild Thingz! and look through the window at all the black T-shirts. It’s not my kind of store.

Or, I didn’t think it was my kind of store. But there’s Kate Sweeney behind the register, looking bored. So I wander in. Just to be friendly.

“You’re not nearly pale enough to work here,” I say.

Kate laughs. “Yeah, well, you’re not nearly pale enough to shop here,” she says. “I’m trying to keep boredom at
bay, or, at least, you know, be bored somewhere besides my house. What’s your excuse?”

“Mom’s buying sheets at Shillito’s, and I think if I got injured by a bargain shopper, the scholarship people at Purdue might be a little pissed. After they stopped laughing at me.”

Kate laughs, which is actually pretty thrilling. “So what are you in the market for here?” she asks. “T-shirt? How about this one?” She points to one that says I
THE DIFFERENTLY BIOTIC.

“Um,” I say.

“Or one of these?” she says, pointing to two that say TEAM JOSHUA and TEAM GREGORY.

“What the hell are those about?”

“
Crimson Sunset
?”

“Oh my God. Is that that vampire thing that all the freshman girls were into two years ago?”

“Yeah. We still move a fair amount of the T-shirts. And it’s not just vampire stuff. Joshua’s the werewolf.”

“I mean, so people actually buy these shirts about whether they like the imaginary werewolf or the imaginary vampire and they, like, wear them around?”

“Oh my God, yeah. We had an actual girl fight in here over that very important issue. Two girls started yelling and before long it came to slapping and scratching.”

“Hot!” I say, laughing. “I mean, what the hell goes on in a girl’s mind that makes her want to do that?”

Kate smiles. “What goes on in a guy’s mind, like, ever?”

“Well, you’re looking at the guy who fell in love with a lesbian, so I guess I can say guys are pretty damn stupid. At least I am.”

“Good thing you’re cute, then.”

Once again I find myself kind of tongue-tied. I mean, I’m dumb enough to have fallen in love with a lesbian, but I know when I’m being flirted with. What I don’t know is what the hell to do about it. I used to, but that was back when I thought I knew who Tessa was, and who I was, and both of those things turned out to be wrong, so my confidence is kind of in the toilet right now. My eyes are darting around the store looking for something else to pay attention to, because the operating system in my brain is going to crash if I keep thinking about the fact that a really cute college girl is flirting with me.

And I see the T-shirt press and the sign that says CUSTOM SHIRTS MADE HERE, and my brain, eager to do something right, makes a connection.

“Hey,” I say. “Can you, um, I mean, thank you, by the way, but, I mean, uh, can you make me a T-shirt?”

Kate laughs at me, but her eyes are kind of twinkly, so it’s okay. I think. “You are a smooth operator! Can you make me a T-shirt! What girl could resist that line?”

I’m blushing, and I hate that. “Well, yeah. I told you I was an idiot.”

“Well, every guy is. At least you can admit it. And yeah, I can make you a T-shirt. It’s what they pay me to do. What do you want on it?”

I tell her, and she smiles. “Okay, that is adorable.”

She makes me the T-shirt, and I meet Mom at the fountain, which isn’t turned on and therefore looks gross and sad. Mom, however, holds several huge white plastic bags and is beaming.

“I just can’t tell you what new soft towels and new sheets are going to do for my quality of life,” Mom says.

“Congrats,” I say.

“What’d you get?” Mom asks, and I show her my T-shirt.

“Are they actually selling those?” Mom says.

“I had it made,” I say.

“I am totally getting one,” Mom says. It occurs to me to beg Mom to stop, to tell her that her walking into Wild Thingz! and getting a T-shirt from Kate Sweeney is going to embarrass the hell out of me in front of an attractive young woman, but maybe it’s just time for me to grow up.