How They Met, and Other Stories

Sally was cool about the whole thing, at least at first. Most of our conversations about it happened in written form, while the respiratory system was being explained. The limo logistics, the cummerbund/gown coordination—we figured everything out. If asked, we said we were going as friends.

The girls in my group circled their limos and made their plans without me. I didn’t have any real guy friends to speak of—or, at least, to speak to—so Sally and I ended up getting a limo by ourselves. The price of everything blew my mind, but Sally was good about splitting it. She said she knew it was stupid to get a limo when both of us had cars, but she thought it wouldn’t be prom without one.

The day of the prom, the limo picked me up first. I was wearing my dad’s tux, feeling massively uncomfortable but ready to hang out and have a good time. I rode over to her house with her corsage next to me in its plastic deli container, the big-ass ninja pins stuck through the stems. As I was walking up Sally’s front steps, I felt like something out of a syndicated sitcom, stuck in a lost episode of The Brady Bunch. Sure enough, her dad opened the door and gave me a dad handshake. Her mom fluttered around like she was the one going to the prom. Sally was nowhere in sight. I waited in the front hall, mustering charm for the gushing parents. Then I heard the creak of floorboards. I looked up, and Sally’s dress appeared at the top of the stairs, with her body somewhere in it.

She looked like Glinda the Good Witch. There’s no other way to describe it. The description hit immediately—I mean, I explicitly thought, Holy shit, she looks like Glinda the Good Witch. And there was no letting go of it. I have never in my life seen so much pink. It was poofing everywhere. She had to turn slightly to the side to get down the stairs.

This was a girl I’d only seen in jeans before. A girl who used words like f**kbucket in her notes to me. A girl who I knew listened to Led Zeppelin.

She was wearing pink lipstick. She was wearing so much blush that it made me blush. And her hair was frozen in this hairdon’t that would have made Little Miss Sunshine turn dark. Her mother started snapping photos and her dad looked all misty and I hid every ounce of my laughter behind the broadest smile I could possibly manage.

“You look beautiful,” I said, when what I really meant was, This is one image I’ll never, ever forget.

She told me I looked handsome, and then teetered there (her shoes were pink, too, and left her stilted). Her mom shot a look at my hands and I offered up the corsage. The plastic took about two minutes to open, and then I didn’t know what to do. All the places that I would’ve put the corsage were covered with sequins, and since I’d never really experienced sequin-pin interaction before, I wasn’t sure where to attach the damn flowers. To be honest, the pins scared the hell out of me, because they seemed like something from a butterfly collector’s table, and the last thing I wanted to do in front of Sally’s parents was draw blood.

Mr. Huston, God bless him, came to my rescue, saying, “Honey, why don’t you pin it on? It looks kind of dangerous.”

I stood there staring, because now I was seeing—no—could it really be?—eyeshadow.

We took about two hundred pictures—I think we were posed in each room of the house, as well as the backyard and front yard. I figured we might miss the prom entirely, and I can’t say that I entirely minded. Sally had gotten me a boutonniere that was nearly the size of the corsage. It was made of magenta roses. Magenta.

When her parents were finally secured back inside the house, I half expected and fully hoped that Sally would say, “I can’t believe my mom made me wear this dress! Hold on a second while I get my real clothes from behind this potted geranium.”

Instead she said, “We’re going to have the most wonderful night. And I’m so happy I’m sharing it with you.” I looked to see if she was using a Hallmark card as a crib sheet.

The limo driver got out of his car as we approached. When Sally got to the door, he had her lift the front of the dress, bend one knee, lift one leg, lift another part of the dress, turn, squeeze, lift the other leg, lean, and squeeze some more in order to fit it all in. I watched as Sally billowed and twisted, then—once the door was closed without incident—I walked to the other side and squeezed myself in.

On the way over, we talked about other people’s dates and other people’s plans. Safe ground. Then Sally said, “Isn’t this a great dress?”

And I said, “It sure is something.”

Then, from somewhere underneath her linebacker shoulder pads and soufflé sleeves, her hand reached over and grasped mine.

And I thought, Oh-kay…

Her thumb slowly stroked my thumb.

And I thought, Oh no.

“You’re so cute,” she said.

“You, too,” I offered. Then I added, “We’re almost there—I’d better fix my hair,” and moved my hand away to do it.

I was hoping that Sally’s Glindawear happened to be the fashion for our year, that some other girls would dress in a similar way so Sally wouldn’t stand out so much. When we got to the prom, though, I saw this wasn’t meant to be. Yes, there were certainly other girls in pink. And, yes, there were some girls whose dresses looked like they were made of icing. But Sally was the Marie Antoinette of this particular court. And I could’ve been fine with that—I swear I could’ve been fine with that—but when the time came for us to take another round of pictures, Sally not only bought the set of sixty-four, but she also ran her finger over my chin after she straightened my tie, giving me this look that I can only call amateur seductive.

I knew I was in trouble.

Luckily for me, tables were five couples each, so Theresa, Liz, and their respective dates had to break off from the rest of their posse to sit with me and Sally. The look on Theresa’s face when she saw Sally was probably the second-most memorable image of the night—I could read Theresa better than I could read myself, and at that moment, she had shock, terror, high hilarity, and a sense of cosmic justice all written across her face. But she didn’t miss a beat. She headed over to us, hugged Sally’s crinoline shoulders, and then, when Sally was turned away, gave me a look that was pure Oh. My. God.

Theresa’s date was a junior with the unbelievable name of Leighton Noble, a cartoonist for the school newspaper who, in one year’s time, would discover both The Smiths and recreational drugs, letting his hair grow long in the front and his moods grow long in the back, becoming the kind of boy I now wish I had dated in high school. Liz’s date was a junior named Phil—I can’t remember his last name, but he was something like third alternate on the debate team. He spent pretty much the whole night staring at his place card, as if he’d never before realized how fascinating the spelling of his name could be. There were two other couples at the table, but they were couples with each other and not with us, so they stuck to their end and we stuck to ours.

Sally tucked so much of her dress underneath her in order to fit on the chair that it must have felt like sitting on a phone book. We were served a salad entirely defined by lettuce and a piece of chicken that was cold at the core. There was a band, not a DJ, and at first it seemed like they had mistaken our prom for a thirty-fifth anniversary party; as we ate, the air was awash with songs from our mothers’ daytime soap operas. When the middle strains of “Tonight I Celebrate My Love with You” crescendoed, Sally actually leaned over onto my shoulder. Theresa nearly laughed her lettuce out through her nose.

There is no way to say “I’d like to point out that we’re not on a date” without sounding like a complete ass**le. And I hadn’t yet discovered that sometimes you need to sound like a complete ass**le early on in order to prevent sounding like an even more complete ass**le further down the road. So I just patted her taffeta and let her lean.

Once the dinner had been cleared and the prom committee had congratulated itself, the music picked up and we picked ourselves up to go with it. At Theresa and Liz’s urging, Sally kicked off her heels, which meant that the frosted peak of her hair was now level with my nose. As if to atone for the waiting-room music of the past, the band went into a (by my count) thirteen-song Motown medley—it had nothing to do with our high school years, but at least we could dance to it. Sally did not leave my side, but neither did Theresa (whose date only knew the box-step) or Liz (whose date was still at the table). The first song in the medley was “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and I made sure that when I got down on my knees, it was Theresa I was facing. She got the message, and I knew she forgave me for not asking her. She wouldn’t abandon me. So the four of us heard it through the grapevine together. We stopped in the name of love together. We even (good lord) just called to say I love you together. It wasn’t until we were about to be signed, sealed, delivered that Sally tried to wedge herself between me and the other girls, tripping over her dress to grab hold of my waist. It wasn’t a slow song, but clearly her patience in waiting for a slow song was starting to wear thin. We were both sweating now from the dancing, and I could see in her eyes a determination that bio class had never, ever elicited.

“Sally…,” I said over the music.

“Damon…,” she said back, pulling a little closer.

Then (hey, the good lord is good) “Twist and Shout” started, and there was no way to pretend it was an intimacy-inducing tune. I tried to twist in time with her, but we were always just a little off. When the medley was finally over, I gasped for some water and headed back to the table.

I thought that maybe if we could talk normally, it would all go back to normal. But it soon became apparent that I was speaking to some prom version of Sally, without being able to summon a prom version of myself. I tried talking about college next year, about how weird it was to be facing the last of our final exams, about how I couldn’t believe that Nina wouldn’t even come over to say hi. I thought Sally would bring up her own ex, so we could bond over our jiltedness in a friend kind of way. But she just said she had never understood why Nina and I were together in the first place, and that I deserved much better than that. Then she said, “Let’s not talk about Nina,” and asked me if I was ready to dance again. A slow song had just come on.

Clearly, Sally thought this dance was going to seal the deal. She wrapped her arms around my neck and dangled there, my very own new-girlfriend necklace. Usually when I slow-danced with Theresa or Liz or one of the other girls, we’d joke with each other, hanging out. But Sally had no desire for banter. She was staring at me so intently. She didn’t even look happy. Instead, she looked determined to be happy. I was the only thing standing in the way.

My arms were around her back, caught in the bubblegum folds. I knew if I’d wanted her, if I’d really wanted her, my hands would’ve moved up—they would have wanted to touch skin. I know that thrill now—of sliding your hand under a shirt, or crossing a collar to get to that nape of hair, that touch. But I was still stuck in girl gear then, and the thrills I got were from talking, from comfort. And with Sally it wasn’t even that.

Theresa cut in for the next slow song. As soon as her mouth was within whispering distance of my ear, she said, “You look like a mink who’s about to be turned into a coat.”

“You’ve been working on that line for the past hour, haven’t you?” I asked.

She nodded.

“What were some of the runner-ups?”

“Well, there was ‘You look like Sylvia Plath waiting for the oven to preheat.’ And ‘You look like you’re taking the SATs and you’ve only brought pens.’ And just plain ‘You look like a castrato.’ I decided to go with the mink.”

“I might’ve gone with Plath.”

“But you haven’t even read Plath.”

“Maybe I’ll go home right now and start.”