All the Way (21 page)

“You are my idol! You're the goddess of revenge,” Ariel said admiringly. “I should have called you years ago when Bobby Smerle broke my heart in seventh grade.”

“It was pretty great,” I said, laughing. “The only thing that could possibly make it better was to have seen the look on his face. If only I had a camera crew following him right now, so I could see him trudging down a dirt road in his stupid, shiny, rented, patent-leather shoes.”

“You rock!” Gina said, shaking her head at me in awe.

“And it looks like it might rain,” I added gleefully. “I think I heard thunder as I was coming back. Keep your fingers crossed.”

By now, the word was already starting to spread through the prom, although people had only heard bits and pieces, so they were getting it all wrong. I heard someone say I had hired a camera crew to shoot Joey's stupid shoes. Someone else said I'd had such wild sex with him, it gave my car a flat tire.

“I've got to tell Samantha,” Ariel said, turning to go spread the word and set the record straight.

“Me, too,” Gina said, hurrying off to tell a bunch of people she knew.

Emily leaned forward and gave me a hug, being careful not to mess up her hair or smudge my makeup. “You totally rock,” she said. “I can't wait to see what Molly does when she finds out her Prom King isn't coming back.”

I giggled. “Yeah. Well, serves her right. She was part of the reason everyone believed Joey's blog. I mean, she had to be in on that Hot Box Club picture Deanna sent. So screw her.”

“Let's dance!” Emily said, pulling me out to the dance floor.

I threw my head back and shook my hair, just to sort of shake Joey Perrone out of my life, once and for all. Then I headed toward the dance floor, but before I got there, one of the clowns tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a bouquet of flowers. Beautiful tiny pink roses with white freesia and baby's breath. Real ones.

“Wow—cool!” I said. “What's this for?”

But clowns don't speak—not the ones in circus costumes, anyway.

He just mimed that someone loved me, touching his heart and acting out the idea of love with an exaggerated smile. Then he pointed through the crowd to someone standing all alone on the far side of the dance floor.

It was David. As soon as our eyes met, he walked toward me.

“I'll catch up in a minute,” I told Emily, who looked slightly lost until some cute guy grabbed her and asked her to dance.

“Hi,” David said.

“Are these from you?” I looked at the bouquet in my hands.

He nodded. “I was too late to get you a corsage,” he said. “So I brought these instead.”

“Awwww. That was so sweet!”

Even though he wasn't really my date, I loved it.

“I heard what you did to Joey,” he said with a smile.

“What exactly did you hear?” I asked. “Because a lot of wrong stories are going around.”

“I heard you drove him out onto some county road and dumped him there,” David said, grinning like he wished he'd been in on it.

“Yeah. I did.”

“Everyone's talking about it,” David went on. “And you know I mean
everyone
if it finally got around to
me
.”

I laughed, loving how he was making fun of himself for being a social nobody.

“Yeah. I had some baggage with him.” I debated whether to tell David the whole sad story, and decided to give him the short version. “You know, I never slept with Joey, and I never spent the night in Cleveland with Tyler. None of that stuff was true. It was all just a bunch of lies Joey spread about me to make Molly jealous.”

“Oh.” He said it like he felt stupid for not figuring that out earlier, and he didn't know whether to apologize again.

“Look, it's okay. How would you know?” I said.

“No, I
should
have known.” He was almost blushing. “I'm sorry. I should have known that wasn't you.”

“Well, anyway, I certainly don't ‘expect' anything from you tonight, so you can relax, okay?” I punched him lightly in the stomach, teasing him but not mocking him or anything.

“Do you want to dance?” he asked shyly, nodding toward the mass of moving bodies.

“I want to dance so bad, I'm going to have a stroke if I don't get out there!” I said with a huge smile.

We pushed our way through the crowd and hit the dance floor just as the DJ switched to a throbbing, pulsing, '70s reggae number. “Oh, yeah!” I said, starting to shake it.

Who cared if David was a slightly pudgy geek in a slightly sweaty tux with pants that were an inch too short?

He was a sweet guy, and we were dancing!

Okay, I'm using the word “dancing” loosely.

So geeks can't dance to save their souls. So what?

We boogied, more or less, for the next few songs, during which I noticed that 80 percent of the guys on the dance floor were checking me out. On the third song, some guy I didn't even know asked me to dance, and David went off to hang with a physics teacher who was chaperoning. It was fun dancing with someone else for a while—someone who actually had a sense of rhythm.

But, believe it or not, after a while, I actually started missing David!

Then Tyler asked me to dance, and I was almost tempted—he looked so hot in his navy blue tux, with a tiny little white boutonniere.

He had that I've-been-a-bad-boy-but-I'm-ready-to-make-amends look about him. He knew he was a jerk for treating me the way he had. But I turned him down. I mean, come on. He might not be the scum Joey was, but he had asked me out for one reason only—to get into my pants. And frankly, I wasn't so sure he didn't have the same thing on his mind right now.

When the DJ took a break, Emily and I found each other again, and she told me who she'd been dancing with. Eric somebody, Jordan, Adam somebody, and even Jacob was hitting on her, although he was there as Becca's date.

Now that's just not nice—but I was happy for Emily anyway.

“And guess who else tried to get me to dance?” she said, smiling smugly. “Tyler! I told him to bite me.”

“Ahhhh!” I screamed, laughing at the idea of Emily Pendleton telling
anyone
to bite
anything
.

“Yeah. He was shocked.”

“So who do you like? Who's this Eric person?” I asked, gazing around the room so she could point him out, since I still didn't know half the seniors at Norton.

“Eric Papageorge. He's okay, but Adam's the one I'm into. He's so . . .”

Her voice trailed off, like she was dreamy in love.

“Which one is he?” I scanned the crowd, and she pointed out a guy with longish curly blond hair—kind of a '60s surfer look—wearing a very cool tux with a pink shirt and no tie. “Wow. Stylish.”

“Yeah, he seems more like your type than mine,” she said, almost apologizing, like she wasn't sure she deserved him. “He's nice, and he's really funny. And he looks cool, doesn't he?”

Yeah, he did. He had this hot fashion thing going on, kind of like Ryan Phillipe.

“You go, girl,” I said. “Ask him to dance when the DJ comes back.”

“Me? Ask
him
? Do you think?”

“Absolutely!”

“That makes me have to pee,” Emily said and disappeared toward the restroom, looking totally happy. As she pushed through the crowd, about five different guys were staring at her, checking her out.

I was dying of thirst, so I wandered out toward the refreshment table to get a club soda and lime. Molly, Natalie, Isabel, Ursula, and Amber were in a clump, drinking Cokes which, from the size of the handbag Ursula was carrying, had probably been spiked with rum. (Give me one other good reason to carry a bag that big to the prom, other than to hide a flask in it.)

Wow, I thought, suddenly realizing which dress Molly had chosen. It was the pink one, with beige lace trim on the bodice over top of the pink silk, and a full, layered skirt. Very retro, very Prom Queen from the '50s. Probably a Betsy Johnson dress, if I know what I'm talking about, and trust me, I do.

It looked great on her, now that I could see it close up.

I had to laugh, though. No matter how fabulous she looked, she was still Prom Queen without her King.

I glanced up at the clock in the hallway. It was ten, and Joey hadn't shown up yet. I'd heard from Ariel that a bunch of Joey's buddies had put together a posse and gone out to look for him, but they hadn't come back.

“Hey,” a voice behind me said.

I whirled around and saw David standing there again.

“Hi,” I said.

“You want to hang out? I know I suck as a dancer, but we could go somewhere and make a pie chart about how many times Molly looks at you with her own special combination of guilt, loathing, and envy.”

“A pie chart?” I blinked at first, and then realized he was totally kidding, making fun of his own geeky image.

Funny! Who knew he had such a sly sense of humor? “Could you work up a PowerPoint show for me?” I played along.

“I have an even better idea,” David said. “If you really want the icing on the cake, we could go back to my house, hack into Joey's blog, and post something about tonight that would totally embarrass and humiliate him.”

Ha!

“You're even worse than I am!” I said, meaning it as a compliment.

We hung out for the next half hour, talking about everyone at the prom. David was hilarious, the way he saw through all the crap in Norton's social cliques and tore them apart, bit by bit.

Then it was time to crown the Prom King and Queen. Mr. Hornersham waited till 10:45, hoping that Joey would show up, but when his posse came back empty-handed, they had to go ahead without him.

Molly walked up to the stage alone, with the King's and Queen's Court trailing behind her—but there was a big, empty throne sitting next to her when they took the pictures for the yearbook. She could barely force a smile.

If my life were a movie, I thought, Molly would get up onstage right now, take the microphone in her hands, and say, “I think we all know we owe Carmen an apology tonight. We've treated her terribly all year, especially the past few weeks, and it's my fault as much as anyone else's. So I want Carmen to come up here and take this crown from me—you're the real Queen of the Prom, Carmen Salgado!”

Then everyone would burst into applause, and I'd cry, and the music would swell . . .

But my life isn't a movie. Instead, I just looked around at everyone there, and I could see from the way they were treating me and from the guilty looks on some of their faces that they all knew I wasn't a slut. They knew I hadn't slept with Joey or Tyler, knew I'd given both guys everything they deserved.

Which was all I needed—all I'd ever need from this crowd, to tell you the truth.

When they played the last slow song at midnight, I glanced around and saw Molly standing all alone, off to the side. Other guys had been dancing with her earlier in the evening, but now she had no one to take her in his arms.

God,
I thought.
I wonder if Joey really did get eaten by coyotes. He should have made it back to school by now.

Then I realized: he probably didn't want to come back. Didn't want to show his face now that I'd humiliated him. He'd probably gone straight home to bed.

I danced the last dance with David and put my head on his shoulder. I could feel him sort of trembling inside, or at least his heart was beating really fast, I'm not sure which.

That's sweet,
I thought. I'd had an awesome prom—I wasn't in love with David, of course, but we'd had a really good time together, and I was glad he was there.

When the music ended, he looked into my eyes and said, “Do you want to come back to my house?”

“Now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “My parents are asleep. They'll never hear us.”

Oh, no,
I thought, my heart sinking.
Not him, too!

 

 

 

“Uh, David, I thought you understood. I'm not . . .” I started to say.

A look of total mortification flashed across his pink face, and I thought he was going to start stammering again. “Oh, no . . . not . . . no, that's not what I meant,” he said, blushing. “I just wanted to show you how I could hack into Joey's blog and mess with him. Like I said, it would be so easy.”

“Okay, great,” I said. “If you really think your parents won't mind.”

“Yeah. We could get some beer, maybe, too. Do you have a fake ID?”

I shook my head.

“Me, either,” he said, “but I could make one pretty fast on my computer. I mean, we can't do an after-prom party with nothing more than a twelve-pack of Gatorade.”

He was being so cute and considerate.

“What about Emily?” I said.

“What about me?” Emily said. I whirled around and realized she'd snuck up on us without my realizing it.

“Hi! You want to come over to David's?” I said. Then I noticed that Adam what's-his-name was standing beside her, looking all bedraggled from dancing like a maniac all night long.

They were holding hands.

“Yeah, you guys want to come hang out at my house?” David said.

“Why not?” Adam said, smiling and looking at Emily to see if she agreed.

She nodded, beaming at him like she'd just won the lottery.