Prom

Table of Contents

 

 

“She stole it? How much?”

“They’re not sure yet. A lot.”

It took a minute to sink in—our math teacher stole the prom money. Wow. How low could you get?

“Hang on,” I said. “So you have to cancel the prom?”

Junie wailed and buried her head in her arms.

“Way to go, Hannigan,” Lauren said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, I mean it.”

I had been saying prom was stupid for years, and it still was, but it was different for them. They had been waiting forever for this. Dichelle, she lived with a foster family who had nothing, but everybody, even the second cousins, had pitched in to buy her a dress and shoes and a sparkly headband that looked like a beauty-pageant crown, only not as tacky. Junie had been dating the same stand-up man, Charles, since freshman year, and they were the cutest couple on the planet, and he was going into the army right after graduation, and we were all sure he was going to ask her to marry him at prom. Aisha had been working for free at a braiding shop so she could get her hair done. Monica, her mom died of cancer last year—if anyone deserved a dance, it was that girl.

Prom was stupid for me, but not for them, and I wasn’t such a butthead that I couldn’t see the difference. But I didn’t know what to say or do.

“Anybody want a Tastykake?” I asked.

SPEAK
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2005
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006

Copyright © Laurie Halse Anderson, 2005

All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Anderson, Laurie Halse.
Prom / Laurie Halse Anderson.
p. cm.
Summary: Eighteen-year-old Ash wants nothing to do with senior prom,
but when disaster strikes and her desperate friend, Nat, needs her help
to get it back on track, Ash’s involvement transforms her life.

eISBN : 978-1-101-15724-4

 

 

 

The publisher does not have any cpntrol over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

That was me.

Normal kids (like me) thought high school was cool for the first three days in ninth grade. Then it became a big yawn, the kind of yawn that showed the fillings in your teeth and the white stuff on your tongue you didn’t scrape off with your toothbrush.

Sometimes I wondered why I bothered. Normal kids (me again), we weren’t going to college, no matter what anybody said. I could read and write and add and do nails and fix hair and cook a chicken. I could defend myself and knew which streets were cool at night and which neighborhoods a white girl like me should never, ever wander in.

So why keep showing up for school?

Blame my fifth-grade teacher.

Ms. Valencia knew she was teaching a group of normal kids. She knew our parents and our neighborhood. Couple times a week she’d go off on how we absolutely, positively had to graduate from high school, diploma and all (like the GED didn’t count, which was cold), or else we were going straight to hell, with a short detour by Atlantic City to lose all our money in the slot machines. She made an impression, know what I mean?

Every kid who was in that fifth-grade class with me was graduating, except for the three who were in jail, the two who kept having babies, the one who ran away, and the two crack whores.

The rest of us, we were getting by.

I was getting by.

It had been a decent morning, for a Tuesday. No meltdowns at home. The perverts outside the shelter left me alone, and the rottweiler on Seventh was chained up. A bus splashed through the puddle at the corner of Bonventura and Elk, but only my sneakers got soaked. It could have been worse. At least the sun was shining and some of my homework was done.

So I got to admit, I was in a half-decent mood that morning, dragging myself and my butt to school.

I had no clue what was coming.

He was leaning against the telephone pole in front of the building, arms crossed over his chest. His black pants rode dangerous low on his hips. A dark blue hoodie was unzipped to show a faded beater stretched across tight, yummy abs. He had a silver chain around his neck. He needed to shave.

TJ Barnes smiled at me.

“Come here,” I said.

Ever kiss someone so hard . . . no, not hard, but intense, you know, electric. . . . Ever kiss someone so electric your skin peels off and floats away, and then his skin wraps itself around you to keep you warm and it feels like velvet, and then you look in his eyes and you can see every thought you ever had looking back at you?

TJ did not kiss that good.

But he almost did.

TJ and me met the summer before tenth grade. I was buying a cherry Slurpee at the 7-Eleven. He was bleeding from a broken nose after a fight in the parking lot. I forget what the fight was about. Everybody told me he was trouble, but underneath the trouble he was sweet and fun, and he knew how to make me laugh. Plus, he was hot as hell.

His kiss tasted like cigarettes and toothpaste. I pulled him as close as I could with my clothes on. We hadn’t touched each other in, like, four days, and that’s a crime when you’re eighteen and he’s nineteen.

The kiss lasted a long time. When he locked his lips on mine, the whole freaking neighborhood vanished—
poof!—
in a cloud of bus exhaust. I heated up so fast I dried my sneakers from the inside out.

He was happy to see me, too.

When we stopped kissing, the noise in front of the school started up again: traffic screaming, music ba-booming out of windows, and people giving us shit as they walked by.

“Get a room.”

“Get me a piece, TJ!”

I pulled back.

Monica jogged past us, holding on to her earrings so they didn’t bounce against her shoulders. “You better hurry, Ash. Bell’s gonna ring. Yo, Teej, ’sup?”

TJ nodded once.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Down to one forty-two this morning.” Monica smiled. “Seven more pounds, eleven days. I’ma make it, you watch.” She ran for the door.

TJ kissed my neck. “I missed you.”

“Missed you, too. Where were you all weekend?”

“Jersey. Helpin’ my cousin side a house.”

“You know how to side houses?”

“Now I do.” His tongue flicked my earlobe. “You tell your parents?”

“Not yet. I worked a double shift Saturday. Sunday I had to babysit. Yesterday was crazy.”

“When you gonna tell them?”

“Soon. It has to be the right time, you know.”

“Um-hmm.” He licked my ear like a Labrador retriever. “Let’s get outta here.”

“I can’t. I got Health.”

“Blow it off.”

“I have too many detentions. I gotta be good.”

“Tell Jonesie you had cramps. We’ll go to Burger King.”

Hmmm.
I was in the mood for hash browns, maybe a sausage biscuit. “You paying?”

He raised my hand up to his lips and tried to kiss it.

I pulled it away. “Oh, no, you don’t. You just worked construction for four days. What happened to the money?”

“I used it for the security deposit. Come on, babe. I’m hungry.”

I shouldn’t have bitched. The deposit was for an apartment. Our apartment. To live in after I graduated, because no way was I staying home with my family. We had big plans, me and TJ. The apartment was just the beginning. We were going to get our own cars. I wanted to travel, too, to L.A. and Cancun, or the Bahamas or Miami, someplace where the sun was always shining and people looked good in their bathing suits. I needed a better job, for sure. I was thinking I could be an executive, even though I’d have to start out answering phones or something. Or maybe a fashion designer. Or one of those people who decide on which shade of lipstick will be popular.

Whatever. We had a lot ahead of us, me and TJ. Least I could do was feed the boy.

I pulled some bills out of my pocket. I was going to peel off a couple ones, but he took the whole wad. Then his phone rang.

He pocketed the cash, flipped open his phone. “Yo.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

He held up one finger to shush me. “No, that’s not what the dude said,” he told the phone. He turned his back to me and whispered something. I followed him. He waved me off with a nasty frown and a shake of his head.

I looked down like I didn’t care. My sneakers had brown spots from the puddle. A couple kids walking to the front door laughed. I knew in my brain they weren’t laughing at me, but my stomach said that they thought I was one of those girls waiting, waiting, waiting on her man while he did his business.

I was so not in the mood.

I picked up my backpack and walked.

“Ashley!” yelled my boyfriend who thought his phone was more important than me. “Come back!”

I didn’t turn around until I was through the metal detectors.

He was gone.

Carceras High used to be worse. It was so bad when I was a freshman, Ma was talking serious parochial school. But then we got this new principal and a new lady superintendent and they changed a bunch of things and we walked in the first day of tenth grade and we were, like,
Whoa, are we in the right place?
I mean, it was still a high school, still built like a prison, but now at lunch we could choose Pizza Hut or Taco Bell because we had our own food court, and they put in more vending machines.

It used to be a lot worse. Kids were stabbed here, a teacher was raped, and the janitors used to smoke pot under the stage in the auditorium. Then all the changes came, including new security guards. They could be rude; they’d pat down the hot girls when they didn’t need to, but people stopped bringing knives. The new custodians (
don’t
call them janitors) walked around in uniforms with logos of the companies that sold us cleaning supplies. They never got high during school hours and they kept the toilets flushing.