Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (10 page)

“I feel bad for people who are, like, born defective,” Melissa says. “But they shouldn’t try to make everyone else miserable.”

“Right?” Stephanie adds.

“So why are you?” I say.

“What?” Melissa says to me.

“Trying to make everyone miserable. I get how being born without a shred of compassion in your soul has probably made your life really cold and sad but, like you said, you shouldn’t try to make everybody else miserable. Right?”

“Shut up, fag,” Stephanie says, and she and Melissa turn on their heels and leave.

I turn to tell Tessa I’m sorry, but she’s already walking away down the hall.

People who don’t run don’t really get the art of it. Maybe that sounds too much like what I wrote in my essay for Northwestern, but while the blur of soy fields passes on my right, and with the unused red silo way off in front as my marker, I pound my feet on the pavement. You’re not supposed to pound. Any distance runner will tell you that. Coach Branford basically implanted that in my head in eighth grade when I annoyed him every morning and jogged next to him in the hall and after school in the office until he let me join the high school team—practices only, but still.

There’s poetry to running, and Lucas understood that. When we were little, we played snake ’n’ follow, our own game, in which the leader runs a jagged path through
cornfields or the town square or backyards, wherever we happened to be—even in the aisles of Giant Brooks where once there was an unfortunate incident with glass mustard jars and significant spillage. One of us would run or jog or take funny waddling steps and the other would have to follow; as the pace picked up, the harder it was, but at the end we’d wind up in a heap, laughing and out of breath.

My breath now comes out in gasps, not with the superb control I’m trained to have, no ‘in through the nose out through the mouth,’ just loud and gasping. The great part of running in Indiana is the flatness: you can see everywhere and nowhere all at once. So many afternoons or early Saturday mornings I spent scuffing these roads with my Sauconys, studying the abundant soy crop or watching the crispy-edged corn look ashamed in times of drought. And most of those times, Lucas was right with me.

He’s not a runner. In fact, panting now with heat rising up my shins, my face prickling with sweat, I think about how little he complained about it. How he just did it. Followed me. How much of that was because he cared about our friendship and how much of that was because he was trying to woo me? If he were here now, I could ask. Or laugh about the word “woo.”

But Luke isn’t here. I start up again, my feet ticking their own lonely rhythm. He always kept up with me, even when I pushed hard and went too fast; it was like he was saying he’d never let me go on alone.

Josie’s not into running. She likes swimming, but it’s not warm enough for the lake yet and the nearest pool is almost an hour away. She’s got a pass there and goes about five times a week. I’ve never been, mainly because she hasn’t asked me. I’d go even though I don’t like swimming that much. I’d go just to watch her butterfly the lengths and wrestle with her ugly green swimcap, which she displayed for me at Giant Brooks when no one was looking. We’re not an official couple in that way, I guess. She does her thing, I do mine, and we cross paths happily. But it’s not the closeness I had with Lucas. On the other hand, Josie’s still up for going to the Prom, and even sent me links to handmade cuff links and cool earrings on Etsy.

The heat gets the better of me and I have to stop, hands on my hips, sweat pooling on my chest, between my shoulder blades. I cough. I’m at the intersection of Inlet 119 and Rural Route 2.

A Ford pickup scatters roadside gravel as it speeds by with all the windows down and kids from Northern in the back. They notice me and my heart pounds harder. But they don’t stop and I’m horribly relieved, the kind of shiver you get when you miss a stair or nearly crash into the car in front of you. But two of the kids shriek from the back, “Lezzie loser!”

The words ring out over the fields, the flatness, and with my breath jagged and no one nearby, nothing looks beautiful. We don’t even take the time to name
our roads here—just numbered routes and inlets, highways.

I jog back alone.

“Oh, no, she can’t go!”

“Oh,
no
, she won’t go!”

“Don’t let one girl’s sins ruin everyone’s heaven!”

Giant Brooks has no employee parking lot, mainly because the store was built a long time ago when there were only two employees. Now there’s just no space to add one without buying more land, which my parents have thought about but haven’t done, feeling that people who work for the store like parking with the customers. And we all take the spots farthest away anyway. But no spot is far enough away from the chanting, the shouting, the clot of picketers in front of the glass entryway windows. Signs hung from inside boast charcoal on sale and locally raised pork, but outside the signs echo the shouts.

HELL WELCOMES TESSA!

The sign is large and painted in red, the drips probably unintentional but blood-like nonetheless.

I close my car door. My hand grips my rolled-up Giant Brooks apron, which I’ve brought in case I’m on sandwich duty, and I bite my lip hard as I try a running trick. If you look down, you feel like you’re not making any progress, just the same road or track slipping under you and you get tired, or falter. But if you look ahead, try to
pick something small and bright on which to focus way in front of you, you feel better, more sure. My parents urged me to stay strong and show up for work and I know they’d come out and meet me if I called them, but I don’t want to. They’ve been supportive enough as it is. Last night when the phone rang for the billionth time, they simply unplugged it without a fuss.

“This is nice,” my father had said when my mother produced an actual cooked meal and served it to all four of us. The windows were open, the spring evening breeze pushed through, and it was like hope was out there, somewhere. That is, until a smashing noise made us all jump and Danny lurched up right away, the king of reflexes, and stomped back in to show us the brick that had been thrown through the sitting room window. My dad cleaned up the glass and I had started to walk the brick out to the trash when my mom put her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t get rid of it,” she said. I raised my eyebrows, fighting tears that mirrored hers. “Let’s use it.” She had the same expression on her face that she did when the store was looted. “I’ve been looking for a doorstop, anyway.” She pointed to the kitchen swinging door that’s always driving the four of us crazy because it just won’t quit swinging even after we’ve tried jamming a balled-up sock under it. She pointed with her chin so I took the brick—Dad and Danny were watching at this point—and I put it against the open door. We all watched, holding our collective breath like it really really mattered whether the brick stayed. Whether it could
be something useful instead of something ugly. And it worked. Dinner was delicious.

Now I try to navigate what used to be a short walk from the parking lot to the Giant Brooks entryway; it feels marathon-length. I focus on the bright purple of a large cooler inside the store. Because people are gearing up for summer, my parents are heavy on the accessory sales to drive up the profits on the food. The purple cooler rests on top of a pile of similar coolers.

“You’re the reason the devil himself is in our town!” a protester shouts in my face.

I suck the hot air into my lungs and it burns as I try to make my way across a line of picketers, each one with a sign: old ladies, mothers I’ve known forever, students from school, toddlers brought for show and who say in their lispy way, “She’s bad!”

I nudge my way by a few sign holders but they jam together, purposefully elbowing me back toward the parking lot.

“Boycott Giant Brooks!”

This chant catches on and the crowd heaves with it. People won’t buy things at my parents’ stores? The purple cooler will sit there until fall. The milk will sour on the shelves. My parents will lose their house. Danny and I won’t be able to afford college.

I try entering again, this time anger pushing me through the first line of people. I look for someone—anyone pro–gay rights, pro-me, pro-anything. But there’s only anti.

“Queer is wrong! She can’t go to Prom!” This one is said through a megaphone and I make the mistake of turning to see who is saying this and nearly get smacked in the face by Jenny Himmelrath’s mother, tidy as ever in her pleated navy skirt and sensible flats, holding a giant white megaphone borrowed from Jenny’s cheering squad.

“Wait—let me explain—” I start to say before Mrs. Himmelrath bellows into the megaphone again.

“Queer is wrong! Don’t let her ruin Prom!”

I push past the rest of the crowd, the jostling and noise still overwhelming, until I hear, “You’d think she could try to come up with a better rhyme scheme. ‘Wrong’ and ‘Prom’ are really slant poetry and I think it’ll be lost on mainstream Brookfield. We could’ve done much better, don’t you think?”

I feel a hand on my back, basically pushing me through the protestors, guiding me past the signs of homemade hate, onto the automatic doorpad and into the store. “Lucas,” I say as we leave the sticky loud air outside and come into the icy sterile store air. Saying his name gives me a shiver, makes me feel like reaching out and grabbing him, holding on or giving his hand a squeeze the way I always did at the end of a run, our eyes meeting.

And we stand there, both of us in our uniforms for work. I wait for him to open his mouth, for him to talk about pushing us both through the picket lines, about our
overlapping shift today, to respond as the muffled protesters turn toward the window to make a show for us.

He opens his mouth to say something, and then a customer asks if the bratwurst is still on sale, and the moment’s gone.

“I smell like coleslaw,” I warn Josie when I see her in the back half an hour later. Josie puts her hands on her hips, and I can’t help but smirk.

She grins. “I always liked cabbage.”

Her grin is only half happy; I told her about the brick. She couldn’t see the strength behind using it as a doorstop, and we haven’t spoken much about the picketers. Now her shift is over. She reaches for her time card and punches it in after giving me a half hug. Without speaking about it, we’re not really showing any public affection. Not that a hug is such a big deal, but reporters are everywhere and I’m worried about the store. “I should probably make my exit,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. I want to tell her something, or do normal things like ask her if she bought a dress or suit. And I feel torn between wanting to be the kind of person who doesn’t care about what anyone thinks or does so I can run to her and we could at least have a quick kiss, or the kind of person I really am, which is the kind who is scared of doing the wrong thing many times over, the kind of person who is really good at trying to please everyone,
even though now I realize I’m failing at that on all fronts: me. Josie. Lucas. The store. The town. My school.

“Here,” Josie says, her small hands picking through her blue backpack in search of something. “I forgot to title it, which, you know, is like the cardinal sin of mix CDs, right? They have to have a name. But as usual I was running late today and there was paint on my car window, and …” She lets her voice get swallowed by the backpack as she zips it shut.

“Your car had paint on the window?” My shoulders fall with the weight of everything. What if I had just said yes to Lucas?

Josie brushes off the incident with her usual mellow confidence. “Look, Tessa, I let it go, and you should too, okay? A little vinegar and scrubbing and it came off.”

I raise my eyebrows. “I was super-worried about the cleaning effort involved,” I tell her, and tentatively take a step closer to her. She shuffles on the concrete toward me and, slowly, like we’re testing tea that might be boiling hot, we hug.