Prom Read online

  “Shut up, Nat,” I said.

  “Shuttin’ up, Ash.” She threw a pencil at me. “Loser.”

  I tossed it back. “Moron.”

  Banks cleared his throat. “Prom regulations will be distributed next week. Again, today is an F day, not G. Ignorance is not an excuse. And remember, the tassel is worth the hassle.”

  The speaker squealed and died.

  Ms. Jones-Atkinson passed out the papers. “Read ’em and weep.”

  Carceras High Graduation Requirements

  1. You must have accumulated twenty-six credits in order to graduate. Credit is granted only for passing grades. To graduate, you must have a minimum of:Four (4) English credits

  Four (4) Math credits

  Four (4) Social Studies credits

  Four (4) Physical Education credits Three (3) Science credits

  Three (3) Elective credits

  Two (2) World Language credits

  Two (2) Health credits

  2. All library fines must be paid in order to participate in Senior Activities.1

  3. All inappropriate clothing fines must be paid in order to parti-cipate in Senior Activities.1

  4. All damages to school property must be paid for in order to participate in Senior Activities.1

  5. All detentions must be served (on a timely basis) in order to participate in Senior Activities.1

  6. Any senior who earns a suspension or other Category Two (2) Disciplinary Action2 from this day forward will be banned from all Senior Activities.1

  Mr. Banks’s paper sponsored by Piscataway Paper Products

  “Let Piscataway Save the Day!”™

  12.

  Ms. J-A started class.

  She taught us that drugs are bad.

  I did a great job on Lauren’s nails.

  13.

  After class, Ms. J-A called me up to her desk to yell at me about a quiz she said I missed and an essay she said I didn’t hand in. Then she handed me the note from the office that said I had library fines.

  I hadn’t been in the library since I was a freshman. Was it still in the same place?

  14.

  Nat was waiting for me in the hall. “Okay, this is serious.”

  “You’re pregnant,” I said.

  “Ha,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of purse to buy for prom.”

  “Oh, God.” I started walking.

  “No, Ash, really.” She ran to catch up with me. “The purse makes a statement. Metallic says ‘hot and independent.’ Beaded says ‘romantic and tender.’ So who am I? It’s not like I have to worry what Jason thinks, but what about the rest of the world?”

  Jason was her so-called date. His dad worked with her dad. Jason and Nat didn’t like each other, but they looked good together, and apparently, that was all that counted. I was not a prom-type person and did not care at all, not even a little bit.

  Nat and I stopped. In front of us was a crowd, a wall of shouting people clogging up the hall.

  “What’s up?” Nat asked.

  “Hang on.” I got up on my tiptoes. “Looks like a fight. Well, it’s going to be a fight in a minute if security doesn’t get here.”

  “A good fight or a nasty fight?”

  Two white guys were circling around each other, staring, swearing, spitting, daring the other one to throw the first punch.

  “A good fight,” I said.

  Here’s the way it worked at our school: as long as the people who were fighting were the same color, it was cool. If it turned into a race thing, you wanted to get the hell out of there. People talked about “diversity” and crap, but the truth was, nobody knew how to get along. Not for real.

  “It’s just stupid,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We squeezed and shoved our way along the edge of the crowd. Even though I was almost six inches taller than Nat, I followed her. Nat always knew where she was going.

  15.

  When the fight was behind us, she repeated her question. “Metallic or beaded? Who do I want to be?”

  I wanted to tell her that nobody made a purse that said “Natalia Shulmensky.” Nobody could make a purse that weird. Nat and me had lived next to each other since second grade, when her family came here from Russia. I made sure she looked decent—at least some eyeliner, zit concealer, and blush—before she went out in public. She kept me from jumping off the roof when my family went crazy. She helped me babysit my brothers. I helped her babysit her grandmother. She liked penguins, chocolate frosting from a can, sappy poetry, gum, and violin music. I liked TJ. She flirted with dorkdom, but she could be tough, and most people liked her.

  Nope, they didn’t make purses that could say all that.

  Three security guards and Mr. Gilroy, the evil vice principal of discipline, galloped down the hall. We pressed ourselves against the lockers so they didn’t run us over. Some kids changed direction to follow them, but Nat and me kept walking.

  “I think you should get the beaded purse,” I said. “You aren’t exactly romantic, but you sure as hell are not ‘hot and independent,’ no offense, not the way they mean in those magazines. They mean hot like, ‘I’m too good for you, I got my own money, don’t be frontin’ me.’ You’re more like, ‘Be my boyfriend, I’ll make you cookies, come meet my dad,’ know what I mean?”

  Nat nodded. “Yeah, but Target is having a sixty percent off sale on their metallics. I’ll ask Miss Crane at our meeting today.”

  “Maybe she’ll have a purse you can borrow,” I said as a joke.

  She nodded, eyes serious. “That would so cool. Good idea, Ash.”

  We pushed our way up the stairs to the English wing.

  “I heard you and TJ had a fight this morning,” she said. “I heard you caught him making out with some little slut.”

  “That slut he was making out with was me, and no, we didn’t fight. It was nothing.”

  “You should dump him.”

  “You should buy the beaded purse.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Shuttin’ up. See ya later.”

  16.

  Second period, English 12: American Literary Connections, Basic, was a waste. Mr. Fugal yelled at us for not reading this poem by Langston Hughes. It was about a bird.

  I liked Fugal at the beginning of the year, but he lost me when he made us read The Old Man and the Sea. Birds! Fish! Why couldn’t we read about people?

  Since nobody knew the stupid bird poem, Fugal told us to take out our persuasive essay outlines. Persuasive essay? Not even the kids who paid attention had a clue what he was talking about. Fugal exploded.

  Then the first miracle happened.

  A fire drill.

  17.

  Fire drill rule #1—find your friends.

  Mine were stretched out in the middle of the soccer field. Nat, Jessica, and the other white girls had stripped down to work on their tans. Some of the biracial girls, like Monica, had, too. Lauren liked her color, dark coffee, and couldn’t be bothered to change it.

  I put on Nat’s sweatshirt and Monica gave me her jacket to cover my legs. My skin did not tan. My skin burned, peeled, and freckled. God did not intend for Irish kids to play in the sun, according to my mother.

  Nat opened up a magazine to an article about feather boas. The air smelled like hot Dumpster, Nat’s spearmint gum, and the pot being smoked in the alley across the street. I closed my eyes and listened to the prom gossip bouncing back and forth between all the prom-maniacs.

  “ . . . because he is sweet.”

  “‘Sweet’ is another word for fat . . . ”

  “ . . . then Patrick took that baby slut of his . . . ”

  “How many calories do french fries have?”

  “My dad said I have to take a white guy or . . . ”

  “How many calories do they have without salt?”

  “Shaun isn’t sweet, he’s skinny. Ask him . . . ”

  “ . . . eight more pounds till the zipper will go all the way.”

  “ . . . def
initely need a bra with it . . . ”

  “ . . . still can’t find shoes.”

  “ . . . you know she’ll get wasted . . . ”

  “ . . . can’t believe it’s so close!”

  “Are those sirens coming here?”

  I opened my eyes.

  Three fire trucks pulled up in front of the building. The fireguys dragged their hoses inside. This was not a drill. This was real. Really real. We might be stuck outside for hours.

  I could hear my skin frying. I covered my ankles with open textbooks. “I’m gonna get burned if they don’t let us in.”

  “You’d get burned worse in there,” Lauren pointed out.

  “There isn’t any smoke,” I said. “I bet a teacher pulled the alarm ’cause he was sick of us.”

  “Maybe it was that coach,” Monica said.

  “What coach?” asked Lauren.

  Monica said her cousin Lily was in the nurse’s office with a bad stomach, and she heard the nurse talking to a secretary about a lot of money being missing from some account. Vendors were calling the school, and the cops were investigating.

  I pulled up the hood on the sweatshirt even though it was eighty degrees. My friends argued about which coach was the kind of jackass who would rip off the school like that. I thought about snow.

  Eventually, the fireguys came out of the building, rolled up their hoses and drove away. When we went back inside, the Consumer Ed teacher made my girls cover everything back up. They were very anti-sex at Carceras.

  18.

  Spanish was boring except for the note that got passed around. It said the kid who started the fire was caught on a security camera. He didn’t want to take an algebra test, so he lit a roll of toilet paper. Then he felt bad and pulled the alarm.

  The security cameras on the second floor actually worked. That’s the kind of thing you needed to know to get by.

  After Spanish, I had Study Hall. I hid under a desk in the back row and used Lauren’s cell phone to call TJ. He never picked up.

  I was over being mad at him. I was nervous.

  To be honest, I was hungry, too. TJ was right. Breakfast at Burger King had been a good idea. Ma was always saying I should eat toast before I left the house. She was big on toast. If I had eaten toast, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a bitch, and then TJ and me could have had a nice time at Burger King with hash browns and a sausage biscuit, and he’d answer his phone.

  19.

  Nat caught up with Lauren and me outside Study. She heard that the kid who started the fire was a Nazi wacko, and he had wired the whole building to explode when the bell rang at the end of the day. But she didn’t think it was true, because if it was, the school district would get sued for making us go to class and all.

  We dropped Lauren off at Calculus. She was such a kick-ass student, she was going to Drexel on a full ride for her brains, not sports.

  Nat and me kept walking to the end of the hall, to the class for normal students: Applied Mathematics for Life, aka Slacker Math. It was one step up from Retard Math and one step down from State College Math. It was a million miles and five doors down from Calculus.

  20.

  Miss Crane was our Math teacher, a rookie. Back in the fall, she tried to be our friend by telling us everything that sucked about her life. We had to listen about her college loans and how she had to pay her parents back for her car and how her roommates both moved out (maybe she bored them to death) and on and on. The only thing that shut her up was when a couple of the guys in class got real interested in her apartment, where it was, did it have a sliding glass door, did she sleep with the windows open, did she sleep nude . . . you know.

  When she stopped trying to “connect with us” and focused on math, I liked her better. Nat fell in love with her the minute she announced she was the new prom advisor, “because prom is such a magical moment.” Nat had a thing for magical moments.

  Crane was having a crappy day, I could see that right off. Her hair was flat on her head like a “before” shot in an ad for volumizer spray. She wasn’t wearing any foundation, and you could see day-old green eyeliner in the crusty corner of her left eye. She forgot to put on lipstick and she was wearing khakis—khakis!—stretched one size too tight over her thighs, along with a faded red polo shirt.

  “What’s up with her?” I whispered to Dalinda, sitting in front of me.

  Dalinda blew a bubble. “Ashanti Williams has her for homeroom and said she was crying in her cell phone first thing. Maybe she got dumped.”

  People were sleeping, eating chicken nuggets, listening to music, talking, and doing homework (not math). Big Mike Whelan was chewing a toothbrush. Nat was in the back of the room, nose in another prom magazine.

  Crane stood up. Her eyes did not look one hundred percent focused. Maybe she finally snapped under the pressure of teaching us. Or she was buzzed. Nah, not her. She had been cranky ever since we came back from spring break. She must have snapped. I was kinda bummed. As far as teachers went, Crane wasn’t the worst.

  She picked up a textbook. “All right, people, that’s enough!” Bam! She slammed the book on her desk. “Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. We’re having a quiz. No, not a quiz. Quizzes are for babies, and you’re always telling me how grown-up you are. A test. Forty percent of your grade, in fact.”

  The class moaned. Nat whined that this was not fair. She was always wanting things to be fair, although they never were.

  Crane screamed louder. “Shut! Up! The next person who speaks will automatically get an F and be sent to Mr. Gilroy.”

  The only sound was paper being ripped out of notebooks.

  Our mouths weren’t moving, but our eyes were, blinking and flashing like billboards. Some people were saying, “Bitch is wack,” and some people were saying, “Forty percent?” and some people were saying, “She’s high.” Nat looked at me, and her gray Russian eyes said, “Something’s really wrong.” I said back to her, kind of desperate, “I need a pencil.” She dug one out of her purse and tossed it to me.

  A couple guys in the back of the room didn’t get the hint and started talking the old-fashioned way again. Crane handed them passes to Gilroy and pointed to the door. After they left, she scribbled some problems on the board.

  “You’d better get started,” she said.

  The problems were hard. Way hard. I wasn’t your A+ kind of student, but I swear she never showed us half of what she was testing us on.

  And then it happened.

  The second miracle. Two of them in one day—the kind of thing that made you wonder if maybe the priests were telling the truth after all.

  A knock on the door.

  Everybody stopped writing, because if we were lucky it was going to be Gilroy wanting to conference with her in the hall about the students she sent to him, and if they were con ferencing in the hall you better believe we were going to conference in the classroom, so we all lifted our pencils from our papers and held our breath.

  It was Mr. Banks, the principal. He stuck his head in the door and asked Miss Crane if she would come out and talk to him.

  Even better.

  Except that she didn’t go. She didn’t answer him or look his way. She slumped in her chair with her eyes on the paper in front of her.

  We all put our pencils down. Mr. Banks stepped into the room.

  “I’m sorry to disturb your class,” he said. “But I need to see you, Miss Crane. Now.”

  Alex Mullins was sitting closest to the door. He stretched his neck to see what was in the hall, then spun around to look at us, his eyes bugging out. Something or somebody was out there.

  Crane stared at her desk. A tired lock of hair flopped in front of her eyes and she tucked it behind her ear. Her hand was shaking.

  Mr. Banks walked over and stood next to her. “Amy.” Since he looked all serious and sad and he used her first name, I was thinking that maybe she had a death in her family, or maybe somebody ran over her dog and called the school, or maybe they just
found out she flunked her graduate school class and she couldn’t teach anymore and she knew that was coming, which was why she didn’t take a shower that morning and why she had been so bitchy the last couple weeks.

  “You’re making this harder on yourself,” Mr. Banks whispered.

  We were all holding our breath so we could hear him.

  “You need to come with me to my office. We have some questions for you.”

  Crane was a statue.

  Mr. Banks turned to the open door and nodded to whoever or whatever was out there. A cop and one of our security guards walked in. Both wearing uniforms. Cop packing her piece. A lady cop. In my math class. A cop here to bust a teacher, not a student.

  Crane pulled a tissue from the pink box on her desk and wiped the tears that had started rolling down her pale face. Nat’s jaw bounced off the top of her desk. She had figured out the end of this movie but was too shocked to clue anybody in.

  Big Mike spoke up. “Mr. Banks, you arresting her?”

  I crossed my fingers and prayed to the math gods. A bad test grade at that point was going to keep me from getting my diploma on time. Summer school for sure.

  Before Mr. Banks could think up a lie, the lady cop said, “We just want to ask Miss Crane a few questions. Come on, ma’am. Let’s do this the easy way.” She slid her hand under Miss Crane’s arm. Miss Crane stood up. She let the cop walk her out of the room, followed close by the security guard.

  Mr. Banks paused and told us to stay in the classroom until the bell rang and he would be sending an aide just as soon as he could find one.