A Prom to Remember(3)
All the boys in their class might have been “beta males,” to use Amelia’s term, but that didn’t make them terrible guys. Sorry they don’t live up to your high standards, Amelia.
What irked Paisley the most was that she had somehow ended up arguing to keep the whole prom-king-and-queen dumpster fire even though she didn’t care about it at all. She would have totally fought against the ridiculous tradition, except that she wanted desperately to prove Amelia wrong. The guys in their class were great! Just because they weren’t the usual variety of jockish Sasquatches that Amelia had dated all through high school didn’t mean they were second-class citizens.
And yet Paisley was definitely disappointed in herself. She was supposed to be fighting the patriarchy. “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and all that good stuff. But there she was, supporting a victory for heteronormative bullshit, as Luke had so eloquently put it.
If she wanted to get to the heart of the matter, what really annoyed Paisley was that she was on prom committee in the first place. Unfortunately her advisor had insisted at the beginning of the year that Paisley put something else on her college applications besides “Mall-food-court potato technician,” and prom committee just happened to fit in her schedule.
Also she heard there’d be free food at every meeting.
She had been lied to.
She could have, and probably should have, quit. But at this point in the school year it was easier just to ride it out and avoid confrontation. Especially since sometimes the drama within the committee was entertaining. Being involved in the drama was less entertaining.
The warning bell rang, and Paisley had no choice but to stop following the happy couple and head for her locker. She promised herself that she would track Cora down later and ask her to take Henry’s name off the list. Henry would never be the wiser.
As Paisley made her way down the hall, passing through a sea of students and long rows of lockers, there was a certain buzz in the air.
Ah yes, the buzz of prom tickets being on sale and the flood of promposals happening everywhere she turned.
Given that tickets had only gone on sale like fourteen seconds ago, these weren’t the elaborate sort of promposals that you see on the local news (barf) but the kind of spontaneous promposals that you might find in a teen rom com. You know, the kind where a boy was literally kneeling down in the middle of the hallway to ask a girl to the prom.
Barf, barf, barf.
Paisley huffed out an irritated breath as she spun her combination lock and started digging through the detritus that lived in the bottom of her locker.
Finding what she needed by touch, she slammed the door shut at the same moment there was a shriek at the end of the hallway where some girl was a little too excited about getting invited to the prom. To each his or her or their own, but this whole situation was definitely not for Paisley.
Paisley fished her phone out of her pocket and shot a quick text to Henry.
She slid into her seat in homeroom.
She turned around and gave Henry the finger.
He put his hands up in defense. “Hey, it’s your rule.”
“Rules were meant to be broken,” Paisley said in a threatening-action-hero voice as their homeroom teacher wandered in and got their attention. Paisley turned back around and did her best to hide her grin.
Chapter 2
Jacinta
Homeroom was probably the number-one thing on “Jacinta Ramos’s List of Things She Would Not Miss About High School.”
It went like this:
1.??Homeroom.
2.??That certain smell in the cafeteria.
3.??That certain smell in the girls’ locker room. (She assumed the boys’ locker room was likely even worse but, having no personal experience with it, decided to limit it to a smell she knew all too well.)
4.??How long it took to get out of the parking lot after school while everyone else on earth was trying to leave at the same exact moment.
5.??Feeling like a background character in her own life.
Number five was something that haunted her on a daily basis. But she wasn’t going to let it get the better of her.
Jacinta wanted desperately to be seen as more than just a background character; she wanted to have one iconic high school moment.
And The Prom would be her moment.
The Prom was the hill she was going to die on. She had even made it her New Year’s resolution. At the stroke of midnight, she whispered, “I will go to The Prom, and I will not be a background character for one whole night.”
With prom tickets having gone on sale yesterday, it was finally time to make good on her promise to herself. She needed a date, she needed a dress, and she needed a huge dose of courage.
As she jogged toward her locker after homeroom to grab her sociology textbook, she found a couple standing in front of it with a bouquet of at least ten helium-filled balloons. When the girl said yes, a hasty celebratory make-out session started and Jacinta could not find a way in to her locker through the balloons.
How was it that Jacinta had gone through four years of high school without having even one boy hang around her locker? Isn’t that what was supposed to happen in high school? Locker lingering? Wasn’t that supposed to be how high school students found love?
At least that’s what every teen romantic comedy movie that Jacinta had ever watched made her believe.