21 Proms

  Bah bup-bup baah bah

  You know this much is true . . . !

  She turns around.

  It’s gotten dark but the glow of the snow through the windows makes the room look almost candlelit. Taylor holds out his hand. “Dance?”

  Brooke realizes how much he actually looks like Jake from Sixteen Candles — at least he will in a few years. And Sam never really knew Jake, Brooke realizes, it was just the idea of him that she liked. Brooke likes the idea of Taylor, too. “Oh, he’s just this guy from my building,” she can hear herself explaining over the phone when Katherine returns from Namibia. She walks over and puts her hands on Taylor’s shoulders. He puts his hands on her waist and they rock from side to side. She smiles up at his nice dark eyelashes and thick eyebrows. If they were really in a Molly Ringwald movie, he’d say something like, “Merry Christmas, Brooke,” and then kiss her.

  She closes her eyes. And then he does — he says it.

  “Merry Christmas, Brooke.”

  Now he’s more than just an idea. She keeps her eyes closed, tilts her head back, and kisses him. It’s exactly like the scene at the end of Sixteen Candles when Jake and Sam sit on the dining room table with Sam’s birthday cake between them, kissing. Except they’re in the city and it’s snowing and Michael is splayed out on the sofa, snoring softly. Maybe it’s not like any movie. Maybe she and Molly and Taylor and Jake don’t have anything in common. But who gives a shit? The prom is all about dancing and kissing a boy you’ve always secretly liked, and she’s doing it, she’s finally doing it.

  In Vodka Veritas

  by Holly Black

  Wallingford Preparatory has two tracks. One is for kids who want to get into the good colleges that private boarding schools — even ones in New Jersey — are supposed to help you get into. The other track — the one not mentioned in the brochures — is for rich kids kicked out of public schools. It’s probably been that way since before they let the girls in, back when this place was just the one building that’s boarded up on the edge of the campus. Put on a jacket and tie every day and all sins are forgiven.

  I’ve been at Wallingford five years — since I got expelled from the seventh grade for making a knife in metal shop. But I wasn’t being psycho like the girls here think. If some asshole jock threatens to jump me after school because I made him look stupid in homeroom, I’m not going to just take the beating like a good little geek. My skinny ass wouldn’t have exactly won in a fair fight, so I didn’t play fair.

  My mother says that I don’t think about consequences until it’s too late. That might be true.

  But seriously, most of the reasons why Wallingford girls think I’m crazy are stupid rumors. Like it wasn’t my fault that after the school trip to France, everybody said I brought back the head of some guy who got into a motorcycle accident on the Rue Racine. Come on, anybody who believes that is a moron! How would I have gotten a head through customs? They won’t even let in some Anjou pears. And painting my fingernails black is a cosmetic choice, not a symbol of my eternal devotion to Satan. It’s also one of the only things I can do to get around the dress code — makeup is allowed, and the handbook doesn’t specify only on girls.

  Yeah, so I guess you picked up on my lack of school pride. Want to know what Wallingford is really like? Every year, they send out a fund-raiser to restore Smythe Hall — that boarded-up eyesore I mentioned earlier — and every year the only thing that gets built is an addition on the dean’s house. That’s also why we have to have our prom in our own banquet room. Sure, it’s better than a gymnasium, but the public school kids get to dance and eat rubbery chicken in the ballroom of a Marriott.

  It’s not like I don’t do any extracurricular activities, though. I’m the founder and president of the Wallingford gaming club — the Pawns. Our shtick is to break into empty classrooms and project PlayStation games on the whiteboard or jerry-rig Doom 3 tournaments with our laptops. Sometimes we even go old-school and play paper-and-dice Dungeons and Dragons. It’s my job to decide. That pretty much makes me Lord of the Losers. Which is great if you want a Phantom Blade with a Fiery Enchantment, but not so great if what you want is a date to the prom.

  Luckily, my best friend, Danny Yu, VP and secretary of the Pawns, doesn’t have a date, either. There are many reasons why I love Danny, but the biggest one is that he’s the only person at Wallingford as crazy as me.

  Like one time, when he was home sick, he saw some daytime talk show that had a bunch of KKK members on it and gave out their official website. So Danny flips open his laptop and sends them an e-mail: I am very interested in starting my own chapter of the Klan. Can you tell me what thread-count sheets we should wear? A half hour later, he sends another one from a different account: Do you believe that white bread is racially superior to other breads? They never e-mailed him back.

  Come on, you can’t blame that shit on DayQuil. That’s plain genius.

  So it’s the week before prom and we’ve already been shot down a couple of times. We’re in Latin class and we’re supposed to be translating something about Dionysus. Danny’s going over our seriously limited prom choices instead.

  “I could ask Daria Wisniewski,” he says. “She likes comics.”

  “She has that creepy doll with the goggles she takes everywhere. Odds are she’ll put it in a matching prom dress and bring it along.”

  “It could be your date, then,” Danny says. “Perfect.”

  “What about Abby Goldstein?” I list off the reasons this is a good idea on my fingers. “Hot. Redhead. Talked to me twice without actually needing to.”

  “Dude, she’d never go out with you. Not even if she had a nasty fetish and you were the only one discreet and desperate enough to take care of it.”

  “Very vivid — that fantasy of yours. Weird that it’s about me, though.”

  “Boys,” says Ms. Esposito. She’s tiny, shorter than a sixth grader, but not someone you want to piss off. She drinks coffee all day long out of a thermos that has a French press built right into it. “How about you tell me what the Bacchanalia were?”

  I stutter something, but Danny turns nonchalantly on his chair and smiles his most ass-kissing grin. “The festivals of Bacchus, called Dionysus by the Greeks. People got drunk and had big orgies.”

  Some of the class laughs, but not Ms. Esposito. “He was called Dionysus by the Romans and Bacchus by the Greeks, but otherwise essentially correct. Now, can anyone tell me what the maenads were?”

  We can’t.

  “No? Well, if we’re going to continue reading the story of Orpheus, it’s important to know. It was said that the mysteries of Bacchus inspired women into an ecstatic frenzy that included intoxication, fornication, bloodletting, and even mutilation. They would tear those not engaged in celebrating Bacchus limb from limb.”

  The class is silent.

  “Xavier, can you read the first paragraph in Latin?” Ms. Esposito asks. She looks satisfied, like she knows she can freak us more than we can freak her. As Xavier starts to read, Danny turns to me.

  “Let’s not go,” he says.

  I’m still thinking about wild women streaked with mud and dried, black gore. In my mind, it’s kind of hot. “What?”

  “Let’s get into our rented tuxes, take pictures for our parents, pretend we’re off to get our dates, score a bottle of booze, and do something dumb, something different.” His kiss-ass grin has not faded and I realize something about that smile. It’s kind of smug. Charming but smug.

  I’m torn. On one hand, it sounds like a pretty good plan. On the other hand, it’s a plan I didn’t come up with. “Let’s break into Smythe Hall,” I say. “Do some urban exploring right on campus.”

  “Genius.” His grin widens into a smile and the naked, crazy girls fade from my mind.

  The night before we’re supposed to go, Danny calls me. “Um, dude. I feel like a dick, b
ut I have a date. I’m going to the prom.”

  I’m in my dorm room, downloading episodes of Veronica Mars and googling the old school. I was going to tell him that there were photos on Weird NJ of the place. I was going to tell him that supposedly someone remembered having a prom there. I have maps and everything printing in color off my ink-jet.

  My hamster, Snot, runs on his wheel and I hear only the clack, clack, clack of the metal because I’m not speaking. Snot’s been hiding the choice bits of seed from his food bowl for the last half hour but now he’s finally decided to kick his night into high gear. Lucky him.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Daria,” he says. “She asked me, man. And she has a friend who could go with you —”

  I don’t wait to hear who the spare friend Daria Wisniewski’s willing to throw in to sweeten the pot. I don’t ask if it’s her stupid doll. I just hang up.

  He calls back twice, but I just let the phone buzz. I look at the tuxedo hanging on the door of the closet. I look at the floorboards, at the one I pried up to hide the half bottle of Grey Goose liberated from my parents. Now it seems like a half bottle isn’t nearly enough.

  My roommate left for his dad’s house this afternoon. He and his date are taking the SATs in the morning and then going straight to prom. I’m not sure if he thinks that’s like foreplay or what. Anyway, I’m glad he’s not here, because my eyes burn like I just got dumped.

  I know I’m not supposed to cry over a guy standing me up. So I don’t. But I have to practically break my knuckles against the brick wall outside my window to manage it.

  By the time I get to the abandoned part of the school on prom night, I’m already drunk.

  The good thing about living at a private school is that you know how to break into places. You learn how to break into other guys’ rooms to take their hot cocoa mix and soup cups. You learn how to break into unused classrooms because that’s the only place you can really set up a bunch of computers for a tournament. If you’re like Danny and me, you learn how to grappling hook out of your dorm room and break into the cafeteria because sometimes what you really need is a sandwich.

  So, basically, I take off the hinges. No problem if you’re sober, but it takes a while for me and I have to set down my bottle. Then I almost knock it over. The glass makes a hollow sound and scrapes over the concrete. I snatch it up by the neck and stumble inside, leaving the door just leaning there, sagging from the knob.

  Inside, the dust is so thick that the cuffs of my pants are already white with it. The walls are wainscoted in wood, and along the water-streaked boards, I see the outlines of where paintings once hung. I take another sip. The vodka no longer burns as it goes down. I feel like I’m drinking water.

  I loosen my tie and a kind of giddiness comes over me. It’s much cooler to be here than at the prom. I bet Danny forgot to get Daria a corsage and she’s already resenting him. I bet they’re taking stupid posed pictures in front of some kind of draped cloth and a vase full of red, red roses. I bet that the food is tasteless and the music is bad. I bet he’s forgotten that we were going to wear tuxedos on our little breaking-and-entering expedition and had to rent whatever was left. I imagine him in light blue with a ruffled shirt. That makes me almost laugh out loud, but my smile turns sour when I realize that it would actually be funny and I see us both in them, exalting in our dorkitude.

  Maybe I should have just sucked it up and taken the pity date. I wonder if Danny is pissed that I hung up on him, if he thinks that I’m afraid of girls. Suddenly, I’m morose. Being drunk by myself in an old building doesn’t seem as edgy as it did moments before. It seems sad and a little pathetic.

  Just then, I hear a sound down the hallway. I get up, clumsy with booze. My fingers and tongue are so numb that it’s almost pleasurable to stumble. I know that it could be one of the rent-a-cops the school’s probably crawling with or even one of the administrators, but my drunk brain can’t help conjuring up a girl. In my fantasy, she just got dumped by her jock boyfriend, she’s stunningly beautiful, and she goes back to the prom with me on her arm.

  I walk in the direction of the sound and I see candles flickering. In the center of a large room, six robed figures funnel dark liquid into silver flasks. At their center is Ms. Esposito. I’m so surprised that it takes my brain long moments to catch up with what I’m seeing.

  I stumble a little and they all look at me. The whole thing is so surreal that I start to laugh.

  “Ave,” one of them says. I walk a little closer and I see Xavier. He’s second board in the chess club, which makes him a member of the Pawns.

  I salute him with my almost-empty bottle of Grey Goose.

  “Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis,” he says. Some of them laugh nervously.

  I frown, trying to figure out what he’s saying. “Did you just tell me that I don’t know the power of the dark side?” More laughter.

  Xavier grins and turns to the others. “He’s okay,” he says. “He passed the test. Besides, I can vouch for him. He’s down. And besides, cornix cornici oculos non effodiet.”

  A crow doesn’t rip out the eyes of another crow. Nice.

  Looking at their faces, I suddenly realize I know them. It’s the Latin Club. Diego, Jenny, Ashley, Mike, and David. And their advisor, Ms. Esposito. Geeks, one and all. My people.

  “What are you doing?” My words come out slurred.

  “Bringing Bacchanalia to Wallingford,” says Jenny. “And you’re going to help us.”

  I picture Jenny streaked with mud and blood, rolling around in an orgiastic frenzy, but the image doesn’t stick.

  “Quomodo dicitur Latine?” says Ms. Esposito.

  I know that one. She wants Jenny to only talk in Latin.

  “Paenitere,” Jenny tells her.

  It’s then that I notice Mike’s gleaming dress shoes and the sequins at Ashley’s throat under her robe. A crazy grin grows on my face as I realize they’re wearing prom clothes. All this creepy shit aside, I finally get it. They’re going to spike the punch. This is a prom prank of epic proportions.

  Danny won’t be part of it. He’ll be slow-dancing like an idiot. He’ll feel left out.

  “In vodka veritas,” I say and tilt back my bottle, pouring the last of it down my throat. I choke a little, but I swallow anyway. In vodka is truth.

  Ms. Esposito doesn’t smile, but she does hand me a vial of the whatever-it-is. I’m thinking Everclear. “Nunc est bibendum,” she says. Now it’s time to drink.

  They snuff out their candles and strip off their robes near a closet. The gleaming wood and lack of dust point to them meeting here before, maybe lots of times.

  “Wow,” I say drunkenly to Xavier as we cross the quad. “This is pretty awesome. I had no idea Latin Club was so cool.” And I hadn’t. I’d always pictured the Pawns as the big geek rebels. I’m actually a little intimidated. I kind of want to join.

  He grins. “Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.”

  That one takes me a while, but I finally figure it out. Everything’s better when you say it in Latin. I restrain myself from rolling my eyes.

  As we’re about to enter the banquet hall, Mike turns to me and says, “Cave quid dicis quando et cui.” Basically, be careful what I say.

  My plan is to be careful where I stand. I’m sure I stink of vodka and I bet that my eyes are glassy. Any advisor gets a whiff of me and I’m going to get hauled out of here.

  “Look,” Xavier says, leaning close to me, and I’m startled to hear him speak English. “The rest of them probably don’t care what happens to you, but I want to make sure you understand. That stuff in the vial is an antidote. Take a quick sip and you won’t be affected.”

  “But … aren’t we just spiking the punch?” I ask.

  He laughs. “No way. Look around. People are drinking water and soda and energy drinks. No one drinks punch out of a
central punch bowl anymore. That’s out of some eighties movie.”

  I look around. The theme of the prom is Under the Sea. Blue, white, and gold streamers hang from the ceiling, and the tables are covered in sea-green chiffon cloth. Someone has spray painted real shells gold and scattered them on the tables, hot gluing them around napkin rings. Stenciled numbers mark the round tables. I think I see Danny across the room, sitting at one of them, next to Daria. He has his arm draped over her shoulders.

  But Xavier’s right. Servers are clearing plates of cake, but there’s no table with a cake on it. No punch bowl beside it to spike. “Wait, so what are we doing exactly?”

  “Dude, aren’t you tired of the beautiful people lording over you?”

  Of course I’m tired of it. I nod.

  He tilts his head toward the stage and the DJ. The shimmering lights of the dance floor reflect in the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes. “They think they’re so smart, but all they do is screw up, screw around, and screw off. Tonight, they’ll see their own true natures. You’ll love it. One steaming-hot plate of revenge coming right up.”

  Across the room, I see Ms. Esposito lift her hands. She starts chanting, and next to me, Xavier starts chanting, too, with a wink in my direction. They’re speaking low and I can’t make out the words over the music. I feel weird, violent, and too hot. I want to yell at Danny; I want to feel my knuckles bruise against his jaw.

  Xavier smacks the side of my arm. I look at him and he’s miming at me to drink something. I remember the vial in my pocket and take a sip. It tastes too sweet, like fortified wine. Immediately, I notice that I’m breathing like I’m already in a fight. I shake my head. Everything’s fine. I’m fine.