“Tina!” I was really annoyed. And not just because I thought her plan was really weak, either. No, I was miffed because Tina was wearing body glitter. Really! She had it smeared all over her collar bone. How come I can’t even seem to find body glitter in the store? And if I did, would I have the coolness to smear it on my collarbone? No. Because I am too boring.
“We are not playing Seven Minutes in Heaven at my birthday party,” I informed her.
Tina looked crestfallen. “Why not?”
“Because this is a nerd party! My God, Tina! We are nerds. We don’t play Seven Minutes in Heaven. That is the kind of thing people like Lana and Josh play at their parties. At nerd parties, we play things like Spoon, or possibly Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. But not kissing games!”
But Tina was totally adamant that nerds DO play kissing games.
“Because if they don’t,” she pointed out, “then how do you think little nerds get made?”
I suggested that little nerds get made in the privacy of nerd homes after nerds marry, but Tina wasn’t even listening anymore. She flounced out into the main room to greet Boris, who’d actually, it turned out, arrived a half hour before, but since he hadn’t wanted to be the first one at the party had stood in my vestibule for thirty minutes, reading all of the Chinese menus the delivery boys shoved under the door.
“Where’s Lilly?” I asked Boris, because I would have thought the two of them would arrive at the same time, seeing as how they are dating and all.
But Boris said he hadn’t seen Lilly since the march on Les Hautes Manger that afternoon.
“She was at the front of the group,” he explained to me, as he stood by the refreshment table (really our dining table) shoving Cheetos in his mouth. A surprising amount of orange powder got trapped between the spokes of his bionater. It was oddly fascinating to watch, in a completely gross way. “You know, with her megaphone, leading the chants. That was the last I saw of her. I got hungry and stopped for a hot dog, and next thing I knew, they had all marched on without me.”
I told Boris that that is, actually, the point of a march… that people are supposed to march, not wait for members of the group who’d stopped for hot dogs. Boris seemed kind of surprised to hear this, which I guess is not surprising, since he is from Russia, where marching of any kind was outlawed for many years, except marches for the glorification of Lenin, or whatever.
Anyway, Michael showed up next with the mix for the CD player. I’d thought about having his band play for my party, since they are always looking for gigs, but Mr. G said no way, as he gets in enough trouble with our downstairs neighbor Verl just for playing his drums. A whole band might send Verl over the edge. Verl goes to bed promptly every night at 9 p.m. so he can be up before dawn to record the activity of our neighbors across the way, whom he believes are aliens sent to this planet to observe us and report back to the mothership in preparation for eventual interplanetary warfare. The people across the way don’t look like aliens to me, but they are German, so you can see why Verl might have made such a mistake.
Michael, as usual, looked incredibly hot. WHY does he always have to look so handsome, every time I see him? I mean, you would think I would get used to how he looks, seeing as how I see him practically every day… a couple of times a day, even.
But each and every time I see him, my heart gives this giant lurch. Like he’s a present I’m just about to unwrap, or something. It’s sick, this weakness I have for him. Sick, I tell you.
Anyway, Michael put the music on, and other people started to arrive, and everyone was milling around talking about the march and last night’s Farscape marathon—everybody except for me, who hadn’t taken part in either. Instead, I just ran around taking people’s coats (because even though it was May it was still nippy out) and praying that everybody was having a good time and that no one would leave early or overhear my mother telling anyone who would listen about her incredible shrinking bladder….
Then the doorbell rang and I went to answer it and there was Lilly, standing there with her arms around this dark-haired guy in a leather jacket.
“Hi!” Lilly said, looking all bubbly and excited. “I don’t think you two have met. Mia, this is Jangbu. Jangbu, this is Princess Amelia of Genovia. Or Mia, as we call her.”
I stared at Jangbu in shock. Not because, you know, Lilly had brought him to my party without asking first, or anything. But because, well, Lilly had her arm around his waist. She was practically hanging on him, for crying out loud. And her boyfriend Boris was right there, in the next room, trying to learn the electric slide from Shameeka….
“Mia,” Lilly said, stepping inside with a look of annoyance. “Don’t say hi, or anything.”
I said, “Oh, sorry. Hi.”
Jangbu said hi back, and smiled. The truth was, Jangbu WAS incredibly good-looking, just like Lilly had said. In fact, he was way better-looking than poor Boris. Well, I hate to admit it, but who isn’t? Still, I never thought Lilly liked Boris for his looks, anyway. I mean, Boris is a musical genius, and I happen to know that, given the fact that I myself go out with one, they are not easy to find.
Fortunately Lilly had to let go of Jangbu long enough for him to take off his leather jacket when I offered to put it in the bedroom for him. So when Boris finally saw that she’d arrived and went over to say hello, he didn’t notice anything amiss. I took Jangbu and Lilly’s jackets and wandered, in a daze, back toward my bedroom. I ran into Michael along the way, who grinned at me and said, “Having fun yet?”
I just shook my head. “Did you see that?” I asked him. “Your sister and Jangbu?”
Michael looked toward them. “No. What?”
“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to cause Michael to blow up at Lilly the way Colin Hanks did when he caught his little sister Kirsten Dunst kissing his best friend in the movie Get Over It. Because even though I have never really noticed Michael harboring protective feelings toward Lilly, I am sure that is only because she has been dating Boris all this time, and Boris is one of Michael’s friends, and a mouth breather, besides. I mean, you are not going to get too upset over your little sister going out with a mouth-breathing violinist. A hot, newly unemployed Sherpa, however… now that might be a different story.
And though you wouldn’t know it to look at him, Michael is very hot-tempered. I once saw him glare quite formidably at some construction workers who whistled at me and Lilly down on Sixth Avenue when we were coming out of Charlie Mom’s. The last thing I needed at my party was a fistfight to break out.
But Lilly managed to keep her hands off Jangbu for the next half hour, during which I attempted to put aside my depression and join in on the fun, especially when everyone started jumping around, doing the Macarena, which Michael had jokingly put in the mix he’d made.
It’s too bad there aren’t more dances, other than the Time Warp and the Macarena, that everybody knows. You know how in movies like She’s All That and Footloose, everybody starts doing the same dance at the same time? It would be so cool if that would happen sometime in, like, the cafeteria. Principal Gupta could be on the sound system, reading off the announcements, and suddenly somebody puts on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or whatever and we all start dancing on the tables.
In olden times, everybody knew the same dances… like the minuet, and stuff. Too bad things can’t be like olden times.
Except of course, I wouldn’t want to have wooden teeth or the pox.
Anyway, things were finally starting to look up, and I was actually having a pretty good time fooling around, when all of a sudden Tina was like, “Mr. G, we’re out of Coke!” and Mr. G was like, “How can that be? I bought seven flats of it at the drive-through liquor store this morning.”
But Tina insisted all the Coke was gone. I found out later she’d hidden it in the baby’s room. But whatever. At the time, Mr. G honestly thought there was no more Coke.
“Well, I’ll run down to Grand Union and buy more,” he said, putting on his coat
, and going out.
That’s when Ling Su asked my mom if she could see her slides. Ling Su, being an artist herself, knew exactly the right thing to say to my mother, a fellow artist, even though since she’s been pregnant she’s had to give up oils and work only in egg tempera.
No sooner had my mom whisked Ling Su into her bedroom to break out her slides than Tina turned off the music and announced that we would now play Seven Minutes in Heaven.
Everybody looked pretty excited about this—we certainly had never played Seven Minutes in Heaven at the last party we’d all been to, which had been at Shameeka’s house. But Mr. Taylor, Shameeka’s dad, wasn’t the type to fall for the “out of Coke” or “Can I see your slides?” thing. He is way strict. He keeps the baseball bat he once hit a homerun with in one corner of the room as a “reminder” to the boys Shameeka dates of just what, exactly, he’s capable of, should they get fresh with his daughter.
So the Seven Minutes in Heaven thing had everybody way stoked. Everybody, that is, except Michael. Michael is not a big fan of PDA, and it turns out, he is even less of a fan of being locked in a closet with his girlfriend. Not, he informed me, after Tina had gigglingly shut the closet door—closing the two of us in with Mom and Mr. G’s winter coats, the vacuum cleaner, the laundry cart, and my wheelie suitcase—that he had anything against being in a dark enclosed space with me. It was the fact that outside the door, everybody was listening that bugged him.
“Nobody’s listening,” I told him. “See? They turned the music back on.”
Which they had.
But I sort of had to agree with Michael. Seven Minutes in Heaven is a stupid game. I mean, it is one thing to make out with your boyfriend. It is quite another to do it in a closet, with everybody on the other side of the door knowing what you are doing. The ambiance is just not there.
It was dark in the closet—so dark I couldn’t even see my own hand in front of my face, let alone Michael. Plus, it smelled funny. This, I knew, was on account of the vacuum cleaner. It had been a while since anybody—namely me, since my mom never remembers and Mr. G doesn’t understand our vacuum cleaner on account of it’s being so old— had emptied the vacuum bag, and it was filled to the brim with orange cat fur and the pieces of kitty litter Fat Louie is always tracking across the floor. Since it was scented kitty litter, it smelled a little like pine. But not necessarily in a good way.
“So we really have to stay in here for seven minutes?” Michael wanted to know.
“I guess,” I said.
“What if Mr. G gets back and finds us in here?”
“He’ll probably kill you,” I said.
“Well,” Michael said. “Then I’d better give you something to remember me by.”
Then he took me in his arms and started kissing me.
I have to admit, after that, I kind of started thinking Seven Minutes in Heaven wasn’t such a bad game after all. In fact, I sort of began to like it. It was nice to be there in the dark, with Michael’s body all pressed up to mine, and his tongue in my mouth, and all. I guess because I couldn’t see anything, my sense of smell was that much stronger, or something, because I could smell Michael’s neck really well. It smelled super nice—way better than the vacuum-cleaner bag. The smell sort of made me want to jump on him. I can’t really explain it any other way. But I honestly wanted to jump on Michael.
Instead of jumping on him, which I didn’t think he’d enjoy—nor would it be socially acceptable… plus, you know, all the coats were sort of impeding our ability to move around a lot—I tore my lips from his and said—not even thinking about Tina, or Uli Derickson, or even what I was doing, but sort of lost in the heat of the moment—“So Michael, what is up with the prom? Are we going, or not?”
To which Michael replied, with a chuckle, as his lips nuzzled my own neck (though I highly doubt he was smelling it), “The prom? Are you crazy? The prom’s even stupider than this game.”
At which point, I sort of broke our embrace and took a step backward, right onto Mr. G’s hockey stick. Only I didn’t care, because, you know, I was so shocked.
“What do you mean?” I demanded. If it hadn’t been so dark, I so would have run my searching gaze across Michael’s face, looking for some sign he was joking. As it was, however, I just had to listen really hard.
“Mia,” Michael said, reaching for me. For somebody who thought Seven Minutes in Heaven was such a stupid game, he seemed to be kind of into it. “You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not exactly the prom type.”
But I slapped his hands away. It was hard, you know, to see them in the dark, but it wasn’t like there was much chance of missing. The only thing in front of me, besides Michael, was coats.
“What do you mean, you’re not the prom type?” I wanted to know. “You’re a senior. You’re graduating. You have to go to the prom. Everybody does it.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Well, everybody does lots of lame stuff. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to, too. I mean, come on, Mia. Proms are for the Josh Richters of the world.”
“Oh, really?” I said, sounding very cold, even to my own ears. But that was probably on account of how super-attuned they were to everything, seeing as how I couldn’t see. My ears, I mean. “What, then, do the Michael Moscovitzes of the world do on prom night?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “We could do more of this, if you want.”
By this, of course, he meant making out in a closet. I did not even credit that with a response.
“Michael,” I said, in my most princessy voice. “I’m serious. If you don’t plan on going to the prom, just what, exactly, do you intend to do instead?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said, sounding genuinely baffled by my question. “Go bowling?”
BOWLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY BOYFRIEND WOULD RATHER GO BOWLING ON HIS PROM NIGHT THAN GO TO THE PROM!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Does he not have an ounce of romantic feeling in his body? He must, because he got me that snowflake necklace… the necklace that I haven’t taken off, not even once, since he gave it to me. How can the man who gave me that necklace be the same man who would rather go bowling on his prom night than go to the prom?
He must have sensed that I was not taking kindly to this news, since he went, “Mia, come on. Admit it. The prom is the corniest thing in the world. I mean, you spend a ton of money on some rented penguin suit you can’t even get comfortable in, then spend a ton more money on dinner somewhere fancy that probably isn’t half as good as Number One Noodle Son, then you go and stand around in some gymnasium—”
“Maxim’s,” I corrected him. “Your senior prom is taking place at Maxim’s.”
“Whatever,” Michael said. “So you go and eat stale cookies and dance to really, really bad music with a bunch of people you can’t stand and who you never want to see again—”
“Like me, you mean?” I was practically crying, I was so hurt. “You never want to see me again? Is that it? You’re just going to graduate and go off to college and forget all about me?”
“Mia,” Michael said, in quite a different tone of voice. “Of course not. I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about people like… well, like Josh and those guys. You know that. What’s the matter with you?”
But I couldn’t tell Michael what was the matter with me. Because what was the matter with me was that my eyes had filled up with tears and my throat had closed up and I’m not sure, but I think my nose had started to run. Because all of a sudden I realized that my boyfriend had no intention of asking me to the prom. Not because he was going to ask someone more popular instead, or anything. Like Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink . But because my boyfriend, Michael Moscovitz, the person I loved most in the whole world (with the exception of my cat), the man to whom I had pledged my heart for all eternity, had absolutely no interest at all in attending HIS OWN SENIOR PROM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I really can’t say what would have happened next if Boris hadn’t suddenly ripped the clos
et door open and yelled, “Time’s up!” Maybe Michael would have heard me sniffling and realized I was crying and asked me why. And then, after he’d drawn me tenderly into his arms, I might have told him in a broken voice, while resting my head against his manly chest.
And then he might have sweetly kissed the top of my head and murmured, “Oh, my darling, I didn’t know,” and sworn then and there that he would do anything, anything in the world to see my doe eyes shine again, and that if I wanted to go to the prom, well then by God, we’d go to the prom.
Only that’s so not what happened. What happened instead was that Michael blinked at all the sudden light, and held up an arm to shield his eyes, and so never even saw that my own eyes were tear-filled and that my nose might possibly have been running… although this would have been horribly unprincesslike and probably didn’t even happen.
Besides, I nearly forgot my grief, I was so astounded by what happened next. And that was that Lilly went, “My turn! My turn!”
And everyone got out of her way as she went barreling toward the closet….
Only the hand she reached for—the man whom she chose to accompany her for her Seven Minutes in Heaven—was not the pale, soft hand of the violin virtuoso with whom for the past eight months Lilly had been sharing furtive French kisses and Sunday-morning dim sum. The hand Lilly reached for was not one belonging to Boris Pelkowski, mouth breather and sweater tucker inner. No, the hand Lilly reached for belonged to none other than Jangbu Panasa, the hot Sherpa busboy.
Stunned silence roared through the room—well, except for the wailing of the Sahara Hotnights on the stereo—as Lilly thrust a startled Jangbu into my hall coat closet and then quickly went in after him. We all stood there, blinking at the closed door, not knowing quite what to do.