She leaned over his notebook to see what he was writing. Math. His handwriting was cramped and square.
“It’s time for lunch,” she said.
“Lunch,” Mikey said. “We need to buy prom tickets at lunch. Today’s the last day.”
“Who are you going to prom with?”
Mikey looked up. “The two of you.”
Cary kept working on his homework.
Shiloh frowned at Mikey. “Haven’t you asked someone?”
“Nah.” He jiggled the tray of chemicals. “Cary, have you asked anyone?”
Cary shook his head. He was graphing sine waves.
“Let’s just go,” Mikey said. “We can’t miss prom.”
“I have so far,” Shiloh said.
“Well, shit, Shiloh, now youreallyhave to go.” Mikey swished the tray. “Don’t be one of those sad nerds who goes to alternative proms in their thirties, trying to fill the void.”
She folded her arms. “I’m pretty sure that’ll be the least of my voids.”
“I got a white tuxedo at the thrift shop,” he said. “I’m gonna decorate it.”
“God be with you,” Shiloh said. “I don’t have a white tux. Or fifteen dollars to spend on a prom ticket.”
“I’ve got you,” Cary said.
“Cary’s got you,” Mikey echoed.
Shiloh grimaced. “I don’t know... Don’t you have to wear a big dress to prom? Like a crocheted-Barbie-Kleenex-box-cover dress?”
“Wear whatever you want,” Cary said. “You always do anyway.”
Shiloh wanted to wear some great vintage thrift-shop dress. She wanted to be the heroine of a John Hughes movie. Or maybe a John Waters movie.
But the fancy dresses at the thrift shop near her house were never more than a few years old. Glossy satingowns,with big puffed sleeves and lace cutouts.
The week before prom, Shiloh’s mom took pity on her and took her to a discount department store called Richman Gordman. Shiloh ended up with a stretchy blue wrap dress that looked more like something a forty-year-old divorcée would wear to a fern bar than something a high school girl would wear to prom. It was the only thing that fit Shiloh and also fit their budget.
Shiloh wasn’t fat, exactly, but she was bigger than other girls her age—she was alreadybuiltlike a forty-year-old divorcée. At eighteen, she looked like someone who looked really good for having had three kids.
Plus she was too tall. Five foot eleven. Almost as tall as Cary.
“It’ll be fine,” her mom said. “We’ll pin a silk flower on the chest, and you can wear my boots.”
Her mom had a pair of calf-length, maroon suede boots with a wedge heel. They wereliterallysomething a middle-aged lady wore to bars. But they were still cool, and her mom had never let Shiloh borrow them before.
The night of the dance, Shiloh’s mom did her makeup for her and rolled the front of her dark hair into one of those 1940s whorls. Shiloh’s hair was long and heavy. It took a whole sheet of bobby pins and half a can of Aqua Net to wrangle it.
The overall effect was better than Shiloh had hoped. She admired herself in the hall mirror while she waited for Cary to pick her up. The dress and the boots and the hair didn’t reallymatch,but they were making a ragtag go of it. Shiloh had stacked her wrists with fake gold bangles, and her mom had pinned a silk calla lily to the front of the dress—she was right, it did help. Then she’d painted Shiloh’s lips bright red. Shiloh had a tube of red lipstick in her purse to touch it up later.
Shiloh wasn’t sure that she lookedattractivelike this... But she looked different. Different from herself and different from everyone else. That was the most important thing—Shiloh would shave her head just to look like nobody else. (Shilohmightshave her head when she got to college. She was still deciding. She needed to get there and scope out the shaved-head situation.)
She heard the front door open.
