“Thanks,” she said. “You look...” Mikey had decorated his white suit with a black marker. He’d drawn bodies. Faces. Political slogans. “Like a wall in Keith Haring’s neighborhood.”
“I try.”
Mikey was waiting to let Shiloh in first, so that she could sit in the middle, like usual, but she pushed him toward the car. “I’m in a dress,” she said, like that mattered.
Mikey got in without complaining, and Shiloh got in, too, smushing him against Cary. “Huh,” Mikey said to Cary. “You really do smell as good as Shiloh’s always saying.”
Cary just frowned at him.
Kowloon was full of other prom kids. Half the schools in the city had prom that night. Everyone else had come in pairs.
For Shiloh, it was just like any other night out with Mikey and Cary. Talking about movies. Talking about people at school. Egging each other on. Coming up with schemes.
The three of them were always planning something—the more absurd, the better. They’d spend hours imagining a scheme, building on it, trying to make each other laugh.
They should run for class officers on a communist platform. They should come to school wearing matching skirts. They should sneak Dead Kennedys lyrics into newspaper editorials.
At some point in the scheming, Cary and Shiloh would start to worry that Mikey was serious, and they’d try talking him down.
Sometimes hewasserious.
Sometimes the three of them ended up executing one of theirschemes—Mikey, gleefully; Cary, conflicted; and Shiloh, desperately afraid of being embarrassed or getting caught.
Thiswas a scheme, wasn’t it? Going to prom together, without dates, dressed like they were from three different planets?
Shiloh was a little worried that Mikey might have something more planned for the prom itself—like, the Mikey version of spiking the punch. Getting the deejay to play klezmer music or unfurling a banner across the dance floor that said,No blood for oil. You just never fucking knew with him.
But once they got to the dance, Mikey did something even more surprising—he danced. He abandoned Cary and Shiloh as soon as they got through the door.
Shiloh had been expecting the prom to look like something out of a movie. The theme was “Under the Sea,” just like inBack to the Future.
But the dance was in a hotel conference center, and the only signs of marine life were some seahorse-shaped balloons in the lobby.
Shiloh and Cary walked through a wall of blue streamers into the ballroom.
Shiloh was disoriented for a second. The room was dark. The music was loud. There were tables along one wall, but nearly everyone was dancing. Shiloh’s ankles buckled. She started moving toward an empty table and collapsed onto a plastic chair.
Cary stood over her. “There’s supposed to be punch,” he said. “You want some?”
She shrugged.
He wandered away, punch-ward, and Shiloh looked out on the dance floor. It was too dark to really recognize anyone. Mikey stood out in his white suit, but everyone else blurred together.
Cary came back with two cans of Pepsi—“I guess they were worried about people spiking the punch”—and sat down next to her.
“We missed the golden age of punch,” Shiloh said.
“When was that, the 1700s?”
“I was thinking the fifties.”
“You over-romanticize the fifties,” Cary said. Matter-of-factly.
Shiloh thought again about the vintage prom dress she would never find at a thrift shop. The wasplike waist she’d never have, anyway.
“Women in the fifties weren’t allowed to open checking accounts,” Cary said, like he could hear her dreaming.
“My mom doesn’t have a checking account,” Shiloh said. “She cashes her check at the grocery store and pays all our bills with money orders.”
