Eight
before
The darkroom was set off from the journalism room by a revolving door. You stepped through the doorway, then spun the opening
around to the other side and walked out into a closetlike room.
There was only space for two or three people back there, and one of them was always Mikey. The other two were usually Cary
and Shiloh.
Today when Shiloh spun the door around, the red lights were on, which meant that Mikey was developing something. Probably
something totally unrelated to school.
He was leaning over the chemical bath, prodding at a photo with plastic tongs. Cary was sitting on a stool, working on homework.
Shiloh climbed onto the stool next to Cary’s and poked him with a pencil.
He smacked her pencil away.
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 you really have 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 satin gowns, 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 already built like 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 were literally something 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 really match, 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 looked attractive like 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. (Shiloh might shave 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.
“Hey, Cary, you look nice.”
“Thanks, Gloria.” (Her mom made Cary call her “Gloria.” He hated it, but it would be rude to call her “Mrs. Butler” if that
wasn’t what she wanted to be called.) “I wasn’t sure whether Shiloh saw that we were here.”
“You should have honked,” Shiloh said, coming down the stairs.
“Slow down,” her mom said to her. “You’ll break your neck.”
“I don’t like to honk,” Cary said, looking up at Shiloh. His eyes shifted, surprised. Shiloh couldn’t read his expression—but she was happy to register with him.
Cary was wearing a black tux with a red cummerbund. Apparently all the guys rented tuxes for prom; you couldn’t just wear
a suit. (Well, you could, but Cary respected conventions.) His tux was too wide in the shoulders, and it was still polyester—but it looked way better
than his ROTC uniform.
“Hang on,” Shiloh’s mom said, looking around the living room. “I’ll get you money for dinner.”
They were going to Kowloon, a sit-down Chinese place. Entrees were $7.95 and you got two crab rangoons plus egg drop soup.
“I’ve got it,” Cary said.
“Save your money, Cary.”
“You save your money, Gloria. I’ve got it.”
“He’s got it, Mom. See you later.” Shiloh hugged her mom from the side, then pushed Cary out onto the enclosed porch. It was
dark—the porch light was burned out. She closed the front door behind them.
“Hey, wait,” Cary said. He caught Shiloh’s wrist before she could walk past him down the steps.
She turned back to him. Thanks to her boots, she was a little bit taller than he was.
“I got you this,” Cary said, holding up a plastic clamshell. “But I guess you already have a flower.”
Shiloh squinted down at the box. There were flowers in it. A corsage.
“Oh god,” she said, “was I supposed to get you a flower? And Mikey?”
“We don’t need flowers,” he said. “But we thought—I thought, well, girls always have them at prom.”
“Then let’s do it,” she said. “Thank you.”
Cary shook his head. He seemed upset. “No. Your flower looks better. You look good.” He glanced down at her, then up again.
“You look like a time traveler.”
Shiloh reached for the corsage. Cary pulled the box away—“ Shiloh. ” She caught it anyway and tugged it out of his hand.
She cracked the lid open. It was a little bouquet with three white carnations and baby’s breath, tied with a blue ribbon.
“Your flower is nicer,” Cary said again.
He was right.
“My flower is fake,” Shiloh said. “Hold this.” She handed him the box and started unpinning her lily. She had to be careful—her
mom had used two sewing pins.
Cary watched her. He handed her the corsage when she was ready for it.
It was hard to pin something onto your own chest. The corsage came with a long pearl-ended pin, and you had to get it just
right... Shiloh stuck her finger and swore.
“Here,” Cary said. “Let me.” He took the carnations from her, and the pin, and leaned closer.
“I guess you’ve done this before,” Shiloh said, thinking of the photo of Cary and Angie, and remembering the corsage on Angie’s
sleeveless gown.
“It would be easier with a light,” Cary said. His head was bent in front of her face.
“Your hair smells like apples,” she said. More quietly than she meant to.
“Hmm,” he said, acknowledging her in his usual begrudging way.
Shiloh had been teasing Cary much less since she found out that he had a girlfriend. Not that the teasing would be inappropriate now... or disallowed...
But Shiloh had always felt like Cary was sort of her territory. The teasing had been part of their whole thing. The Shiloh-and-Cary
of it all.
It was different now—pulling his hair, poking him, leaning on him—knowing that he was very officially someone else’s territory. Someone who had intentions .
Shiloh didn’t have intentions.
“There,” Cary said, standing up. The corsage was pinned neatly to Shiloh’s dress.
“Wait,” she said, before he could back away.
Shiloh had slipped the silk calla lily into her purse. She pulled it back out now, un-squashing it, and reached for Cary’s
chest. “Does this go on your collar? Or to the side?”
He tucked his chin down to see what she was doing. “Oh. You don’t have to—”
“I want to. Do you not want me to?”
He lowered an eyebrow at her. “Do you care whether I want you to?”
She let her hand drop. She shrugged. “I mean... yeah.”
“On the lapel,” he said. “Just below the bow tie but above the pocket.”
“Which side?”
“Over the heart.”
Shiloh reached up to her left.
“My other heart.”
“Right.” She smiled and shifted the flower over. It took her a second to get it attached. Cary kept his head bent to watch,
probably worried she’d stab him. His hair was in her face again. “You still smell like apples.”
“Hmm.”
“Where do you put the flower when you’re wearing all your ROTC medals?”
“No boutonnieres in uniform.”
Shiloh nodded. She twisted the last pin back through his collar. There. The lily was a little bit crooked, but it looked good... It looked really good, actually. It classed up the tux.
She patted the flower gently. “Nice.”
Cary stepped away from her then. He opened the porch door for her, and Shiloh started down the steps.
“Don’t break your neck,” he said, taking her arm.
“I’m fine. Don’t I look fine?”
“You’re walking like the Tin Man before Dorothy oils him.”
“I’m fine, ” she said, letting him steady her.
They made it to the bottom of her steps, and Mikey got out of the car. “Hey, Shiloh, you look like somebody from Blade Runner . ”
“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 he was serious.
Sometimes the three of them ended up executing one of their schemes—Mikey, gleefully; Cary, conflicted; and Shiloh, desperately afraid of being embarrassed or getting caught.
This was 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 in Back 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.”
Cary watched her for a second over his Pepsi can. Then he turned his whole body toward the dance floor. Shiloh turned, too,
kicking her feet up onto the chair next to her.
“Did you want to dance?” he asked.
Shiloh didn’t even bother answering him, just threw him a face that he didn’t bother acknowledging.
What a joke. Shiloh wasn’t going to dance . First of all, she didn’t know how—she couldn’t even do choreographed dances, like the kind you learn at slumber parties.
And second, she didn’t want to know how. Dancing was stupid. The proof of that was right in front of them.
Cary sat with his hands in his pockets. He was antsy.
“ You can dance,” she said. Was that what he wanted?
Cary shrugged.
He probably wanted to dance with his girlfriend. Why hadn’t he brought her?
A school dance is interminable when you aren’t dancing.
Shiloh sat at the table with Cary. Some friends stopped by and asked her to watch their purses.
A boy from drama club sat with them for a while. He was on crutches—his date was dancing without him. After a few songs, he
hobbled onto the dance floor anyway. Bouncing on one foot. Clinging to his crutches.
It was too loud for Shiloh and Cary to talk much. Every time the song changed, Shiloh would announce whether or not she liked
it.
She wished that Cary was sitting closer. She wished she could amuse herself by pulling on his jacket or kicking the backs of his heels.
There weren’t many slow dances. When “Open Arms” came on, Shiloh said, “I know Journey is a hessian band, but I love this
song.”
Hessians were kids with long hair who wore black T-shirts and smoked in bathrooms. Most of the other white kids at their school
were hessians. Or hessian-adjacent.
“Journey isn’t a hessian band,” Cary said.
Shiloh leaned toward him to argue, but Becky, from journalism class, had just run up to their table. She was out of breath
from dancing. “Cary, come dance—I need a partner!”
You couldn’t slow-dance by yourself; even Shiloh knew that.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Cary, come on— please .” Becky looked cute. She had on a slick purple dress with a ruffle over one shoulder. She’d taken off her shoes and was wearing
little socks with pom-poms over her pantyhose.
“Go ahead,” Shiloh said. “I’ll be fine.”
Cary frowned at Shiloh. “I don’t need to dance.”
“Yeah, but you don’t mind.” She’d seen pictures of him dancing. “Just go.”
Cary sighed.
He got up and took Becky’s hand, then walked with her onto the dance floor.
It was so weird the way people acted at dances...
Cary would never just touch Becky under normal circumstances. But now he had his arm around her waist, and he was looking in her eyes... It was unbearably intimate, all of this—how could they even do it? How could they playact love and intimacy? They were only holding each other because that’s what you do at a dance. It didn’t mean anything, they were just going along with the ritual. Shiloh hated it—she hated it. She couldn’t even watch.
Sometimes Shiloh thought that she and Cary were the same, that they agreed on all the important things—but that was obviously not true. Because there was Cary with his arms around a girl he didn’t even like in that way. Holding her close, even though he had a girlfriend. (Didn’t he still have a girlfriend?)
The song ended, but Becky kept Cary out on the floor. She and another girl, another friend of theirs, were dancing around
him.
Shiloh couldn’t watch Cary slow-dance—and she really couldn’t watch him fast-dance. She looked away. She was embarrassed.
After two songs, she was bored.
A little while after that, Cary dropped back into the seat next to her. He’d taken off his jacket and laid it over a chair.
His face was flushed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine. Keep dancing. You should be having the full senior-prom experience.”
“And you shouldn’t?”
“No, I am.” Shiloh stretched her hand over her chest. “I’m having my own version. Classic wallflower scenario.”
“I asked you to dance—you’re not a wallflower.”
She held up a finger. “I’m an intentional wallflower. I choose this adventure.”
Cary blew air through his teeth. He didn’t go back to dancing. “We could leave—”
“Yeah?” Shiloh sat up.
“—but I’m Mikey’s ride.”
She slumped back. “Right.”
Shiloh was so relieved when the deejay finally announced the last dance. It was “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men.
Cary turned to her. He looked unhappy. “Will you please dance with me?”
“Why?”
“Because this is our senior prom,” he said, “and the whole point of being here is to have this experience.”
“What experience?”
“ This. ” He looked frustrated. “You get dressed up, you come to the dance, you dance .”
“It’s just a ritual,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes. Rituals are all we have.”
“Speak for yourself, Cadet Colonel.”
Cary pulled his pointy chin into his neck. “How did you know I’m a colonel?”
Shiloh folded her arms. “I read our school newspaper. I’m the editor.”
Cary huffed. He sat back in his seat, away from her. “I should have known you’d be like this.”
She glanced at him. “Like what?”
He didn’t glance back. “Stubborn. Miserable.”
“ I’m not miserable.”
He huffed again. “When I saw you, at your house, I thought maybe you were actually going to allow yourself this.”
“I’m allowing! I’m here!”
Cary rolled his eyes.
Shiloh waved her hand out at the dance floor. “Everyone else here is dancing. You could be with them. Nothing is stopping you.”
“That’s why you don’t want to dance, right?” He’d turned on her. His brown eyes were narrow. “Because everyone else is? It
must kill you to have to drink water and breathe air, just like the rest of us.”
Shiloh clenched her jaw. “I feel like you’re being really unfair right now.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Cary shook his head. “This is our senior prom.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It’s a ritual —”
“To manufacture sentiment,” she said.
“No, Shiloh. To allow us an outlet for actual sentiment. We’re all here to say goodbye.”
“Hence the Boyz II Men.”
“Yeah, hence .” He shook his head. Then he shook his head again. His tongue was in his cheek—that seemed like a bad sign. (The phrase “tongue in cheek” should really mean “pissed off and thinking something hurtful.”)
Cary shook his head some more. “We could have had a good time. Tonight. It could have been a memory.”
All of a sudden, Shiloh could see it—the night they could have had, if she didn’t care so much about making a fool of herself...
If she could have stepped over some internal threshold...
Out on the dance floor with Cary and Mikey. Holding on to Cary’s shoulder for balance. Maybe taking off her boots. Dancing
like a broken robot. Being silly to mask the fact that she couldn’t be sexy or smooth. Slow-dancing with Cary—because that’s
what friends do at dances, right? They put their arms around each other. They stare into each other’s eyes.
None of that was going to happen now. This was the last dance. End of the road.
Cary was angry. He was the kind of angry that sometimes led to him just walking away from her. Leaving. But he wouldn’t leave
her and Mikey stranded there, so he was stuck.
Here came Mikey now, running toward them. He caught himself on the edge of their table. “Shiloh, get up, come on!”
“Are you ready to go?”
“No, it’s the last dance, and you have to get out there, or you won’t have broken the spell. This whole night will have been
for naught.”
“What spell?”
“Cary and I swore we wouldn’t let you be one of those horrible bores who think they’re too fucking cool for high school. One
of those girls who ends up with a beehive, in a punk band.”
“I love those bands. You love those bands.”
“Just get up, come on.”
Shiloh turned to Cary. He still looked pissed. She stood up. She stumbled toward Mikey. She was three inches taller than him,
even without the heels.
Mikey took her by the hand. They’d never held hands before. It was mostly painless.
Dancing wasn’t.
Mikey put his arm around her. He smiled.
Shiloh couldn’t move her legs. She really, honestly didn’t know what to do with them. And she didn’t like standing this close
to Mikey.
Her cheeks felt hot.
There were tears in her eyes.
“Oh god,” Mikey said, face fallen. “You really didn’t want to do this.”
She shook her head.
“I thought you just needed a big push to get over yourself.”
She shrugged. It was impossible for Shiloh to imagine ever getting over herself.
“Yeah, okay,” Mikey said, pulling away from her. “Let’s just go.”