On my way out to meet Taylor at the mall the next day, I stopped by my mother’s office. “I’m going to look for a dress,” I said, standing in her doorway.
She stopped typing and looked over at me. “Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks.” I supposed there were worse things she could have said than “good luck,” but the thought didn’t make me feel any better.
The formal-wear store at the mall was packed with girls looking for prom dresses with their mothers. I didn’t expect to feel the pang in my chest when I saw them. Girls were supposed to go wedding dress shopping with their mothers. They were supposed to step out of the dressing room in just the right dress, and the mother would tear up and say, “That’s the one.” I was pretty sure that was the way it was supposed to be.
“Isn’t it a little late in the year for prom?” I asked Taylor. “Wasn’t ours in, like, May?”
“My sister told me they had to push back prom this year because of some scandal with the assistant principal,” she explained. “All the prom money went missing or something. So now it’s a grom. Graduation-prom.”
I laughed. “Grom.”
“Also, the private schools always have their prom later, remember? Collegiate, St. Joe’s.”
“I only went to one prom,” I reminded her. One had been more than enough for me.
I wandered around the store and found one dress I liked—it was strapless, blinding white. I’d never known there were degrees of white before; I’d just thought white was white. When I found Taylor, she had a whole stack of dresses on her arm. We had to wait in line for a dressing room.
The girl in front of me told her mother, “I will freak out if someone wears the same dress as me.”
Taylor and I rolled our eyes at each other. I will freak out, Taylor mouthed.
It seemed like we waited in that line forever.
“Try this one on first,” Taylor ordered when it was my turn.
Dutifully, I obeyed her.
“Come out,” Taylor yelled from her chair by the three-way mirror. She was camped out with the other mothers.
“I don’t think I like it,” I called out. “It’s too sparkly. I look like Glinda the good witch or something.”
“Just come out and let me see you!”
I came out, and there were already a couple of other girls at the mirror, checking themselves out from the back. I stood behind them.
Then the girl from earlier stepped out in the same dress I had on but in a champagne color. She saw me, and right away she asked, “Which prom are you going to?”
Taylor and I looked at each other in the mirror. Taylor was covering her mouth, giggling. I said, “I’m not going to prom.”
Taylor said, “She’s getting married!”
The girl’s mouth hung open. “How old are you? You look so young.”
“I’m not that young,” I said. “I’m nineteen.” I wouldn’t be nineteen until August, but nineteen sounded a lot older than eighteen.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought we were, like, the same age.”
I looked at us in the mirror as we stood there in the same dress. I thought we looked the same age too. I saw her mother looking at me and whispering to the lady next to her, and I could feel myself blush.
Taylor saw too and said, loudly, “You can hardly even tell she’s three months pregnant.”
The woman gasped. She shook her head at me, and I gave her a little shrug. Then Taylor grabbed my hand, and we ran back to my dressing room, laughing.
“You’re a good friend,” I said as she unzipped me.
We looked at each other in the mirror, me in my white dress and her in her cutoffs and flip-flops. I felt like I was going to cry. But then Taylor saved it—she made me laugh instead. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out sideways. It felt good to laugh again.
Three more stores later, we sat in the food court, still no dress. Taylor ate french fries, and I ate frozen yogurt with rainbow sprinkles. My feet hurt, and I was already wanting to go home. The day wasn’t turning out to be as fun as I’d hoped it would be.
Taylor leaned across the table and dipped an already-ketchupped french fry into my frozen yogurt. I snatched the cup away from her.
“Taylor! That’s disgusting.”
She shrugged. “This coming from the girl who puts powdered sugar on Cap’n Crunch?” Handing me a fry, she said, “Just try it.”
I dipped it into the cup, careful not to get any sprinkles on it, because that would just be too gross. I popped the fry into my mouth. Not bad. Swallowing, I said, “What if we can’t find a dress?”
“We’ll find a dress,” she assured me, handing me another fry. “Don’t get all Debbie Downer on me yet.”
She was right. We found it at the next store. It was the last one I tried on. Everything else had been only so-so or too expensive. This dress was long and white and silky and something you could wear on the beach. It was not that expensive, which was important. But most important of all, when I looked in the mirror, I could picture myself getting married in it.
Nervously, I stepped out, smoothing the dress down on my sides. I looked up at her. “What do you think?”
Her eyes were shining. “It’s perfect. Just perfect.”
“You think?”
“Come look at yourself in this mirror and you tell me, beotch.”
Giggling, I stepped up on the platform and stared at myself in the three-way mirror. This was it. This was the one.
