She is standing at the top of the stairs, a dress hung-over eye white crimson drips off her shoulders, her hair is elegantly sprayed into an intractable bouquet of late-adolescence elegance surging with the suggestion of looming independence, he feet armored in stiletto's clacking in a muffled fashion over the carpet, as if she does not want to acknowledge my presence just yet, as if we somehow arrived prematurely for our candle-lit adorned high school rendezvous, as if I don’t only have less than ten days and counting of Manual and the rest of my life left, the welcoming of escaping from that south side penitentiary of daily pain and the spontaneous wonder of the unknown. Strick, next to me, his tie slightly crooked, waiting for who will be his future wife, and Kristina, the woman I have known all of two weeks, shuffling up stairs, the sight of the red dress spilling off the dual mounds of her shoulders. She is agitated. She is in a hurry. She is irked that we showed up fifteen minutes early. But still looking at her in the tux I pieced together from the disheveled remnants of Jeff Grebe’s basement, the tux with tails, the studded shirt I usurped from a failed canticle of Manual singers, my hair almost waxed into perfection, standing next to my best friend watching as if in slow motion as Kristine with a K, Kristina who her friends call kitty, Kristine who stealthily lassoed the necklace around my neck when were lying supine on her couch watching French kiss, somehow espying the sight of this radiant creature preparing the body for man dressed in a black tuxedo is the most beautiful sight known to boy balancing on the precipice crags of adulthood ready to stumble into a draping shroud of oblivion, the forever unknown every time he takes hold of the cusped gentleness inherit in her left hand.
***
In her maternal fashion mother asks if she can say a prayer, a blessing over the slathering layers of meat sauce and noodles . Mom is saying grace. She is tahnking god ofr these find young men and women and asking God to send his protection over them as they have this important night. She is thanking her Western variation of a diety simply for everything these fine young men and women are.
***
Strickler falls down mock drunk as we are walking down the
stairs just to make Andrea laugh. The tables have are names on it. Music is
chiming as in in pecks from the loudspeakers. I see my friend Laura from church
and offer a wave.
***
In her maternal fashion mother asks if she can say a prayer, a blessing over the slathering layers of meat sauce and noodles . Mom is saying grace. She is tahnking god ofr these find young men and women and asking God to send his protection over them as they have this important night. She is thanking her Western variation of a diety simply for everything these fine young men and women are.
We enter the Scottish Rite in the womb of the basement. The room
is festooned with pastel flavored balloons. All the girls have their hair up
like thoroughly spritzed mahogany ice sculpture. Kitty and I are glued by the
palms. There are several teachers serving as lifeguard chaperons, their arms
crossed, a stoic impression sewed into the ridge of their lips.
This is not my prom. These are kids who live across the sliver of liquid known as the Illinois river. These are kids who attend the high school whose avg ACT score is ten points higher than the avg. ACT score at my high school.
This is not my prom. The high school I attend has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation. The high school I attend wins state basketball titles yet none of the athletes can get through freshman year of college because they did nothing but coast through the halls creating babies while in high school.
This is not my prom.
Kitty seems to be looking up at me. I can't refrain from optically blinking into the dome of her forehead. She manacles my wrist as if I am about to be convicted. Slowly we begin to dance, holding each other, like holding a three month old in the community swimming pool, leading each other to the syncopated sway of the music.
This is not my prom. I would have given my left testicle to go to the high school across the river. I would have given my left testicle to go to a school where I wouldn't feel all alone. Where I would feel that my future encapsulated a creative kernel of hope.
This is not my prom, yet still I am somehow feeling a part of it.
With the exception of Drea and Strick and Laura from my church and the goddess draped in my arms I don't know who any of these kids are. Kitty and myself continue to sway in metronomic fashion. I can't stop making out with the sheen of her forehead. I can't stop gnawing at her eyebrows. I can't stop forming a
It has nothing to do with sex. We are both Christians. I am the president of my church's youth group. there will be know need to jangle the keys of a motel room. No need to find out how far she will let me go.
It is not about sex. I cannot stop smiling. I cannot refrain from lassoing the tips of my fingers behind her anatomy and picking her up, twirling her around. After every five or dances we sit down at the thoroughly groomed linen of the table
They are announcing the prom king and queen. We are seated
in the corner. Kristina has remained on my lap the entire night. There is a royal court, the popular air-headed girls in school who will be overweight with six kids working in a checkout line come a decade from now are receiving applause and tiaras.
Kitty simply loafs in the trigonometry of my arms. The music begins to play. We alight from our table and dance.
Kitty simply loafs in the trigonometry of my arms. The music begins to play. We alight from our table and dance.
It happens sometime during Killing me softly.
Kitty’s fair almost mideval maiden type forehead comes up at to around my
erobe. I think about how when I was a kid and would say prayers with my father
and after he would leave I would think about Alicia Durham and how I would be
in a tuxedo and she would be adorned in a dripping silver gown and how I would
employ the word gorgeous. Kitty’s hair is intractable and it looks like a
stylized cactus although it is sexy
Our foreheads are welded together and I am nursing
on various vectors of her frontal lobe.
It is somewhere during killing me softly I swear I see my
literary hero Charles HIighway, dancing behind me with ruffled hair, a tad
clumsy, buckled close to his own individual inflection of a Rachel. Charles
Highway who I fell in love with the opposite way to fall in love with a
literary legend, by watching the movie first and thinking about London—a book
even thou author has more or less disowned and knowing somehow, my Rachel is
there—the dark haired creature ofmy dreams and somehow sheis also buckled
close, swaying in plosive syncopation to the tonal vowels of Lauren Hill,
somehow my protagonist looks at me with Kitty Pekowski draped in my arms.
I swear, he fucking nods in my direction,
Attaboy.
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