by Brian Rowe
18. Fifty-Two
The last step I had taken inside the school cafeteria was during my freshman year, when I had to write to Amnesty International with hundreds of other students, all of us forced to spend our lunch break inside the joyless, brightly lit room. Walking into the surprisingly crowded cafeteria today, I found myself confused why anybody—student, teacher, counselor, or hobo—would want to spend his or her free hour in here.
But I wasn’t in the cafeteria to find some cold, runny slop to munch on. I was here to find a date for the prom.
I crossed my arms and stood in the back right corner, watching endless trains of students pass me from the left and right. I scanned the lunch tables, where I could see dozens of girls who would likely go with anyone to the prom, even a middle-aged oddity like myself. But I couldn’t just ask anyone; I figured it had to be a girl I knew socially.
I spotted Sophia across the way, a gorgeous junior Asian girl I shared geometry class with last year. We weren’t exactly friends, but I talked to her here and there, and I knew she would definitely say yes if nobody had asked her yet.
My strut through the cafeteria drew strange glances from everyone around me. I couldn’t imagine they didn’t know who I was. After that school assembly a few weeks back and that basketball victory last Friday, I imagined I was some kind of bizarre, one-of-a-kind school celebrity.
But there was no cheering or smiling. I felt like I was on a sad, lonely walk to my inevitable execution.
Sophia sat with her Asian friends—there were five or six of them, at least—and she was the last to look up from her lunch tray to see me marching toward her. She glanced to her left and right, like she couldn’t imagine she was possibly the one I was coming over to talk to. I stopped in front of her table and did my best to sport a jovial grin.
“Hi Sophia.”
She turned to one of her girlfriends, and then back at me. “Uhh… hi.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Fine.”
“Listen,” I said, trying to appear suave and relaxed, “I had a quick question for you.”
She didn’t seem to have a clue what was about to escape from my mouth, but her friends clearly did—they all turned away from me, as if they didn’t want to take part in my heartbreak.
“OK,” she said. “What is it?”
“I was wondering if you had a date for the senior prom?”
One of her friends, a short girl compensating for her chubbiness by wearing an over-sized sweatshirt, burst into hyena-like laughter.
“Oh… oh, Cameron,” Sophia said.
“You can think on it if you want—”
“No, that’s sweet of you to ask. It really is. It’s just… I’m already going with someone else. I’m really sorry.”
I figured as much. The prom was only a week and a half away. “No problem. I guess I’ll keep looking.”
As I started turning around, Sophia’s high-pitched voice shrieked: “Good luck!”
I sighed as I made my way out of the cafeteria, trying to ignore the blast of laughter coming from Sophia’s crowded, obnoxious table.
I felt angry and embarrassed. But I had to admit she was right.
Who the hell’s gonna go to the prom with a freak like me?
19. Fifty-Three
I asked three more girls yesterday and two more this morning.
I felt like I had potential with this next girl Laura, a nerdy but semi-cute sophomore who had been a life saver in my AP World History class last year. I knew for a fact nobody could have possibly asked her to the prom yet.
She stood at her locker, her braided blonde hair falling below her waistline. Her thick glasses covered most of her face, and her chest still hadn’t started developing yet. I knew my previous troubles growing facial hair had been worrisome to many, but that problem couldn’t possibly compete with Laura’s struggle to grow boobs; her chest was as flat as Uncle Tony’s thin crust pizza.
I took her by surprise. When I tapped her on her left shoulder, she dropped one of her books on the ground.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, kneeling down and grabbing her thousand-page novel, which weighed so much I thought it was a textbook.
“Oh, thanks.”
“Here you go.” I handed her the book, something about a fountainhead. She smiled and laid it softly in her bag. “How’ve you been, Laura?”
“You remember me?” she asked with a sweet grin.
“Of course I do.”
“That’s sweet.”
She started taking more books out of her locker and stuffing them in her backpack. I imagined the backpack would be so heavy in the next few seconds that she’d need a wheelbarrow to get it to her next class.
“So I had a question,” I said, supporting myself in the sexiest way possible up against the locker next to hers, “and you can think on it if you need to.”
She stared at me, seemingly enraptured in our conversation, as she waited for my question.
“I was just wondering if you wanted to go to the prom with me?”
She closed the locker and swung the backpack full of hardcover books over her petite shoulders, a goofy smile appearing on her face. She just stood there for a moment, staring at me. Now I was waiting for her to say something.
“Oh!” she finally said, instantly removing the smile from her face. “You’re serious!”
I nodded. “Yeah… of course, I’m serious.”
“Wow!” Laura laughed through her nose, a modicum of snot squirting out from her nostrils like a cannonball and landing on my left tennis shoe. She patted me on my right shoulder. “Don’t think so, old man. But thanks for asking.”
She walked past me as if I were invisible, snickering and shaking her head, making her way down the hall and around the corner.
20. Fifty-Five
By Thursday I had asked over forty girls to the prom. Some offered me more polite, restrained rejections than others. The majority said they already had dates, which seemed strange, since many of the girls I was asking were two or three years away from being seniors.
I was desperate. I needed someone, anyone. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to miss out on my senior prom, and I really didn’t want to show up alone if I didn’t have to. I didn’t care if I had the geekiest freshman in school on my arm—at least it’d be someone.
That’s when I looked into Mrs. Lake’s freshman English classroom to see a corpulent young girl sitting by herself, taking notes in the back of the room.
I tiptoed up to the classroom to see that the teacher was nowhere to be found, and I made my way in. I sauntered up to the sad, lonely girl, trying not to notice the little bald spot on the top of her head where her thin, stringy hair had vacated itself. Her tight shirt covered half of her upper body, and the fat in her love handles drooped over her tight jean shorts.
I didn’t really want to ask. But I opened my mouth anyway.
As I started forming my first word, she looked up from her notebook to reveal a terrifying scowl, the kind normally witnessed only on rabid dogs and flesh-eating vampires.
She started shaking her head.
“Would you…” I started.
She kept shaking her head.
“The prom…” I continued. “It’s on Saturday…”
The shaking became faster, like she was inflicting onto herself a violent, head-exploding seizure.
“OK,” I said.
I guess that’s a no.
I walked out of the classroom backward, and when I turned the corner, the terrifying girl was still shaking her humungous head.
It’s time to face reality, I thought. Looks like I’m going stag.
21. Fifty-Six
I felt like by now I had made contact and conversation with every breathing, living girl at school. It was clear—nobody in her right mind wanted to be seen at the prom with a guy who looked in need of social security. I was still aging on schedule, with every day a leap closer to an end that was rapidly becoming a reality. I did
n’t like thinking about where my life was headed. All I wanted to think about were three things—prom, graduation, and the State championship basketball game. I wanted to make it to all three. I knew it would be difficult without a miracle to make it to early June, but I knew it was possible.
It’s going to happen.
It has to happen.
After spending an additional hour at basketball practice after the other players had departed for the evening, I jogged into the deserted locker room, sweat pouring out of every gland in my body. I didn’t use the showers often, but I felt like now was a better time than any. I glanced into the small shower room to make sure nobody was inside.
I disrobed and made my way to the furthest showerhead on the right. The water was freezing at first, making me jump back and almost slip on the slick hardwood floor. I didn’t scream like Janet Leigh in Psycho (a film Wes insisted I watch), but I did let out a faint cry that sounded like something a depressed indoor cat might utter. When the water eventually turned hot, I started washing away all my grimy, stinking sweat.
I closed my eyes while I started applying soap to my arms and chest when I felt another body step toward me. The showerhead next to mine turned on, and I blinked the water out of my eyes to see the surprising body next to me.
“Hey Cameron,” he said.
“Aaron?”
“Yeah, hey.”
I tried not to freak out. But his sudden appearance in the locker room, let alone the shower stalls, did seem a little odd. Did he follow me in here?
“Sorry, I thought everyone had gone home,” I said.
“You needed to shower, too, huh? My God, I was sweating like a pig out there.”
“Didn’t you finish practice a while ago?”
“Yeah, but I had to go take a make-up test, and I didn’t have time to shower until now.”
I started rubbing my face down with soap. Am I supposed to keep talking to him?
“My God, Welch is killing us, isn’t he,” I said. “He has to, I guess. No one can fault him.”
“He’s making us work hard all right, but he’s killing you for sure!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well you’re the oldest one out there and he treats you no differently than the rest of us.”
“That’s the way it should be,” I said.
“I don’t know, Cameron. I think you should be more careful.”
“Now’s not the time to be careful, Aaron. Now’s the time to live. To not be afraid of anything.”
“Anything?” he repeated.
“That’s right.”
I let the water eliminate the harsh soap from my face, and I bent over as best my aching body would let me to start cleaning my thinning legs.
“I heard you’ve been having trouble finding a date to the prom,” Aaron said.
I nodded and washed under my armpits. “Yeah, looks like I’ll be going stag. Not a big surprise, right? At least nobody’s asked me to be a chaperone or something. I know I look ancient on the outside, but I swear I’m still that seventeen-year-old kid on the inside.”
“I know you are,” Aaron said.
I cracked my neck and started washing my back down. I was almost done.
“So yeah,” I said. “I still want to go. But it’s lame no one wants to go with me.”
There was a moment of silence until Aaron said, “I actually think that you look better as the older you. You were almost too perfect when you looked seventeen, almost unattainable in a way.”
Huh? I didn’t really know how to respond to that. “Umm… what are you trying to say, exactly?”
“What I’m trying to say is…”
I didn’t think I had felt it. But there it was. Aaron’s right hand was pressed against my left arm.
“Cameron?”
I didn’t move. “Uh huh?”
“What would you think about going to the prom with me?”
I figured by now that Aaron was gay, but this little maneuver on his part was definitely unexpected. What was I supposed to say? I didn’t have a problem with how he felt—I tried to think of myself as open-minded—but an overwhelming claustrophobia took hold of me.
“I’m sorry, Aaron. But I’m not—”
He busted up laughing. “I’m just messing with you, dude. Relax.”
I opened my mouth but no words came out. I didn’t know what to think anymore. “Oh. Oh!”
“I’ve already got a date. Name’s Jamie.”
“I see,” I said, turning off the showerhead. I turned to Aaron. “So you’re not…”
“What?”
“You know…”
“What?”
“Gay?”
“Gay?”
“Yeah.”
Aaron started washing his hair. “Oh, totally. Jamie’s a guy.”
I stared at him, quizzically, and then slowly made my way back to my locker. “Well, I’ll… uh… yeah…”
“See you at the prom, Cameron!”
My head hurt from all the confusion. I didn’t even take the time to put on my t-shirt before I sped out of the locker room.
22. Fifty-Nine
Mrs. Gordon saw me reading in the library, but she didn’t throw me out. Instead, she strutted right up to me and smiled.
“Can I get you anything, Mr. Martin?”
I put my book down, one of the few non-fiction titles about architecture I could find in the limited library selection, and glanced up at the old woman with confusion.
“Excuse me?”
She cleared her throat. “What I’m trying to say is, did you find all the books you were looking for?”
I just nodded, completely at a loss why she was talking to me, particularly in such a respectful manner.
“Is that a book on architecture?” she asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“Well that’s great, Mr. Martin. I’m glad you’re expanding your interests.”
“Mrs. Gordon?” I asked, scooting my chair back, making sure not to run over her frumpy toes. “Are you feeling OK?”
“Fine. Why?”
“Well…” I couldn’t believe she didn’t recognize her odd behavior. “It’s just that I thought… you know… you hated me?”
“Hated you? Whatever made you think that?”
“All those times you screamed at me, I guess. Grabbing my ear and pulling me into your office. Things like that.”
She chuckled and ran her hand through her hair as if she was showing off something I would find attractive. “Water under the bridge, Mr. Martin. I guess you can say I’m a changed woman now. I might’ve had some ill feelings for you in the past. But that’s all changed.”
“And why is that?”
She leaned down next to my face so close she could kiss me. “Because you are in my library, and you are reading.”
She did have a point. This was unusual for me.
I nodded in agreement as she started walking back toward her office, glancing toward me one last time with a scary smile.
“Again, let me know if you need help finding anything.”
“Will do,” I said in a forceful please-go-away fashion.
It was Monday morning, and I didn’t have my first class for another half an hour. I couldn’t sleep last night and found myself at 6 A.M. waiting outside the school before the front doors were even unlocked. Not really knowing where to spend my time for the next hour, I found myself in the library, browsing through books on architecture, holding onto an abstract dream that would most assuredly never come to fruition.
I had glanced at myself in the rearview mirror on the way. While the first few weeks of my condition had been traumatizing, these last few days had been borderline terrifying. Every time I caught myself in the mirror I looked five years older, and it made me want to scream. I looked so ancient that sometimes when I caught my reflection in my car rearview mirror I wanted to somersault out the driver’s side and let the nearest semi-truck splatter my guts all over the road.
“Hello Cameron.”
I was going to use my hardcopy book as a weapon if the voice was coming from Mrs. Gordon’s crusty old lips again, but this voice was surprisingly soft and sweet. I looked up, and the first thing I saw was a pleasurable shade of red.
“Liesel,” I said.
“This seat taken?”
“No, of course not.”
She sat down on the chair next to mine and pulled out some trigonometry homework. As she zipped up the front pouch of her backpack, she turned toward me.
“How are you?” she asked. “How have you been?”
“OK, I guess.”
“You look older.”
I took a deep breath and tried to refrain from slamming both my fists down against the table. I put my finger on the paragraph I was reading in my architecture book and veered my concentration toward the pretty redhead. “Yeah, that tends to be the tagline for my life right now.”
“How old are you today?”
“I don’t even want to know.”
It’s true. I didn’t. But I pulled out my phone anyway and looked at the calendar. I sighed and put the phone back in my jean pocket.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Fifty-nine,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“I said I’m fifty-nine.”
“No, I… I heard you,” she said.
I pushed the book away and brought my head down to the table. I rubbed my hands through my short gray hair and started chewing ferociously on my tongue.
“I know you don’t want to hear anything positive right now…”
“I don’t,” I said, sitting back up.
“But for your age, you know, you look pretty damn good.”
“Yeah? You want to go on a date with me?”
She didn’t answer; instead, she swallowed some saliva and turned away from me, not saying a word. She just sat in silence.
I inspected her closer than I ever had before. She looked super cute, dressed in a tight pink shirt and dark blue jeans, her hair curlier than usual, a generous amount of black eye shadow bringing out the watery blue in her eyes.