Dear Universe

by Florence Gonsalves

  “I have so much to do before prom,” I say, “like coax some lost soul into being my date.” I hop out of the car.

  “But you can do that with us at Abigail’s,” Hilary offers.

  I shake my head. “It’s way too many things, and it’ll be easier if I’m home. I’ll text you guys later, okay?”

  “Okay,” Abigail says with a little bit of concern in her voice.

  “It’s gonna be fine! Just gotta hammer out all the prom details: date, dress, et cetera.” I wave to them through the windshield and pull my skirt down. “Talk to you soon.”

  “Okay!” Abigail calls, and suddenly the music is at full volume again. I put my phone to my ear and pretend to be on a very important call as I cross the parking lot. It seems like everyone is wearing a T-shirt with their college on it, 70 percent of them in State colors. Hurrying past the entrance to the Gill School, I realize I don’t ever have to go in there again. I’m done with high school, and now that it’s over, I have nothing left to do. Except draw my shades, turn my projector on, and hide in my universe.

  SHOULD YOU TAKE YOURSELF TO PROM?

  (A QUIZ FROM THE UNIVERSE)

  ANSWER YES OR NO:

  1. Most of your conversations happen in your head with someone/something that doesn’t exist.

  2. If alone, you feel in danger of being totally kidnapped by a dismal expanse of nothingness, leaving behind only your supercool knee-high combat boots because that’s all you’re really worth. And they’ve been resoled three times.

  3. You like dresses, but only if no one’s looking. Otherwise it’s too stressful, what with the wind and utility holes and stuff.

  4. Your favorite song to slow dance to is the ballad of your loneliness and inadequacies, mezzo forte in E major. Also everything Elvis.

  5 You think bobby pins and hair spray should actually be used to blind boys and keep their mouths shut. Just kidding. You love boys. Need boys. Hate all the boys you know (kind of) but firmly believe there’s one out there who doesn’t have a douche-y haircut and loved his mom before rap songs made it cool.

  6. You’ve been asked to prom, then un-asked to prom.

  7. You considered taking your dad in his wheelchair but then remembered this is not a sappy rom-com where the girl “learns a lesson.” This is you, and you never learn a damn thing.

  ANSWER TRUTHFULLY: DID YOU ANSWER MOSTLY YES TO THIS QUIZ? THEN DO NOT ACTUALLY GO TO PROM WITH YOURSELF, BECAUSE YOU SHOULDN’T SUBJECT YOURSELF TO YOURSELF AT ALL.

  Text exchange with Abigail, Hilary, and me with twenty-two hours and twenty-two minutes left ’til prom:

  Bad news kids C

  I’m not going to prom C

  A Are you freaking kidding me?

  A You are absolutely going to prom.

  In fact I’m not. C

  A IN FACT YOU ARE. YOU ARE GOING TO DANCE WITH ME AND HILARY AND IT IS GOING TO BE A-FREAKING-MAZING.

  Nope. C

  Prom is just a lot of makeup and uncomfortable clothes and taking pictures. I want to do something real tonight. C

  A BUT IT’S FUN!!!

  Idk I’d rather just hang out C

  Exchange personal philosophies with the dust bunnies under my bed C

  BTW I bombed English class C

  soooo ttyl Nicaragua C

  A Did Mr. Garcia say that?

  No, but I didn’t do my essay C

  He probably doesn’t wanna break the bad news before prom C

  A Come to prom and we’ll figure your summer out after. I bet we can talk Mr. Garcia into letting you come.

  Nah not feeling it C

  FaceTime me from the dance floor C

  It’ll be like I’m there except better cause I won’t be there!!! C

  lol jk I’m done being an ass C

  you guys have fun and we’ll do something special the three of us after graduation OK? C

  Hellllooooo? C

  Texting into the abyss here… C

  To avoid the smothering pressure of dealing with the post–high school oblivion, I’ve pledged to stay in my room until I’m thirty. It’s only when my mom calls through my closed door that I realize my mistake in hiding someplace that basically has my name on it.

  “You’re not tweezing your eyebrows in there, are you, Cham? Don’t change yourself for prom. I think the asymmetry is really—”

  “Ahh, Mom!” I yell as she opens the door and a fierce ray of hallway light exposes me. “Stop it, I’m not going to prom.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not going?” she asks, taking in the whole Cham-in-her-universe situation I’ve got going on: lights off, projector on, antenna up, and waiting for an extraterrestrial life-form to claim me as their own. “You can’t not go.”

  I sit up and squint at her. She smells like organic lavender bleach. “In fact, I can. I am not going to prom.”

  “Cham, you have to go,” my dad says, wheeling in behind her.

  “No, it’s so fake.” I run a hand through my bedhead and estimate the nest in my hair to be perfectly sized for a squirrel. “It doesn’t have anything to do with our friends, which is basically all I got out of high school. It’s just a photo op, and I don’t wanna waste my time on things like that. You can’t do meaningless stuff your whole life. That’s pretty much what I learned in English this year.”

  My dad frowns. “I always thought the Gill School was a little out there. Is it too late to send you to high school somewhere else?”

  “Very funny, Dad.” I smile when I realize he’s joking. Today’s looking like a good day.

  “Just because Gene isn’t your date anymore doesn’t mean you should miss out on such a big night,” my mom says sympathetically, as if all this has to do with a boy. “It’s a milestone.”

  “Yeah, but just ’cause the yearbook lays out certain moments for us to be world-rocking or whatever doesn’t mean they are.”

  “But they could be,” she prods.

  “I’m still not going.”

  My dad parks his wheelchair in front of my dresser and holds up his hands. “Well, I’m still going.”

  I summon some patience. “You’re not going to prom, Dad, remember? You did that a long time ago. Ice ages ago, probably.”

  “No, I mean, in life.” He looks me in my eyes. “There’s no cure, but I’m still going.”

  My head almost makes a 360-degree movement. My mom studies him carefully too, the only sound being the gentle hum of the projector pretending to mind its own business, when really it’s hanging on our every word.

  “What do you mean, Dad?” I ask carefully.

  He settles into his wheelchair. “They can’t fix it, this Parkinson’s or whatever, but I still get up and have coffee and get on with it.”

  He runs a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “You can’t waste time thinking about the bad stuff. It’s depressing.”

  I don’t know what to do with myself so I stand to get a hairbrush. My mom sits down against the wheel of my dad’s chair and rests her head on his knee.

  “Careful you don’t rip your hair out,” he says as the teeth of the brush tear through the knots in my hair.

  I give up and put my hairbrush back on the dresser. “I just can’t take everyone being all pumped about Nicaragua now that my summer’s looking like a sinkhole.”

  “You’re young and you should go dance,” my dad says. “Come here, we can turn the go-my-man into the go-my-girl.”

  He chugs his arms and hums a mix of a couple of Elvis songs. I hum along unenthusiastically and do a few arm chugs myself. The mirror confirms that I look like an old-fashioned, clinically depressed train.

  My dad laughs so hard he chokes, and my mom slaps him on the back. “You know you can always stand around the punch table,” he offers. “You don’t have to dance.”

  I shake my head. I want them to leave so I can sort out my senior year time capsule. Or throw it away. “Thanks, Dad,” I say, moving toward the door with the hope that they’ll take the hint. “But I’d ra
ther stay here and cut my toenails.”

  “You’ll regret it forever if you don’t go.”

  “Come on,” my mom encourages. “Forget about your English grade and Nicaragua and college and marriage and kids and midlife crises and retirement homes and nursing homes and crematoriums. Just go enjoy your last night before you graduate from high school!”

  I look over at my closet and try another way to get them off my back. “Even if I wanted to go, I don’t have a dress.”

  “I happened to see one that reminded me of you,” my mom says, hopping up. “It was in the window of Willa’s Closet, and I got it on my way home.” She disappears into the hallway and comes back holding up a short bright blue dress with layers and layers of shiny ruffles. “Ta-da!”

  “Wow, Mom,” I say slowly. “That is a really, really unique dress. Thanks so much.” I take it from her and hold it up to myself in the mirror. Honestly, it’s like I’m being eaten by an eighties-themed pastry.

  “Oh, it’s perfect,” she says, clapping her hands. “We’ll leave so you can put it on.”

  Upon squeezing myself into the most unfortunate piece of fabric that’s ever been on my body, I poke my head out of my room. I hear my parents’ voices downstairs. “It’s really beautiful and I appreciate it, but I’m still not going,” I yell. “Prom is just a dance. I can dance anywhere, anytime.”

  I’m about to take the dress off and hide until graduation when the doorbell rings. “Oh god, if it’s Abigail and Hilary trying to get me to this dance—”

  I run down the stairs. When they see me in this dress, they will understand that I can’t go. In a way, my mom probably just saved my life.

  “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Myles,” Brendan is saying as my mom opens the door. He’s wearing a pale blue suit just like Elvis’s. I try to dart back to my room, but he’s already seen me. I reach the bottom of the stairs, and a smile accidentally takes over my face.

  “Hey, Cham,” he says, pulling a big white balloon in behind him and closing the door. It grazes the ceiling when he comes in.

  “Uh, what’s that?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest in a failed attempt to hide my runaway ruffles. “And what are you doing here?”

  “We’ll be in the other room, kids,” my mom says. I’ve never seen my dad wheel anywhere so fast.

  Brendan steps toward me and holds out the balloon. “I’m bringing you the moon,” he says. “I mean a moon, to hold you over while you look for yours.” He hands me the string, and our fingers touch.

  “Wow.” I look up and pull the balloon to me. It’s twice the size of a usual helium balloon, with a silvery-white face. “Well, that’s—” I start, but I don’t know where I’m going with this exactly. In fact, I’m a little bit speechless.

  “I know it’s not the real moon,” he says, putting his hands in his pale blue pockets. “But it was the biggest balloon they had at iParty.”

  It drifts above our heads. I tug the string and the balloon comes toward my face. For a second I think I could actually be holding the moon, which is big and scary but also thrillingly unknown and seemingly infinite.

  “Anyway, I’m on my way to prom,” he says, pointing at his tie. “Do you want to go with me?”

  I blush and look down at his dress shoes, starting up a stuttering conversation with their black laces. “Wow, um, I, it’s just—”

  “Not with me with me,” he says quickly. “Just like do you want to carpool with me?”

  “Oh, I knew what you meant,” I say, laughing and hoping it’s loud enough to drown out my disappointment.

  “Go to prom, kids,” my mom calls, careful to stay out of sight.

  “Come on,” Brendan says, taking the balloon from me and tying it to one of the coatracks. “Prom itself can’t be worse than the pictures of prom you’d be torturing yourself with if you stayed home.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “How do you know I don’t have big plans?”

  He bites his lip and says facetiously, “That dress does seem to be for a special occasion.”

  I punch him in the arm and he laughs. “Well, I do have a whole summer to plan out now that I can’t go to Nicaragua,” I say. “Not to mention the rest of my life.”

  “Are you sure they’re not gonna let you go?” he asks.

  “Pretty damn positive. You heard my presentation, and I just couldn’t bring myself to write the essay.” For a second I feel like crying. I was on the fence about going before, what with my dad and everything, but now that I can’t go, it feels like I’ve been cut out of my whole future, or at least any hope of a future that resembles anyone else’s. Above us the balloon sways back and forth before making up its mind to occupy one little random piece of space close to the ceiling.

  “Well, all the more reason to go to prom, then,” Brendan says, nodding toward his car parked in the driveway. “This might be the last time except for graduation that you ever see these people. Unless you go to State,” he adds thoughtfully.

  At that my eyes start dribbling. I wipe them quickly, but it’s too late. He’s already seen.

  “Oh no,” he says gently. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s not you,” I sniffle, wiping my face and engaging the floor in a staring contest.

  “I didn’t know you wanted to go to Nicaragua so badly,” he says.

  I run my fingers through some of the ruffles. “I don’t really.” I lean my forehead against the doorway. “It’s just everything. Everyone’s moving on and going to college and whatever while I’m stuck here in limbo. If I go to prom, I’m just going to feel even more like a freshly hatched alien. Everyone else is in that world, and I’m in this world. And they can’t wait for me, and I can’t catch up with them.”

  Brendan looks at me steadily. “How about this: We go to prom and convince Mr. Garcia to let you go to Nicaragua. Then at least you’ll have a little bit longer to be part of everything.”

  I wipe my nose. I guess I could go, but not because I want to. Me going is kind of a selfless act to appease my friends, my parents, and, okay, future Cham, who might find herself a true idiot for not going.

  “Okay.” I tug on a particularly egregious ruffle at my hip. “We just have to make one stop first.”

  According to the hours posted online, Willa’s Closet is open for another fifteen minutes. Luckily, our town is small enough that you’re never more than ten minutes away from where you want to go, even when the traffic is particularly “heavy.”

  “Here?” Brendan asks as he slows through the center of town and stops between the pizza place and the bank.

  “Yep, perfect.” I dash out of the car, blue ruffles of my dress swishing together. “There you are,” I whisper. My darling white dress is front-and-center in the fingerprint-smudged window, waiting for somebody. My body to be exact. As fun as it sounds to go through life pissed about the only As I ever got, maybe if I fake it ’til I make it, my boobs will actually grow on me one day (not literally, although that’d be some great karma). I open the door to find—Iggy? Izzy? Izzy.—looking very intently at her laptop, where a sticker says PROUD TO BE A COLLEGE DROPOUT next to one that says NACHO PROBLEM.

  “Hey, sorry to interrupt,” I say, leaning on the counter and accidentally invading her personal space. “Even though it won’t fit, I gotta have that dress.”

  I point to the window and she eyes me up and down, one blue ruffle at a time. “Do your thing, girl. Anything’s better than what you have on.”

  She hops off the stool and heads for the window display. “You going to prom?” she asks.

  “Yeah, changed my mind last minute,” I say, following her past the racks of clothes. “I wasn’t going to, ’cause it’s all about pictures and dates and uncomfortable shoes. But then this guy I like, I mean as a friend, offered me a ride, so…”

  She unbuttons the dress from the mannequin’s plastic back and hands the white lace fabric to me. “Good for you. Life’s too short not to go to prom.”

  “Uh, last
time I was here, you were shitting on prom.” I follow her to the dressing room and strip down in the tiny space.

  “Just ’cause something’s stupid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it,” Izzy calls through the closed door. “Honestly, it’s so much better that way. It frees you up to do your own goddamn thing. Now lemme see.”

  I zip the dress up and open the door. When I look down there are miles and miles of material across my chest, just hanging there like Please love me. “I’m having a bit of a boob situation, which I’m sure could be fixed with two balloons and a bicycle pump, but I’m trying to be accepting.”

  “Don’t worry,” Izzy says. “I’ll be right back.” She heads toward the front of the store and calls out, “Is the guy with the vigorous dance moves in the car out front your date?”

  “Not my date,” I say quickly, attempting to downsize the nest in my hair from squirrel babies to chipmunk babies. “He’s just my ride, and he wasn’t even supposed to be that. He just showed up at my house.” Also, he brought me the moon.

  “Well, that’s good timing. Here, use these,” Izzy says, coming back with four pieces of thin black duct tape. “Gather up the material and tape it like an X.”

  I stand in front of the mirror hesitantly, then do it. I mean I can’t really look more ridiculous than I do with saggy ghost boobs. At first it’s awkward pulling the fabric up then down, but finally I’ve effectively taped two Xs on my chest.

  “Ooooh!” she says, nodding in approval. “X-tits might be the next big thing.”

  I grin. “Gotta admit, I actually look good. In a lived-through-a-horror-movie type of way.”

  “Which you did,” she says, patting my shoulder. “But I’m done shit-talking high school. Now pay up.”

  I rip the tag off the back of the dress and she walks over to scan it at the computer. As my card goes through I look at Brendan, jamming out alone in his car. It’s like he’s holding his own private prom between the seat and the steering wheel.

  “All yours,” Izzy says, handing me my card.