The drive from Connecticut to my mom’s is short. Her majordomo Gerard greets me with a smile and leads me to the library, where Maman sits at her chessboard. She’s staring at the pieces when I take a seat across from her.
“Hello, darling.”
“Hey, Maman. Did you—”
“Get your pictures? Yes, my love. You have a problem.” She hands me an envelope, which I take without a word. “This is the last time.”
“But—”
“No ‘buts,’ Renata. Either you move on or you go back, but you must choose or I will make the choice for you.”
“Fine.” If she won’t help me, I can find a way to do it myself. “How have you been getting these pictures?” I slide the images out of the envelope and stare at them.
Classic surveillance photos.
I grab a close-up shot. Damian is stepping out of a car. He looks so angry at the world, and I wonder why no one else notices. It’s almost enough to make me want to save him. Almost.
“I have a friend.”
“In De Luca territory?”
“You can’t ask about Vitali things. You gave up that right.” Her patient smile does little to soothe me, especially because she can’t even begin to understand why I left the mafia. “Either you’re out of the mafia or you’re not, Renata. I pulled a lot of strings to get you out.”
My eyes shutter closed. I left because this world embodies everything I hate. The fractured childhood. Being alone all the time. Letting Angelo De Luca and his stupid picture of Ludovico De Luca run me out of Devils Ridge.
I open my eyes and meet her gaze. “And I thank you for that.”
Any other Vitali wife wouldn’t have the power, but Maman makes friends everywhere she goes. She’s friends with the wives of every powerful Vitali man, and Papà is so afraid Maman will leave him that he’ll listen to her—to an extent.
“Then, truly thank me for that by moving on. Do what’s right for you, Renata. You can move on, look to the future, thrive in your teaching job. I know you love learning and education. You should be happy.”
“I am.”
I’m not.
She sees past my lies, her eyes so understanding. “You’re not. That’s okay. He’s your first love, Renata. First loves will always be the one you compare everyone else to. They’ll live in your heart every day, and no matter how much you think you’ve moved on, they’ll always have that special piece of you. For you, it’s every time you step into a library and remember the memories you two shared in them. It’s whenever you hear Texas in the news, and you wonder what he’s doing right now. It’s a million little triggers. It’s a million little things. And if it were just one thing, you could bury it. But you can’t bury a million little things, Renata. There’s only so much space in the world.”
“How do you know this? How do you know that’s how I feel?”
“If you don’t feel that way, he was never your first love in the first place.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “I love you, Renata. I want what’s best for you. You either need to go back to him or move on. This in-between state isn’t healthy.”
We both lied to each other. How can we trust each other again? It’s not like trust comes with a free refill. My biggest fear is going to Damian and being told he doesn’t want me anymore. That fear seizes me up every time I think of flying to Texas and begging him to believe I’m not just another person who disappointed him.
Don’t be weak.
You’re a Vitali.
Vitalis don’t feel fear.
I repeat Papà’s mantra twice in my head before I tell Maman, “I can’t go back to him.”
She releases my hand. “Then, move on.”
It’s not that easy, I want to tell her, but I bite my tongue. I don’t want to hear her replies. I don’t want to confront her logic.
Instead, I gather the courage to tell Maman, “When I was in Devils Ridge, Damian said I was sent there.”
I told her nearly everything that happened in Devils Ridge—falling in love with Damian, fending off Angelo, and faking a fight to flee after finding the picture of Ludovico De Luca in Damian’s room. But I never went into the specifics of the fight. Too painful.
Her brows draw together. “You were. We’ve been over this. Your father sent you there. He forbade me from visiting or contacting you.”
I shake my head. “But why did you listen?”
Her remorse slithers across the table and into my heart. Making Maman feel guilty is like finding a stray dog and leaving him in a ditch. You just don’t do it.
She dips her head and eyes one of the chess pieces between us. “I thought if I listened, he’d cut your trip short and let you come home to me.”—He didn’t—“One of many regrets of mine.”
“But Damian mentioned someone sent me there. He implied it wasn’t by Papà. I—” I take in her eyes. They’re on the verge of tears, and I know if I push, she’ll cry. One of many reasons I’ve never pushed. I take in a deep breath, then expel as much of the past as I can. “I’m sorry I brought this up. I know it upsets you.”
“Oh, baby.” She stands, rounds the small table, kneels in front of me, and grabs both of my hands, making me feel like I’m a kid again. “I love you, Renata. I worry for you. You have to stop asking for Damiano De Luca. You have to let him go.”
“I will,” I lie, because I’d rather break Maman’s trust than admit to her that there’s no letting go.
Loving Damian is trench warfare. It’s digging deep, then clawing your way out. But sometimes, you have to accept that there’s no way out.
The End.
Want more of Damian and Ren? Check out their novel, FREE on KU here. Stay tuned for a sneak peek!
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Parker S. Huntington hates talking about herself, so bear with her as she awkwardly toots her own horn for a few sentences and then bids her readers adieu.
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Parker is from Orange County, California. She graduated pre-med with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside. As of November 2018, the 23-years-old novelist is still pursuing a Master’s in Liberal Arts (ALM) in Literature and Creative Writing from Harvard University. Go Crimson!
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She was the proud mom of Chloe and will always look back on her moments with Chlo as the best moments of her life. She has 2 puppies—a Carolina dog named Bauer and a Dutch Shepherd and lab mix named Rose. She also lives with her boyfriend of five (going on six!) years—a real life alpha male, book-boyfriend-worthy hunk of a man.
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For more information:
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Asher Black
Niccolaio Andretti
Ranieri Andretti
Bastiano Romano
Renata Vitali
Damiano De Luca
Two Boys, One Prom
B.B. Easton
Copyright © 2018 by BB Easton
All rights reserved.
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No part of this story may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Two Boys, One Prom was originally published in the Cocktales anthology. It is a work of creative nonfiction based on characters introduced in BB Easton’s bestselling memoir, 44 Chapters About 4 Men. While the settings and most of the situations portrayed in this book are true to life, the names and identifying characteristic
s of all characters have been altered to protect the identities of everyone involved.
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For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I write stories about my own life. About the actual, questionable, choices I made and the actual, regrettable men I dated. (And by dated, I mean accompanied to Waffle House.) These stories are hilarious and self-deprecating, shocking and sexy, heartwarming and heartbreaking, and if I had to estimate, about seventy-five percent true.
This particular story is about the time I took my two ex-boyfriends—sworn mortal enemies—to the same high school dance and lived to tell the tale. I call it…Two Boys, One Prom. Enjoy!
* * *
Let me set the scene for you. It was April of 1998. I was a junior at Peach State High School—a huge, working-class public school in the suburbs of Atlanta. On paper, I looked like the model student: four-point-oh grade point average, on track to graduate early with honors, no disciplinary file, aside from a few tardiness-related detentions. However, in person, I looked like a drug-addicted gutter punk. My once-shaved head had grown into an inch-long helmet of hair that I’d bleached platinum blonde and tried to tame with hair gel and bobby pins. I wore too much black liquid eyeliner and not enough of anything else. And my steel-toe combat boots practically weighed as much as my emaciated ninety-five-pound body.
You’ve probably heard the term “high-functioning alcoholic” used to describe someone who suffers from an addiction yet manages to excel in at least one area of their life. That was me. I was a high-functioning bad-boy-aholic. At any given moment you could find me chilling on the Dean’s List while some sexy, broken, tattooed miscreant with washboard abs and a killer smile was completely ravaging the rest of my life.
Or in this case, two.
Ronald “Knight” McKnight had been my first love, if you could call it that. A professional would have called it Stockholm Syndrome. Knight was a friendless, joyless, vicious sadist whom everyone at Peach State High School had learned to steer clear of. He looked like a skinhead, lifted weights with the football players, and physically assaulted anyone who so much as spoke to me. By tenth grade, Knight had completely isolated me from my friends and made himself my only option for rides home, for friendship, for everything.
Naturally, like the dumb attention-starved fifteen-year-old that I was, I grew to love the psycho. But when his violent tendencies became more than he could control, Knight joined the Marines and shipped off to Iraq. He exited my life the same way that he’d entered it: before I was ready and without my permission.
Leaving the door wide open for Harley James to waltz through.
I had just turned sixteen. I had just gotten my first car. And I had just gone through my first real break up. What better time to hook up with a sexy, carefree, blue-eyed, blond-pompadoured, tattooed mechanic? Harley was fun and flirty and bad to the bone. He organized illegal street races, sold illegal street drugs, had a cache of illegal firearms, and had been in and out of jail more times than Lindsay Lohan.
To a girl with a bad boy problem, Harley was perfect.
His tattoos, on the other hand…not so much.
Harley had the worst tattoos I’ve ever seen on a real person. Sure, we’ve all seen bad tattoos on the internet. We’ve even shared them with our friends and had a good laugh. Well, some of those tattoos are Harley’s. I know because I’m the one who submitted them to badtattoos.com in the first place.
I was able to overlook a lot when it came to Harley James—his lack of intellect and formal education, his criminal record, his trunk full of sawed-off shotguns—but the one thing I was never able to see past were those horrible fucking tattoos. In fact, they were the cause of our first breakup.
Or maybe our third? I can’t remember. We broke up a lot.
Harley had been telling me for weeks that he wanted to get a huge tattoo of me, right on his bicep. He had me draw dozens of mock-ups for him: sad clown BB, sugar skull BB, Bettie Paige BB, bionic angel BB, anime BB, hell, even pirate wench BB. So, when I got the call that Harley was at the tattoo shop and needed a ride home, my heart and my Mustang practically defied gravity as I sped over to see which design he’d chosen.
I lurched my car into the first parking space I could find and bounced through the front door, ready to see myself immortalized in ink. Harley gave me a smug, sleepy-eyed grin from his tattoo chair, where a hulking beast of a man was putting the finishing touches on his upper arm. With a skip and a hop, I landed right next to Harley, where I stared in horror at a gray cartoon donkey with a pink bow on its ass.
Eeyore.
My boyfriend had gotten Eeyore, the depressed jackass from Winnie the Pooh, tattooed on his arm. Forever.
Make that my ex-boyfriend. I high-tailed it out of there and vowed to never be caught in the same room as that fucking tattoo ever again. I was done. I had dignity, goddamn it. I…
Still needed a prom date.
Shit.
After pouting and screening Harley’s calls for a week, I finally answered and told him that if he scrounged up a tuxedo and took me to prom I’d consider taking him back.
Harley wasn’t real excited about my proposition, considering the fact that he was a) a grown-ass man, and b) had been expelled from Peach State High School, but he said he’d see what he could do. Which I knew was code for, I’m going to get high and forget we had this conversation in five…four…three…
* * *
“Eeyore?” Juliet’s cackles flooded out of the dressing room she was thrashing around in, causing everyone in the quiet dress shop to turn and scowl in our direction.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Goth Girl deadpanned from the purple tufted ottoman she had commandeered in the seating area. Of course, she’d already found her dress. She’d simply walked in, grabbed the first floor-length black thing in her size, and parked her Wednesday Addams-looking ass down to wait in annoyance while Juliet tried on every other dress in the building.
Juliet tossed the curtain back dramatically. She had on a shimmery, midnight blue strapless thing that looked like it was meant to be worn in front of a wind machine.
“So what did you do?” Her almost black irises twinkled as she beamed over my misfortune. Juliet had real problems—like, an eleven-month-old at home and a baby daddy in prison kind of problems—so Harley’s little Eeyore tattoo was the highlight of her week. That and getting her mom to babysit so that she could go dress shopping.
“I just left.” I shrugged.
Juliet laughed and slapped her hand on the side of the fitting room. “You just left him there?”
That pulled a grin out of me. “Yeah, and I didn’t answer his calls for a week.”
“So, is he coming or what?” Goth Girl asked, lazily looking over the top of a Bridal magazine. I was kind of surprised something that girlie hadn’t spontaneously burst into flames in her hands.
My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. He said he’d try, but…it’s fucking Harley. You know how he is.”
My friends both nodded in morose silence.
“You know what will make you feel better?” Juliet asked, her usually bitchy voice more cheerful than ever. I turned and looked at her skeptically. “Trying on this dress!”
“You’re not gonna get it?” I asked, admiring her again. She was standing in front of a full-length mirror outside of the fitting room, holding her long black braids up with one hand. I had to admit, as much as I loved the dress, it wasn’t right on her. Juliet had dark skin thanks to her African-American mother; dark, almond-shaped eyes, thanks to her Japanese father; and killer curves, thanks to motherhood, but that dress did little to accentuate any of it. She needed something bright. Something form-fitting. Something low-cut.
She needed to remember what it felt like to be a slutty teenager again.
I, on the other hand, had zero curves, green eyes, freckled skin, and couldn’t wait to grow the fuck up.
“Yeah, okay. Fine.” I sighed.
I grabbed the smalles
t size they had, pulled it on over my head in the fitting room without even bothering to take off my skin-tight jeans or combat boots, and tossed open the curtain.
Juliet’s mouth fell open, and Goth Girl’s drawn-on eyebrows lifted almost to her hairline.
“You have to get it. You have to.” Juliet whispered. I glanced at Goth Girl, who gave me an apathetic nod of agreement.
“Dude, it’s like,” I lifted my arm to peek at the price tag, “two-hundred dollars. And I don’t even have a date.”
“You have Harley!” Juliet beamed. She was wearing a sequin-encrusted body-hugging, halter-top number with a slit all the way up one thigh. It was red. It was slutty. And with some matching lipstick, it would be perfect.
“If he bails you can always just go stag,” Goth Girl drawled, not even glancing up that time. “Or I can break up with Steven, and we can go together. I hate that asshole anyway.”
I snorted out a laugh as excitement bloomed in my belly. Glancing back and forth between my two best friends, I smiled and said, “Fuck it. I’m going to prom.”
* * *
A few minutes later I came skipping out of the store two-hundred dollars lighter, plus tax, but with my signature cockeyed optimism fully restored. I hugged my friends goodbye and strutted over to my little black Mustang hatchback with my head held high, squinting into the warm, spring sunlight.
I don’t need no man.
I smiled, hitting the unlock button on my key fob.
I’m an independent woman.
I pulled open the driver’s side door and laid my garment bag across the backseat.
I can go to prom all by myself.