LIAM: It didn’t even hit me who it was at first. I just saw a hot girl coming out of a limo. But then she got closer, and it was Emma Rajpur. Emma Rajpur! She looked just like she did in my poster, and on TV every week, only even more perfect, somehow. She was also tinier than I’d ever imagined—only as tall as my shoulder.
COCO: She was completely poreless. Seriously. There was not a flaw on her face. She looked like she’d been airbrushed!
HUTCH: Liam was completely awestruck. I pushed him, and he staggered toward Emma Rajpur.
COCO: She was so smiley. Insanely white teeth. I think I was staring at her in a weird way, but honestly, she was blinding. Tripp maneuvered me into his car, and then Hutch got Liam and everybody into the limo.
MICHAEL: Alex immediately started quizzing poor Emma Rajpur on scientific impossibilities in the Skyward universe. I had to save her—and Liam. So I went to my go-to Alex distracting conversation topic, which is “Jurassic Park could easily happen within the next five years.”
ALEX: Jurassic Park is not happening anytime soon. It’s not! It is absolutely not!
HUTCH: There was a lot of background noise about Jurassic Park, but even though there were six people in that limo, all I could see was Avery. I realize she was sitting next to someone who was professionally beautiful, but Emma Rajpur couldn’t hold a candle to Avery. I reached out and grabbed her hand. She leaned her head against my shoulder, and I think that was the moment I changed my mind about prom. Prom was awesome. We could have just ridden around the block in the limo, and I would have been happy.
AVERY: We pulled up at the planetarium, and everyone looked amazingly nice, even the teachers who were chaperoning. I realize that everyone was staring at and taking pictures of Emma Rajpur, not me, but I still felt like a celebrity, too.
COCO: I don’t think it was even Emma Rajpur. Everyone was staring at Michael Feeley’s eyebrows. His face had been transformed!
Editor’s Note: I love that Coco has so much faith in my aesthetician prowess, but I am really confident that everyone was staring at Emma Rajpur, not Michael Feeley’s eyebrows.
AVERY: As we walked toward the planetarium, I squeezed Hutch’s hand. I was so nervous—I hoped everyone in our class liked the way the room looked. It was a lot of pressure, being head of the Prom Committee! But then the doors opened, and the space was even more magical than I remembered. It was midnight in Paris at six forty-five in San Francisco.
HUTCH: You know what? It really didn’t look half-bad. Pretty impressive for a bunch of tech kids with glue guns.
COCO: How did Avery pull it off ?! I mean seriously, how?! I had seen those balloons with my very own eyes. I was there when Bizzy announced there was no longer a venue. There was nothing left in the budget. Where did all this come from? How did she even get into this space?!
BIZZY STANHOPE: I have no idea how she pulled it off.
COCO: All Avery would say is “Hutch did it,” and then smile. That wasn’t a real answer!
BIZZY STANHOPE: Tamsin’s, um, unfortunate mistake had guaranteed there would be no decorations. And Daddy’s scheduling conflict had guaranteed there would be no venue. And yet, here it was! A venue! Decorated! It was totally tacky, but it was still more than I expected. Whatever. Prom’s stupid anyway. Like who cares, right? I can’t wait until I get to college and I can plan formals at my sorority and they can be real events, not like this amateurish hoedown Avery had planned.
Editor’s Note: Dear God, please protect the future sorority sisters of Bizzy Stanhope.
TAMSIN BREWER: It was so pretty in there! Bizzy was mad about something, but I’m not sure what. She was so grumpy!
Editor’s Note: Tamsin Brewer’s date was the Minion balloon. She did let Coco take a picture with it at least.
CRESSIDA SCHROBENHAUSER-CLONAN: When I walked into the prom, the first thing I saw was Avery Dennis holding hands with Hutch. Of course she was. Because Avery Dennis gets absolutely everything she wants. Now there was absolutely no reason for me to be there, except that my mom made me come. God, I hope college is better than high school.
LIAM: Prom was one of the best nights of my life. Did Emma Rajpur and I fall in love? No. But it turns out, she is awesome. She’s kind of a goofy dancer, so she made me feel better about my goofy dancing. And she loves the Skyward universe just as much as I do! She’s also really into graphic novels, and vegan baking, and hiking with her dog. I thought she might just stay for a PR photo op and leave, but she stayed for the whole prom. And she gave me her secret Facebook account name so we could stay in touch. Promises were made about Skyward season four spoilers … and I’m going to hold her to that.
MICHAEL: Prom was the best night of my life.
COCO: I think I broke the prom date Code of Ethics.
MICHAEL: I guess Avery was right, when she was going on and on and on about how prom is a magical night where anything can happen. Because I sure felt the magic.
COCO: Listen, I know I am not, was not, and will never be Tripp Gomez-Parker’s girlfriend, but I do feel like there is an implied pledge of fidelity when you agree to go to the prom with someone. But I couldn’t help myself! I blame it on the eyebrows.
MICHAEL: Coco Kim is probably the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in real life. But I thought a universe in which someone like me could kiss someone like Coco was purely theoretical.
COCO: I ran into Michael on my way back from the bathroom, and we were alone in a darkened hallway.
Editor’s Note: Forget the eyebrows. I think the blame for this one lies squarely on the shoulders of lax chaperoning. This one is on you and your kind, Ms. Segerson! See? You should have chaperoned the prom! Look at all these shenanigans!
MICHAEL: She pulled me toward her like she was Neodymium Iron Boron and I was a metal filing. I was powerless to resist.
COCO: I kissed him, okay?! It was me! It was all me! I abandoned my date and made out with Michael Feeley in the hallway for an inappropriately long time!
TRIPP: Yeah, Coco disappeared for a weirdly long time, but it was fine. I danced with Tamsin Brewer. She still looked banging, even with that weird yellow balloon tied around her wrist.
COCO: Good God … maybe I’m JFK! JFK probably made out with tons of randos at White House dinners!
MICHAEL: Best. Night. Ever.
HUTCH: We stayed until the very last song of the night and the teachers kicked us out. Avery and I danced to almost every song. We went back to the ice-cream sundae bar three times. And we kissed in a surprisingly unsupervised hallway. I hadn’t had that much fun since the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
Editor’s Note: Coming from Hutch, this is a MAJOR compliment. Also, what did I tell you about that hallway, Ms. Segerson?! I bet you’ll chaperone next year!
AVERY: Somehow … Bizzy Stanhope and Sean Graney were voted Prom Queen and King. Did I suspect that she’d cheated, somehow, and rigged the voting? Sure. But you know what? I couldn’t have cared less. Let Bizzy have her shiny piece of plastic if it meant that much to her. Because prom was over after a few magical hours, but then we were cruising through the In-N-Out drive-through in a limo, and I had successfully kidnapped Coco from Tripp Gomez-Parker—at the time, I didn’t realize that Michael Feeley also had something to do with it, but who could have seen that coming?! There I was, sitting with my best friend and my, well, my Hutch, eating animal fries and drinking a strawberry vanilla milk shake and laughing like I couldn’t ever remember laughing before. And that’s what prom is really about. One last perfect moment with the people you love in high school. It might have been the happiest moment of my life—so far.
HUTCH: Avery wouldn’t stop harassing me about the onions on my burger. I’ll convert her one of these days, though.
MICHAEL: My mom called Coco and Avery’s parents and got their permission for them to sleep over at my place, since my mom assured them Coco and Avery could share the guest room, she would personally be supervising at all times, and th
ere would be absolutely no funny business, blah blah blah. Miracles really do happen on prom night! Because Coco Kim and Avery Dennis were sleeping at my house, and they said they wanted to play D&D with us.
ALEX: They completely destroyed our rate of play. Not to mention that they don’t have the group camaraderie the four of us had established over the past four years. Or the fact that they decided to be twin elven archers named Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
LIAM: Alex is just mad that Avery had a higher kill rate than he did.
ALEX: Listen—I think we all saw firsthand exactly what happens when you date the Dungeon Master.
HUTCH: I cannot believe he said that! No one has ever—ever—cast aspersions on my integrity as a Dungeon Master. And I swear to you on the hammer of Thor that I didn’t do anything in AD’s favor. That was a totally straight game. She was just that good. Beginner’s luck, maybe, but she was good. Sour grapes, man.
MICHAEL: Avery was actually pretty decent. With more playing, I think she could be great. Coco … not so much. Although she kissed me when she got her one and only hit of the campaign, and that was great.
Editor’s Note: I was so surprised when Coco kissed Michael Feeley, one of Liam’s Flamin’ Hot Cheetos fell out of my mouth. Just fell right out of my mouth and onto the board. Alex Manevitz sighed really loudly and brushed my Cheeto dust away with way more force than was necessary.
COCO: Would I play again? Probably not—I am legitimately awful at D&D. But I never thought I’d have so much fun being awful at something! Or that I would spend the rest of my prom night in Michael Feeley’s dining room playing a tabletop RPG game instead of at the after-party at Tripp Gomez-Parker’s house.
TRIPP: Oh, yeah … I guess Coco never did make it to my house. I hooked up with Tamsin Brewer, though, so it’s all good. It was kind of weird, though, because she wouldn’t put down that yellow Minion balloon.
Editor’s Note: SO MANY bullets dodged on prom night!
MICHAEL: My mom never did have to worry about those guest rooms.
LIAM: Just like we’d all hoped, on Ultimate Game Night, we raged till dawn.
MICHAEL: As the sun rose, I popped a bunch of Eggo waffles into the toaster. The way Coco ate her waffle was so cute … She nibbled it like a little squirrel.
Editor’s Note: Coco does look like a squirrel when she eats with her hands! We used to call ourselves Squirrel Girl and Piranha Woman. (I’ve been told I look a little toothy while I eat.)
HUTCH: I could tell AD was getting tired. Her head kept nodding onto my shoulder, and every once in a while, she’d jerk herself up with a start and shout, “Kill the kobolds!”
Editor’s Note: “Aggressive, xenophobic, yet industrious small humanoid creatures, kobolds are noted for their skill at building traps and preparing ambushes.”—Wikipedia
AVERY: I didn’t want to miss a minute, but I must have fallen asleep at some point, because Hutch shook me and whispered, “AD,” until I woke up with the box top from the Eggo waffles stuck to my face.
HUTCH: Ultimate Game Night was over. Prom was over, too. I was sad, but man, it had been fun while it lasted.
AVERY: Hutch and Michael walked me and Coco to the car. I had a lot of questions about that situation I was planning to ask once we got in the car, but at that moment, Hutch was kissing me, and I had absolutely no brain space for Michael Feeley.
HUTCH: I kissed AD good-bye. I didn’t know where, or even if, I’d ever see her again.
THE END
(Just kidding, Ms. Segerson! I wouldn’t leave you hanging like that!)
HUTCH: I first saw Avery Dennis in a pink bikini at a pool party. I met her on the first day of freshman biology. And I was mildly annoyed when she turned to me and asked for a pencil because she’d forgotten hers. Which she would proceed to do, every single day, for the next four years. But I quickly learned that AD’s inability to hold on to a pencil—despite having more colored pens than any human reasonably should—was only a very small part of who she is. I probably started to fall in love with her the first day I saw her dissect a frog. Or maybe it was the day she wrote that song about enzyme catalysis and sang it in her horrible, wonderful, off-key voice. Maybe it was all of those days, and more. And she must have been falling in love with me, too, or she never would have broken her oath to stop dating.
AVERY: I met James “Hutch” Hutcherson on the first day of freshman biology when I asked him for a pencil. I spent the next four years looking forward to science class every single day, but somehow didn’t realize that was because of Hutch until the last week of school.
HUTCH: My friends have been asking me a lot about what happens next with me and AD. I know there’s this stereotype that guys don’t like to talk about relationships, but Michael and Liam have been bugging me nonstop about what our “label” is.
AVERY: How would I label us? I don’t know. Happy? I’m just happy I realized I liked Hutch before it was too late. Also, I’m happy that Coco found Ashley Jenkins on Facebook, and was able to confirm through mutual friends that she’d never dated Hutch. Not that it really matters, since I am the last person who has any right to be jealous about exes, but at least we solved that mystery. Although I should have known from the start that Hutch would never date someone who would incorrectly label a diagram. The mantle is like the easiest layer of the Earth to identify.
HUTCH: Michael kept wailing that we’d found each other “too late.” But I don’t think that’s true at all. Caltech and Pepperdine are only an hour apart, after all.
AVERY: So we’re seeing what happens. We’re taking it slow. And we’re still together. Although I don’t know how I’m going to get pencils in college.
HUTCH: I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in Avery’s oral history project. I don’t want to be her past. I want to be her present. And, hopefully, her future.
AVERY: But that’s the thing about history, right, Ms. Segerson? It’s still being written, all the time, even while we’re living it. Now it was time for me to close the book on my history of boys, open up my yearbook, collect signatures from absolutely everyone, and get ready to graduate. As I flipped through the pages that contained our final legacy as seniors at San Anselmo Prep, I had another epiphany about history. History may help us understand why certain events had happened. But maybe the most important thing wasn’t the why, but that we remember. That we have a record of the experiences that we loved and the people we loved having them with. Because I was happy that I had a better understanding of why my relationships had ended, but I was even happier that along the way, I’d made so many wonderful friends, had so many amazing experiences, and had so many ways to remember them by. So I guess you were right, Ms. Segerson. History is pretty worthwhile after all. But I think I’m done with writing history for a while. It’s time for me to make history instead.
Avery:
This was extremely unorthodox, and yet I must say I’m impressed by how thorough you were.
A+
Good luck at Pepperdine—don’t be a stranger.
—Ms. Segerson
This book is the fulfillment of my lifelong dream to write a book for Scholastic. If elementary school me, whose favorite day of the year was the Scholastic Book Fair, could see me now, she would probably pee her pants. Huge thank-yous are in order to everyone who made this dream come true.
Matt Ringler, thank you for coming up with this brilliant concept and for entrusting it to me. Writing an oral history has been frequently fun, sometimes frustrating, but always fascinating. This book would literally not exist without you, and it wouldn’t be nearly as good without your pitch-perfect editing and Kanye lyrics. I’m also convinced that if someone made an ’80s-style workplace sitcom starring the two of us, it would be hilarious. Thank you to Jennifer Abbots, Michelle Campbell, Laura Festa, and everyone at Scholastic I haven’t had the pleasure of e-meeting yet. Your love for this book overwhelms me, in the best possible way.
Molly Ker Hawn, you ar
e a dream-come-true agent and one of my favorite people. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sending this project my way. Thank you for being my best early reader, and for always making me feel like I’m funny. I should probably just move to London so we can have brunch all the time, right?
Max, by the time you read this, we’ll be married! Thank you for reading every page and for always having faith in my writing, even when I don’t. I wish I was half the genius you think I am, but I love you for thinking it. Additional thanks to you, Daniel and Colin for keeping my D&D references honest and for introducing me to the wonderful world of tabletop gaming. I will beat all of you at Lords of Waterdeep anytime, anyplace. Especially you, Colin. I will destroy you.
Dad, thanks for all those emails saying “good” to let me know I’m on the right track. Mom, thank you for your constant love and support, and for always picking up the phone, even if it’s the fourth time I’ve called that day. Ali, remember that time your hair was doing a thing? Yeah, me too. Thanks for that. Somers and Max (again!), thanks for the conversation about helicopter parents that spawned a great chapter.
I thought I hated high school when I was there, but now I realize how great it was, if only because I had incredible teachers and made amazing friends. Mr. Burns and Ms. Schwartz, you are the kind of English teachers people write inspirational movies about; Mr. Campbell and Mr. Guffin, I know you would never have given this history project an A+, but all four of you made me a writer. Megan, Donnie, Sarah, Evie, and Caitlin—I’d still share a prom limo with all of you. Let me know when the DJ plays “Hey Ya!,” okay?
Stephanie Kate Strohm is the author of Pilgrims Don’t Wear Pink, Confederates Don’t Wear Couture, and The Taming of the Drew. She graduated from Middlebury College with a dual degree in theater and history and has acted her way around the United States, performing in more than twenty-five states. She currently lives in Chicago with her fiancé and a dog named Lorelei Lee.
Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie Kate Strohm
All rights reserved. Published by Point, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, POINT, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
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