When he’s sober, our dad is a funny, smart, warm guy, criminal greed aside. Mel in particular loves him, always has since I can remember. And she’s so disappointed in him, it almost literally chokes her.
Look, some more stuff happens that evening – Meredith argues with our mom over Bolts of Fire, Mel sneaks out to Henna’s house – but nothing so important that I have to go on about it. Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn’t the story I want to tell. At all.
You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I’m choosing my own story.
Because if you can’t do that, you might as well just give up.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH, in which indie kid Kerouac opens the Gate of the Immortals, allowing the Royal Family and its Court a fissure through which to temporarily enter this world; then Kerouac discovers that the Messenger lied to him; he dies, alone.
On Friday, Henna and I somehow get a whole half-hour in her car alone together while she drives us back from the shop where she’s getting her prom dress (custard and burgundy, apparently) and I’m renting my tux (black).
We’re not going together. Well, we are, but not like that. Henna broke up with Tony after he’d already asked her to prom so anyone else she might have wanted to go with had already got other dates. Mel is a year older than everyone in our senior class and the guys who tend to ask her out are the creepy ones who think they can smell damage, in whom she has zero interest, thank God. Pretty much everyone would be totally fine if Jared brought a guy as his date, but he just gave his usual close-lipped refusal to even talk about it. As for me? I waited so long to ask Vanessa Wright, my ex-girlfriend, that she picked up the pieces of Tony Kim instead.
So guess what? Me, my sister, my best friend, and Henna are going to prom as a foursome, that ridiculous idea that only happens in the stupidest teen movies or drippiest teen books. Trust me, it only ever sounds cool if you never have to do it.
Oh, well. At least I like the people I’m going with and we’ll all be in it together.
“Mike?” Henna asks as we drive.
“Yeah?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. In fact, the silence goes on so long I look up from the text I’m writing to Mel to ask if she confirmed the limo we’re all taking to prom. (What do you want from us?
We’re suburban. We live for shit like limos.)
“Henna?”
She sighs out through her nose. “Would you guys be really pissed off at me if I didn’t go in our foursome to prom?”
Oh. Hell, no. No, no, no.
“Of course we’d be pissed off,” I say. “That’s why you’re asking me and not Mel or Jared. I’m the one least likely to yell at you.”
“Please don’t yell at me,” she says, turning off the main road to the wooded ones that lead to our houses. The sun has abandoned us for the past couple days, and Henna flicks on the wipers as rain starts to fall.
“Who do you want to–” I start, but there’s no need to ask, is there?
“He’s new,” Henna says. “He doesn’t know anybody and how hard must it be to come to a new school right before graduation–?”
“Henna–”
“I haven’t asked him yet. But I want to.” She glances over at me. “Would that be awful of me?
Would you hate me for it?”
“We’ve arranged everything, though. It was going to be lame but at least it was going to be lame for the four of us–”
“Well, how about this? How about if it’s the five of us?”
“But he’d be your date.”
“Well. Yeah.”