off. Ruby Oliver, good enough to kiss, but not good enough to get naked with.
It just kills me.
Not that I wanted to, but why not me?
10. Angelo (but it was just one date.)
Here is why I’m now a leper. I went to the Spring Fling with Jackson, even though he broke up with me before it and was already going out with Kim. So sue me. My ex-boyfriend that I was madly in love with wanted to take me to a dance, and it was only the second formal dance I was going to with a boy, and I had already bought a dress, and who knows? Maybe he’d see me in it and realize he made a big mistake. Really, I think almost any girl in my shoes would have done the same.
Here’s the other formal dance I had been to: Homecoming at Garfield High, which is the public school we always drive past on the way to the Chinese restaurant my dad likes the best. I went because my mom’s friend Juana (the playwright with the thirteen dogs and four ex-husbands) has a son who goes to Garfield: Angelo.1 He’s a year older than me. I had only met him three or four times before, at Juana’s dinner parties. I think he spends a lot of time at his father’s house, so he’s hardly ever at Juana’s when my mom and I go over there.
Angelo seemed all right. He had big brown eyes and curly black hair; sort of a flat, round face. Serene. He dressed kind of hip-hop, which no one does at Tate.
At the dinner parties, we generally got up from the table early and watched TV. He never said too much, probably because Juana is always talk-talk-talking, and also because no one can ever hear at her house anyway, what with all the barking going on.
So Garfield was having a homecoming dance, and I guess Angelo needed a date, which is a little odd because the school has like 1500 students and he’s definitely not bad-looking. He didn’t even call me and ask directly. Juana called my mother, and my mother asked me if I’d want to go to this thing with Angelo.
I said yes. Not because of Angelo. Because I wanted to go to a dance.
But why was he asking?
Maybe Angelo was such a loser no one at Garfield would go with him. Or maybe he was gay and didn’t want to take a girl at all, and Juana thought she was helping him out when really she just had no idea. Or maybe my mother had told Juana I was unpopular with boys, and so she was making him take me out of pity. Or maybe he was madly in love with some girl Juana didn’t like, and I was supposed to distract him?2
My mom told me he’d pick me up at eight and not to have so much angst—but I worried for the whole two weeks before the dance. I had used my babysitting money to buy a yellow silk dress from the 1950s, with spaghetti straps—but what if I got all dressed up and he never actually showed? What if he really didn’t want to take me, and started being mean, or left me to go off with someone else? What if this was a Stephen King situation? 3
My mother told me to stop being so insecure. My father asked me sixteen times if I wanted to talk about my feelings of insecurity.
The day of the dance, Angelo arrived on time, wearing a blue suit. He brought me a corsage of yellow roses. My dad took pictures. Juana was driving us, and she acted all hokey, like she was a chauffeur. There were two terriers and a big hairy mutt in the backseat, so we all three sat in the front, squashed in. Juana didn’t make us wear the seat belt.
The dance was in the gym, with the lights down low and decorations everywhere. Angelo and I didn’t say much. He got me a cup of fruit punch. A lot of the girls were wearing narrow black gowns and high heels. I felt virginal and young and goofy in my yellow dress with the wide skirt. We danced, and the music was good, and we even slow-danced, which was strange and awkward and nice—holding hands and swaying back and forth.
But the whole thing went on too long. By 8:45, we had danced, stood around, drunk punch, slow-danced, stood around. We had talked to his friends, but the music was too loud to have a real conversation. What else was there to do? We danced some more. Went outside and got some fresh air. I was basically bored from 8:45 until 10:30, when Juana came to pick us up. I sat on his lap on the ride home, since now there was a border collie, a fat Labrador and a mean-looking Doberman in the back.
That was it. I didn’t see Angelo again until the next dinner party his mom had. We watched TV, as usual.
Strangely, this anxiety-producing and ultimately boring experience did not lessen my interest in going to another formal dance. I would definitely have gone to the Spring Fling later on in my freshman year, only no one asked me, and I was excited that Jackson was taking me this year. Although I ended up lying to him once again because he never issued a formal invitation. To
But Jackson just assumed we were going. The dance was announced on Friday, three weeks ahead. I figured he’d wait a few days, maybe ask me on Monday, so as not to make a big deal of it. That’s what I would have done if I was asking him.4 So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And a week passed, and he hadn’t asked me. Cricket and Kim and Nora went shopping for dresses, and I went with them. I tried stuff on, then said I was planning to make the rounds of the vintage stores the next day with my mother.
But I didn’t.
Finally, halfway through the second week and five days before we broke up, Jackson and I were talking with Matt and Nora at lunch. “Hey, Roo,” Jackson said. “After the Fling would you want to have people over to party on your dock? Because the miniyacht stops nearby.”
“Oh, um, sure,” I said.
And that’s how I knew we were going. I went out and bought a dress, and ended up borrowing $85 from my mother so I could get this great seventies silver wrap thing I found at Zelda’s Closet, and to pay it off I was going to have to babysit fourteen hours for this kid who barfs on me nearly every time I go over there.
Then Jackson broke up with me, and after I had been crying and crying alone in my room, I saw the corner of that dress poking out of my closet and it made me cry even harder, because there was nowhere to wear it, and I’d
