What would your mother say?
“Your life is over!” was what her mother had screamed when Emily’s pregnancy had become apparent. “No one will ever respect you now!”
The funny thing was, looking back on the last few months, her mother had been right.
Emily left the boardwalk, cutting down the long, dark alley between the candy shop and the hot dog shack, crossing Beach Drive. She eventually found herself on Royal Cove Way. Several cars drove by, some of them slowing down to take a look at the bedraggled beachball in the bright turquoise prom dress. Emily rubbed her arms to fight the chill in the air. She shouldn’t have gone with such a loud color. She shouldn’t have chosen something strapless. She should’ve altered it to accommodate her growing body.
But she hadn’t considered any of these good ideas until now, so her swollen breasts were spilling out of the top and her hips swung like a pendulum on the clock inside of a whorehouse.
“Hey, hot stuff!” a boy screamed from the open window of a Mustang. His friends were shoved into the back. Someone’s leg was sticking out a window. She could smell beer and pot and sweat.
Emily’s hand cradled her round belly as she walked across the school quad. She thought about the child growing inside. At first, it hadn’t seemed real. And then it had felt like an anchor. Only lately had it felt like a human being.
Herhuman being.
“Emmie?”
She turned, surprised to find Blake hiding beneath the shadow of a tree. He was cupping a cigarette in one hand. Improbably, he was dressed for the prom. Since elementary school, they had all scoffed about how the dances and the proms were a Pageantry of Plebs clinging to what would probably be the best nights of their pathetic lives. Only Blake’s formal black tuxedo set him apart from the bright white and pastels she had seen the other boys wearing in passing cars.
She cleared her throat. “What are you doing here?”
He grinned. “We thought it would be fun to sneer at the plebs in person.”
She looked around for Clay and Nardo and Ricky, because they always traveled in a pack.
“They’re inside,” he said. “Except for Ricky. She’s running late.”
Emily didn’t know what to say. Thanks seemed wrong considering the last time Blake had talked to her, he’d called her a stupid bitch.
She started to walk away, offering only a stray, “See ya.”
“Em?”
She didn’t stop or turn around because, while he was right that she could be a bitch, Emily wasn’t stupid.
Music pulsed from the open doors of the gymnasium. Emily could feel the bass vibrating in her back teeth as she walked across the quad. The prom committee had apparently decided on the theme of “Romance by the Sea”, which was as sad as it was predictable. Paper fish in rainbow colors darted between rows of blue streamers. Not one of them was a longbill, which was the fish that the town was named after, but who was Emily to correct them? She wasn’t even a student here.
“Christ,” Nardo said. “You’ve got some balls showing up like this.”
He was standing off to the side of the entrance, exactly the kind of place she would expect Nardo to be lurking. Same black tux as Blake, but with an I SHOT J.R. button on the lapel to make it clear he was in on the joke. He offered Emily a sip from a half-filled bottle of Everclear and cherry Kool-Aid.
She shook her head. “I gave it up for Lent.”
He guffawed, shoving the bottle into his jacket pocket. She could see the stitching had already torn from the weight of the rotgut. A hand-rolled cigarette was tucked behind his ear. Emily remembered something her father had said about Nardo the first time he’d met him—
That kid’s gonna end up in jail or on Wall Street, but not in that order.
“So.” He slipped the cigarette out and searched for his lighter. “What brings a bad girl like you to a nice place like this?”
Emily rolled her eyes. “Where’s Clay?”
“Why, you got something to tell him?” He wagged his eyebrows as he stared pointedly at her belly.
Emily waited for his cigarette to catch. She used her good hand to rub her stomach like a witch with a crystal ball. “What if I have something to tell you, Nardo?”
“Shit,” he said, his eyes flickering nervously behind her. They had drawn a crowd. “That’s not funny, Emily.”
She rolled her eyes again. “Where’s Clay?”