Prom Ever After: Haute Date / Save the Last Dance / Prom and Circumstance

Apparently, Laila had been a lifesaver for non-Spanish-speaking Josh, and he had promptly fallen in love with her and convinced her to take a train to Madrid with him for the weekend, and they had eloped before the semester was up. They’d spent a few years in London while Laila had gotten her law degree, and Josh had pursued computer science when he realized a music degree wasn’t going to take him too far in supporting his new bride.

Ash still couldn’t believe her practical lawyer of a mother had left England behind to follow Josh to Seattle so he could make his software dreams a reality. Till this day, he was the one who could charm her into anything.

“Dad, seriously. You need to talk to her. Where am I going to get a prom dress for a hundred dollars? And I’m not wearing that lehenga thingie.”

“I think it’s important for you to learn some negotiation strategies that don’t involve yelling,” a voice piped up knowingly from the corner of the room.

Ash shot a “get lost” look to Sonali, her little sister, who was in her usual position, hiding behind an easel that was bigger than her entire body. Ash caught a glimpse of Sonali’s face.

“What did you do to your hair?” she demanded. Her sister had some sort of tangled bird’s nest-looking hairdo on top of her head, very different from the satin sheet of black hair she’d left home with that morning.

Sona ducked back behind the easel out of Ash’s line of sight.

“You better tell me, Sona. Right now.”

Ash marched back to where Sona was hiding and grabbed her arm to make her stand. Gods. All of her hair was in a tangled, knotted mess. Ash couldn’t even get her fingers through a lock of it. It was like someone had superglued it into a knot.

“Ow, stop!”

“Who did this to you?”

“Let go!” Sona pulled away her arm and sat back down. “I did it myself.”

Ash glanced at her dad with an are-you-hearing-this look.

Josh shrugged. “She wouldn’t tell me, either.”

“Tell me what happened.” Ash lowered her voice. “Did something happen at school?”

“I just wanted to do something different with my hair.” Sona was the worst liar in the world. “That’s not illegal.”

Bad enough that the eleven-year-old was some sort of artistic genius, but was also in the progress of becoming a bully’s target, apparently. The only person who was allowed to mess with her sister was her. Ash vowed to figure out who and why, and would resort to spying on her sister to do so.

“Let it go,” Josh murmured. “She’ll tell us when she’s ready.”

Ash disagreed. Sona was like a timid baby deer outside the house... That was one of the main reasons their parents sent Sona to a very small private school for gifted artists.

“Why don’t you come to the mall with me? You’ll see what I’m talking about.” Ash turned her attention back to her father. “Please? Please, please, please? I’ll write the band’s next song.”

“Your mother’s the decision maker on this one, love. I’m sorry.”

“Next two songs.”

“No.”

“Daaaaaaaaaaad.”

“Some cheese with that whine?”

“Dad! Come on. Why don’t we have a gig and charge cover this weekend? We can play the new stuff. I swear I’ll learn it fast. We’ll earn enough for the dress in a night.”

The best thing about having Josh Montague home full-time was that there was more music in the house than ever before. He and Ash had started a band with a few other neighbors and were in the process of working on their first real set to play at the next neighborhood barbecue.

“I can pretty much assure you that giving people opportunities is more important than any dress. Ever.” Josh had that stern note in his voice, signifying that he was no longer playing.

Ash sighed. Of course that was true. She’d even come up with the idea to donate any gig money they made to the inner-city school Josh had grown up in.

Josh always said he owed his life to the music program at his high school. Many of his friends had ended up in juvie...or worse. Josh had spent his teenage years learning every instrument from piano to guitar to the French horn. He vowed to always give back whatever he could, whether it was a little or a lot.

It had been very little the past year due to the family’s financial situation. Josh had left his small tech company the previous year when it had started to go under. He’d been actively job hunting, but the opportunities were slim in an industry that was obsessed with kids out of college, not “people old enough to have kids in college.”

He’d spent the last year writing apps for phones to earn some income, while her mother’s law firm had been cutting out billable hours for the attorneys. Money had been tight on just her mother’s salary, especially considering Ash’s Seattle Academy tuition and Sonali’s specialized art school. The family’s lifestyle was far different from what Ash was used to...or from what all of her friends at school had.

Ash had heard her parents fighting—actually fighting—for the first time in her life over their financial worries. She understood their reasons for not wanting to spend a lot on the prom...but she knew she could find a way to pay her mother back for the dress if she only had a chance.

“Prom is a night when women are objectified. I think I’ll boycott mine,” the know-it-all piped up again, as if someone had asked for her opinion. “I’d rather give that money to an education program for young artists.”

“Quiet, or I’ll beat you, too,” Ash ordered.

“Don’t maul your sister. House rule number two,” Josh said automatically, without looking up from his laptop screen.

“You actually went to the prom, Dad.” Ash directed her tantrum at her father. “How much did your date’s dress cost? I bet it was over a hundred dollars even in the ’70s!”

“Hey, hey, hey. My prom was in the ’80s, thank you very much. And Jeannie made her dress with her older sister’s help. It was a big puffy yellow thing. Like one of those marshmallow-chicken things you get at Easter. Do you want me to call her and ask if you can borrow it?”

Ash shot eye daggers at her father.

“Just being helpful.” Her father shrugged. “You’ve got to get with the program before the program gets you.”

God, her parents were dorky.

“You people are seriously going to drive me crazy,” Ash muttered as she grabbed her coat. “I’m going to Sebastian’s!”

Three

Ash glared at Sebastian in the middle of their drafting class the next day. He was still completely unconcerned about the prom situation, as he’d been the previous evening.

“I should just tell Armstrong I can’t go with him. I mean, why drag it out? I should call it off now so he can find someone else. Someone with a dress instead of some belly dancer–looking costume.”

Sebastian was focusing a little too hard on their drafting project still. No answer.

She knew she was being kind of a brat, but couldn’t help herself.

“I should just call it off right now.”

Still no answer.

“Like today.”

She sighed loudly.

Sebastian finally glanced up from the giant sheet of paper he’d been leaning over.

“Oh, is it time for drama? Is it my turn? Noooo, Ash, you can’t. You and Armie-boy belong together. Like forevvvvver.”

Did no one have sympathy for her plight? Did no one understand that she was actually not going to be able to go to the prom this year—her senior year? She wouldn’t have prom pictures, she wouldn’t have the first dance, she wouldn’t have that magical night she’d be talking about for years to come with her own kids and grandkids. And most importantly, she wouldn’t have another chance with Armstrong.

“I don’t like you,” was all she could think of to say to Sebastian.

“You love me. Now, we need to do our assignment. What do you think? How many watchtowers, if any?”

“I don’t care.”

“Hey, you wanted the front of the school. You at least have to choose if you want a watchtower or not.”

“I want a moat.” Ash stuck out her lower lip. “And alligators. And that dress!”

Sebastian sighed. “Just have the tantrum and let me know when you’re done.”

Ash glared at him.

Sebastian ignored her and went back to sketching pointy roofs. He wrinkled his forehead and chomped down hard on the corner of his mouth as he worked expertly with the protractor. He looked cute today, in a dark blue University of Michigan T-shirt that clung well to his arms, a fact every girl, freshman through senior, had clearly noticed.

He was easily one of the cutest guys in the senior class. He knew it, but he also knew he was smart. He’d already gotten accepted into Michigan’s honors program and amazingly, was still invested in keeping his GPA a 4.0.

“You can fail and repeat senior year and have another shot at the prom.” Sebastian could tell she was not working without even looking up. “Get to work.”

The small, twelve-person drafting class had a joint assignment. Each team of two was to choose a section of Seattle Academy to redesign into whatever style they wanted. The second part of class would be to take the flat sketches, make them into 3-D models and actually build a miniature version of the school redesign. The redesign would be displayed in the front entryway of the school to show off their skills.

Other teams had predictably chosen the gym or the cafeteria, which would’ve been much easier. Ash had insisted on choosing the front of the school—saying it needed to look majestic and haunting all at once. Plus she wanted her work to be the thing people saw first when they looked at the miniature. So far, Sebastian had done all the actual drawing work, while Ash had tossed out opinions every once in a while when things looked off. She was the creative force. Every team needed one.

When Sebastian still didn’t respond to her threat of not going to the prom, Ash grabbed her pencil and within minutes had replicated the dress on the corner of their sheet of paper.

God, it was beautiful. She darkened the lines of the cutouts on the bodice. She didn’t care what her mother said, the bodice was beautiful and it had looked great on her.

“How goes it?” Mr. Watkins’s voice caused Ash to drop her pencil and let out a small scream. “Sorry, Ash, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Uh...” Ash tried to cover up her dress sketch with her arm. The drafting teacher was very young and pretty cute, and generally gave interesting assignments, but he was also very detention-happy. If anyone was caught texting, tweeting, on Facebook, taking selfies, thinking about taking selfies or generally doing anything else but the assignment, he immediately gave them weekend detention, which meant cleaning the garage for auto shop, which he also taught. She did not want detention.

“What’s this?” He turned the paper around to see what Ash had been working on.

“Oh. That.” Sebastian cut in before Ash could make up a lame excuse. “Ash and I were having a discussion. An argument, let’s say.”

Mr. Watkins’s eyebrows rose. “About some ugly dress?”

“It’s not ugly!” Ash’s mouth dropped open. “You guys are mean!”

Sebastian grinned. “I was attempting to prove to my lab partner here that there are so many similarities between classic drafting professions such as architecture and...fashion.”

“There are not.” Ash rolled her eyes, not playing along, as she assumed Seb would want her to.

“Actually...” Mr. Watkins tilted his head. “I’d like to hear what Sebastian has to say on this one.”

Ash looked to Sebastian. “Let’s hear the crazy.”

“Drawing flat sketches. Visualizing them in 3-D. Being able to put pieces together that fit and stay that way over a course of time. It’s architecture,” Seb insisted. “Look at the dress Ash is wearing for example.”

Both of them looked. Ash self-consciously smoothed down the puffy skirt of the navy cap-sleeve dress with tiny white bicycles printed all over it.

“The flat sketch of the sleeves—” Sebastian pulled the sleeve away from Ash’s arm “—would look something like this.” He quickly sketched a triangle. “But when it was modeled in 3-D, it would look more like this.” He made the triangle into a pyramid. “And the three pieces of fabric to make the sleeve would have to be sewed to make the pyramid. Fashion is an engineering problem.”

“Mr. Diaz, I’m impressed by your knowledge of both fashion and architecture.”

“Thank you.”

“Carry on, you two. But please save your debates for when you’re done with the assignment.” He walked away.

Ash breathed a sigh. No scrubbing oil off the floor of the garage this weekend!

“Thanks for the save. Though the excuse was such BS. I can’t believe he fell for that.” Ash picked up her pencil again and started to actually work on the watchtower of their castle entranceway.

“It wasn’t a save.” Seb was being serious. “Your dad has Project Runway on 24/7 in your house, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Ash gave him a so-what look. Her dad had become oddly obsessed with any show where people gave up everything to pursue their life’s dreams. She was pretty convinced he’d run off and audition for The Apprentice one of these days.

“I’ve been absorbing that show while I’m at your place. So much of it sounds like the stuff we learn in here.”

Sebastian had been building a website for his family’s church and had been working on it mostly out of Ash’s house so he could get Josh’s input on design. Apparently he’d been learning a thing or two, however wrong, about fashion, as well.

Ash leaned over and gave Sebastian a side-hug. “You’re cute when you’re wrong. But thanks anyway.”

“I’m not wrong!” Sebastian looked insulted.

“I love having a guy as a best friend, but seriously Seb. Fashion...definitely not the same as some boring old building!”

* * *

“Hey.” Ash tried to sound casual as she slipped into a seat behind Armstrong Jones in their Brit-lit class. Every time she got near him, she lost her nerve to say the fun, carefree line she’d come up with the night before. Every. Time.

“Cute dress. I like it with the Vans.”

She’d worried that checkered Vans with a printed dress was too much, but apparently not. Before Ash could thank him, he was off on a tirade. “Don’t you hate the reading list? God, it’s so mainstream. Do we really all need to read Emma or Wuthering Heights? Why can’t we find something a little more obscure... Something actually original? Like The Doctor’s Wife. Or East Lynne. Or at least some Kipling everyone hasn’t read a hundred times over. God.”

“I know!” Ash nodded along. She had no idea what he was talking about. She loved all the Jane Austen readings they’d done, but didn’t want to look overly mainstream.

Armstrong was unflappably awesome. She just loved the way he knew everything about literature. And even though she had no idea what he was talking about half the time, it had played to her advantage.

Ash had watched Armstrong from afar for years—commenting on the pieces he wrote for the school blog, sitting in the first row when he had the role of Jean Valjean in the previous year’s Les Misérables, admiring the fact that he made being a scholarship kid look cool. He relished being a thrift-store junkie and the fact that his parents were frequently unemployed.

Ash had found out Armstrong was taking Brit lit that semester and had immediately registered for the class. She had made sure to grab the seat behind him on the first day, knowing the teacher considered those seats permanent.

She had also gladly accepted Armstrong’s help when he’d offered to proofread her second paper on Jane Austen when the first one she’d written hadn’t gone over so well. Laila had had a fit when she’d seen Ash come home with a B. “An English paper? A ‘B’? You’re half British for heaven’s sake, you should be teaching the class!”

Ash had gotten an A on her second paper and despite this, had asked Armstrong to help proofread her third, as well. He didn’t have too many changes to suggest, but she’d effervescently attributed the A-plus, the highest grade in the class, to his help. He’d asked her to the prom shortly after.

“Want to go thrifting this weekend?” Armstrong asked without looking up from his phone, where his fingers worked furiously to live-tweet whatever was on his mind.

Ash burst into a smile. “Absolutely!” She cursed herself for sounding so pathetically pleased.

“I could use a suit for the prom. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Ash’s smile slowly faded. Here she was totally freaking out about what to wear and he hadn’t even thought about it?

“So...the prom after-party. What are you thinking?” Ash asked casually, hoping he would ask her what she wanted to do. The senior class was planning an all-night “lock-in” at the school with dance contests, food, music and movies. Her parents had already agreed to let her go given that it was chaperoned and didn’t cost anything extra. Ash was almost more excited about that than the prom.

“After-parties are so...I don’t know, cliché. Don’t you think? I mean the prom is such a cliché alone, right?” Armstrong turned back to face her. “I love that about you—you hate clichés.”

“Hate them,” Ash agreed, though she didn’t understand what was so cliché about the after-party. This was the first year the school was having it.

“I’m sure every other girl is probably fixating on her dress right now. Trying to find something ‘different’ while getting the exact same thing as her six best friends. I love that you’re not even stressed,” Armstrong continued.

Ash was relieved she hadn’t sent him the dress freak-out text she had almost hit Send on the night before.

“Why don’t we go to Belltown after the prom and get into an open mic? You got a fake?”

Ash blinked, not realizing what he meant for a second. A fake ID? No, she didn’t have one. Where was she going to get one?

Great, one more thing to worry about. She had no dress. She had no fake ID.

“Sure, I have one. I mean, who doesn’t, right?” Ash smiled weakly. She’d just only gotten her real ID a few months ago.

“You’d be surprised. I gotta finish this blog. Text me later?” With that, and without waiting for a response, Armstrong turned around.

I guess we’re done. She still hadn’t gotten to deliver her fun, carefree line of the day. She’d gotten so light-headed being around him, she’d forgotten it anyhow.

Four

“What’s that?”

Sebastian and Ash were spending the afternoon at Ash’s house, each in their usual position around the kitchen table. Today, they were doing the work they hadn’t finished in class. Both of them were rocking out to the music coming from the garage.

Josh Montague’s band was playing a new song Josh had written the night before, he on drums, his former coworker on lead guitar, vocals and bass by their next-door neighbor. The only thing missing was Ash’s role, keyboardist. She’d promised to join practice once she was done with her homework.

“What?” Ash looked up from the diagram of the moat she was surreptitiously adding to the front of the school. She knew as soon as Sebastian saw it, he wouldn’t let her have any more suggestions in the project. “Be influenced by medieval times—don’t be literal!” he’d already chided.

“That outfit.” Sebastian was looking at Laila’s lehenga, which was still hanging on the coatrack. “Is that yours?”

“Oh. That. You haven’t heard?” Ash filled him in on Laila’s master plan of Ash wearing the lehenga to the prom. Sebastian always knew the latest happenings in the Montague household through his mother, sometimes before Ash had a chance to tell him.

Laila and Sebastian’s mother, Constance, had been close friends since the Montagues had moved in across the street in the multicultural First Hill neighborhood. Constance had a babysitting business that she ran out of her home, and had watched both Ash and Sonali till they were old enough to stay home alone. Sebastian and Ash had grown up in each other’s homes. Seb had no siblings and loved the constant chaos in the Montague household.

Sebastian shrugged. “I think it’s nice of your mother to offer. You don’t have too many other options.”

“Can you not be my mom’s fanboy for five seconds, please?” Ash was getting annoyed with Sebastian’s taking Laila’s side. He was supposed to be her best friend and support her despite his obvious and loyal admiration for Laila.

“I’m just saying.”

“Just agree with me. That’s your job as a best friend. And besides...” Ash was distracted by what she was seeing out of the kitchen window.

Sonali was cutting through the neighbor’s yard, climbing over bushes and under hedges. Was she practicing to join the marines or something? Why wasn’t she walking from the bus stop to home via the normal route of the sidewalk like all the other kids?

Ash rose from the table and went over to the window to see if there was someone on the side of the house she was avoiding.

No one.

Ash would bet anything this had something to do with whatever had caused the bird’s nest in Sona’s hair.

“I just don’t think fighting with your mom over something as silly as a dress is worth it,” Sebastian was saying. “Especially not since you’re just trying to impress Armstrong. Do you really want to end up as the star of one of his podcasts that badly?”

Ash resented that remark.

“I’m not just trying to impress Armstrong.”

“Then why were you not obsessed with going until he asked you?” Sebastian didn’t look up from his sketch. “And you weren’t stalking some expensive dress, either.”

“Well, no one else asked me! He asked. I said ‘yes.’ What’s wrong with that?” Ash clearly remembered texting Sebastian when Armstrong had finally asked her. He hadn’t been as overjoyed as she’d expected.

“You never gave anyone the chance! It was always, ‘I hope Armstrong asks me to the prom... Why hasn’t he asked me yet... I hope he asks me out in his blog. Or like on Twitter. Twitter’s so cool.’” He mimicked a voice that sounded nothing like her and more like Cartman from South Park.

“First, I do not sound like that.”

Seb smirked.

“Second, it’s not like there was a line of guys waiting to ask me.”

“What if someone else had asked you? Someone nice. Would you have been this obsessed?”

“Like?” Ash raised an eyebrow. This was going to be good.

“Like...someone else. Say, Dave.”

“Who the hell’s Dave?”

“My friend Dave! The only Dave we know.”

Ash furrowed her brow. “That guy you play Monster Race Cars with or whatever? Dave was going to ask me?”

Sebastian did an eye-roll. “Portal is not Monster Race Cars. He’s one of my partners in app development—we don’t just sit around playing games all day.”

“Who’s doing app development? Hi, Seb.” Ash’s father came into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk during the band’s break. Sonali snuck in behind him and before Ash could say anything, sprinted up the stairs. That girl was acting weirder than usual, and her hair was still a mess. Ash made up her mind to figure out what was going on.

“Hey, Mr. M. I am. With two of my buddies for our AP Computer Science class. We already have BlueDog Studios interested in buying our first app!”

“Their IPO was amazing last year. That’s huge, Seb. What’s the concept?” Josh Montague sat down at the table and passed a glass of iced tea each to Ash and Sebastian.

“Thank you. Our app insta-catagorizes all the pictures you take with your cell phone. Like, Ash has taken 15,000 pictures of that dress.” Sebastian pointed at the sketch she’d drawn in class. “Our app tags them all something like ‘Orange_Dress’...”

“You mean ‘The Dreamsicle,’” Ash interrupted.

Sebastian gave her an eye roll. “...so that she can search for that tag and find all of them in her Camera Roll rather than having to scroll through the year’s worth of pictures she has on it.”

“Now I remember us talking about this.” Josh looked impressed. “Every company’s asking for great apps and app development experience. I just submitted a multilayered tic-tac-toe game to the Windows Phone store. Sonali did the graphics for me.”