The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [61]
During what was, in essence, Bean’s senior year—though nobody bothered with such formality, we just said we went to Coop and that was enough—she decided we needed to have a prom. She took the idea to what served as the board, who, as always, encouraged her to do it, but in the traditional Coop spirit. Which meant, of course, that the prom would include everyone, from wee babe to angsty adolescent.
We worked for months under Bean’s direction to make it happen. (Well, Rose had started college by then, and was doing her level best to pretend not to know us, as Bean was already making noise at some of the keg parties on campus, and Cordy was liable to be found wandering around the college’s black box theater, clad in something strange like pink leg warmers and combat boots, so Rose wasn’t too interested in helping, but the rest of us were all in.) While the kids at the high school a few towns over danced in a gymnasium, high heels clicking over the basketball court, abandoned tables along the foul lines and a weary cover band imported from Columbus to play “Stairway to Heaven,” we had our own celebration.
It turned out more like a low-budget family wedding. We held it in Coop’s backyard, a ceiling of stars created with criss-crossing Christmas lights tied to the cottonwoods and red maples, a faux parquet dance floor crushing the patchy grass beneath. The Christian brothers acted as DJs, shuffling carefully cued tapes and records with surprising mastery, and punching each other good-naturedly when boredom set in.
On the wide porch, the elementary school-aged children, ostensibly in charge of refreshments, scrambled back and forth (more often over one another than around, more often dismantling than helping). A few of them—Carrie Obertz, clad in a lemon-yellow pile of chiffon she had once worn as a flower girl dress, adding to the general nuptial air of the proceedings; Michael Taylor, who discarded his clip-on tie, leaving it dangling over the edge of the punch bowl, adding a dapper and unique touch to Professor Shapiro’s crystal; and Hannah and Henry Holtz, who now run the best, albeit only, chocolatier in Barnwell—were of actual use, until, around nine o’clock, they collapsed into small, fluffy heaps on the patio furniture like tiny wilted flowers.
Coop being the kind of place it was, Barnwell being the kind of place it was, and the student body consisting of the children of disaffected, geeky ex-hippies, most of the twelve- to eighteen-year-olds didn’t come in traditional prom style. Cordy arrived in our mother’s wedding dress (an oh-so-sixties Empire-waisted minidress of a disturbingly quilt-like fabric), and danced with every available man, including Dr. Ambrose, a Cretaceous relic in the mathematics department, and Henry Holtz, whose head came approximately to Cordy’s hip, but who presented her with a lovely hydrangea blossom that she tucked into her bra strap, leaving a trail of impossibly blue petals wherever she walked for the rest of the evening. Her best friend Lyssie came in a pair with Benjamin Marcus, she in a Heidi-esque dirndl, he in a saggy pair of lederhosen, but they redeemed their shall-we-say-unorthodox attire by spending the entire evening together in a slow, sweet clinch in one corner of the dance floor, no matter the tempo of the Christian brothers’ selections.
Bean was really the only one who wouldn’t have seemed out of place at an actual prom. Her dress, which would have looked ridiculous on anybody but her, was silver lamé with a sweetheart neckline and a wide, flouncing skirt straight out of Tara, if Scarlett O’Hara had been partial to silver lamé. Her date, one Nick Marchese, wore a stiff, rented tuxedo with a silver lamé bow tie and cummerbund. They would have made Seventeen proud.
Even Rose came by, standing on the corner halfway