It’s approaching prom season, which means something totally different where I live now than where I grew up. I don’t know if I’ve really been made aware of proms in the last thirteen years I’ve lived here, except for seeing the occasional limo in the East Village screeching down 2nd Avenue, teen girls popped up through the sunroof waving hello to no one in particular. Later they will do something they regret, even if it’s just spilling something on their dress. It’s usually much worse than that. And then the next day they will wake up with a hangover. If I could say one thing to them it would be: college is much worse for the hangovers.
I didn’t go to my own prom. My date, who went to high school in Evanston, which is about thirty minutes away from where I lived, broke his leg, or re-broke his leg, or something, the week before prom. He was just a friend, so while I felt sad for him and his leg (although I feel like the leg thing might have been an ongoing problem, or even possibly exaggerated), I wasn’t heartbroken so much as humiliated that I wasn’t going to prom. This was it. This was how it was all coming to an end. A guy that no one had ever met before broke his leg – he could have lived in Canada, for all anyone knew, that’s how made up the whole thing sounded – and now I was missing the prom.
My best friend – a very sweet girl, with a good brain – asked me to come see her off, and so I did. For a long time I had a picture of her and her date in a backyard somewhere. She looks lovely, freckled, and really skinny. I believe she’s in pink. Her date lived in another town, too, but had somehow managed to not break or reinjure a leg (or manufacture a leg injury at the last minute), and had showed up and stood next to her and smiled for this picture, which I kept with me until I lost it in one of my many moves, probably somewhere between my senior year of college and spending the summer smoking a ton of weed in Northern Virginia while hostessing at a chain restaurant in a mall.
I smiled my way through it all, wanting to die every second of it. I somehow managed to make it to my car without breaking character as the supportive friend. (It was a supporting role, yes, but in my mind I was the lead in this story.) I got into my car, pulled out of the cul-de-sac (yes, I said sac), and made it all the way to Old Arlington Heights Road before I started to cry. I’m pretty sure I might have been sobbing. I pulled up at the stoplight and when I looked around, still crying, I realized every car around me was filled with people going to the prom. And they could all see me alone, on prom night, in my car, crying.
There are a lot of important lessons I learned that night. “Always bring sunglasses to a depressing situation” hovers close to the top of that list. But perhaps the most important one is that I should never ever have gone to see my friend off to the prom. Why did I feel obligated to go and tell her how pretty she looked? Did she really need me to tell her to have a good time? Why did I put myself into a situation that was going to make me feel bad? Say what you will about technology ruining our lives, but if that story happened today she could have sent me a picture of herself on her phone, and I could have texted her back that she looked great, just great! Have a great time! And then I could have sat in my basement with sixteen different varieties of potato chips and cried all by myself, alone as I should have been, occasionally sucking on a salted fingertip.
I have definitely made it a life goal to only put myself into situations where I can succeed. Sometimes you can’t, but you would be surprised by how much control you have over your own destiny.
I don’t talk to that girl anymore although I do use her name as the answer to a password reminder question for some random savings account. (What was the name of your best friend from high school?) We lost touch a decade ago, and I don’t even know her married name so I can’t look her up on the internet. I don’t think she’s on Facebook, so there’s no chance of looking at pictures of her children doing something hilarious in a costume.
Her family was always really nice to me, but I think it was partially because they were fascinated with me. (Jew.) I can’t even remember much of anything else between us anymore, or even why we were best friends. I just remember being trapped at a stoplight with tears streaming down my face. A metaphor for something, I’m sure.
