Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

I spent the day with Eli, picking up our tuxes (black for me, white – to hide any rogue flakes of dandruff – for Eli), helping him get dressed, even combing his hair for him. His mother stood behind us in the hallway of their trailer, which I'd never been in before, and which smelled like the clothes of old people.

"Your hair's sticking up on the sides," his mother said.

"It's supposed to do that," Eli said. "It's called feathering.

"It's called sticking up. Those pants are too tight."

"They're supposed to be tight," he said.

"Where are your glasses?"

"I'm wearing contacts."

"Oh, God. Now you're putting shards of glass in your eyes. And your chest and arms are so bloated. Is that from drugs?"

"They're muscles, Mom. From lifting weights."

"Well, it's not healthy. It's bad for your circulation."

I clipped his bow tie and straightened it and helped him into his jacket. I splashed Aqua Velva on his cheeks.

"You smell like a sailor," his mom said.

When he was dressed, she leaned on the back of a chair in their tiny kitchen – there was only room for the two chairs – and took his picture.

"My God, Eli," she said. "You're beautiful. I wish your father…" She turned away and started crying.

I drove. Eli and I picked up Susan, who looked a little too professional, and who didn't talk all the way to Dana's house, maybe for fear of cracking her makeup. At Dana's house, her parents didn't come out onto the porch this time. Eli went to the door and came back with Dana, who wore a silver dress with a deep neckline. She had a wrap pulled around her shoulders and when she shivered a little in the cold, on the way to the car, Eli offered her his coat. She took it and I sighed with relief. Her hair was swooped up on her head and spilled out on her forehead. She looked perfect, like an old movie actress. Susan hadn't been eager to double-date with two people so far removed from her social stratum, and when Dana walked out to my parents' Dodge Colt looking beautiful – and not in my date's makeup and hairspray way – Eli's coat around her shoulders, Susan mumbled something with the word "asshole" in it.

We had dinner at the Mr. Steak at the end of the mall, and at first, I have to admit, I worried about Eli's ability to pull this whole thing off. He sat next to me and echoed my every move, taking off his jacket and unfolding his napkin as I did, shooting glances at me every few seconds to pick up his next cue. He ordered the same food and drink that I did and looked at me for approval every time he spoke, which, in the first twenty minutes, was actually seemed to loosen up and even told a few good jokes at his own expense about grade school ("You probably don't remember me. I was sort of stuck up. Dana, he was polite and stood when she excused herself to go to the bathroom.

By the time our food came, Dana seemed to be having a decent time – at least in comparison to my arctic date, who chewed her thumbnail and stared off into space as we began talking about college. I was looking at state universities. Eli couldn't afford a university, and his grades weren't high enough for a scholarship. He was going to start at community college, he said, build his grades up, and then hopefully transfer to a four-year school.

When Dana admitted she was going to Stanford, Eli's fork fell to his plate. "Wow!" he said. "Stanford. Are you sure?"

Dana smiled at her sirloin. "I'm sure."

Susan excused herself to go to the bathroom.

"Aren't you nervous?" Eli asked.

Dana looked up at him, surprised. "You know, I don't think anyone has asked me that. They just keep telling me how great it is."

"It is great, but that's the first thing that popped into my head," Eli said. "I'd be scared to death. Everyone there must be so smart. And it's so far away."

"She'll do fine," I said, and waved a little plastic cup at the waiter so he'd bring me more sour cream for my baked potato.

Eli leaned back in his chair. "I just keep thinking college is going to be just like high school, but twenty-four hours a day. No escape."

"I don't know," said Dana. "I guess I've been assuming that's when life really gets going. In college."

"Really?" Eli asked. "You think so?"

"God, I hope so," said Dana. "If it doesn't…" She didn't finish.

There was a moment of quiet, and Eli took a deep breath. "I lied," he said to his plate. "My mom inherited some money that she put away for my college. I could probably afford a four-year school, at least in state. It just sounds so scary to me, I figured I should go to community college first. I'm a chicken."

"It's perfectly understandable," Dana said.

Eli laughed a little. "No, it's not," he said. He pounded his fork down into his ribeye and was about to cut it when he stood up, lifted his fork and his steak to his heart, and addressed Dana formally. "I pledge at this very moment, on this cut of meat, to take my two-point-five grade point average and enroll at Harvard."

Eli sat down and rubbed at the steak stain on his white tux as Susan returned from the bathroom, saw that she'd missed something funny, and glared at me. She mouthed that thing with the word "asshole" in it again and then sat down to finish her flank steak.

It's funny. I saw a basketball game on ESPN Classic the other day, a game I'd first seen in 1979, the NCAA championship game between Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores and Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans. At first I was startled to have come across so important a relic of my teenage years, then I was giddy to watch my memories roll across the TV screen, then I was disappointed to see what a flat version it was compared to my mental picture of the game (the players were too slow; the game was a blowout; Bird and Magic rarely guarded each other). I had taken a very ordinary game and made it a seminal moment in basketball and my own development.

And perhaps my sweet memory of the rest of the prom, of Eli's near-total transformation, is a similar trick of mental editing and mythmaking. Because it certainly wasn't perfect. For instance, we hadn't had time for dance lessons, and so Eli's dancing during fast songs resembled nothing so much as a dog trying to escape a leash. The Mr. Steak stain on his tuxedo was quickly joined by punch on his shirt and a slice of cake in his lap and two unidentifiable stains that may have come from Eli himself. He head-butted Dana at one point and nearly chipped her tooth, and his hair eventually lost its feather and fell straight on his head; he looked like a pimply, red-haired Ringo Starr.

But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise sparkling evening. From the moment he and Dana strode in ("Who is kind of box step; while the rest of us just leaned over and hung on our dates' asses, Eli and Dana actually danced) to his anticipating when to pull out her chair, when to get her punch, when to get her wrap, Eli was a gentleman, almost smooth, and I know that I am not imagining this part: more than a few girls found ways to cast looks over at the two of them. I can't say he and Dana clicked, really, but they seemed to have a fine time and I watched as Eli relaxed and began enjoying himself.

It was even his idea, after our regular dance pictures, to have one more taken, together, the four of us. Of course I see now the significance of this moment, not just for Eli, but for Dana and me and even Susan – for whom this was the penultimate indignity, the next-to-last straw, having to be photographed with the likes of Eli Boyle while our classmates stood in a queue. In the photo, Eli and I are standing behind our dates in the photographer's sea-foam grotto, lost in our tuxes, at the last minute our arms thrown over each other's shoulders and our heads dipped in, like war buddies about to ship, our dates standing at an angle in front of us, a cool distance between them, Dana smiling politely, Susan chewing glass. If you saw the picture, you would notice first this wide range of smiles: Dana polite and quite nearly believable, Susan snarling, me wary, and Eli positively buoyant standing next to me. I have a theory about pictures like that; they actually reveal more as time passes, and as the colors fade and the styles die, other things emerge, connections and motivations, and maybe even futures.