Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

I was officially the last man standing.

“I’ll go with you,” said a quiet voice.

I turned around to see Robbie’s ex-girlfriend, Vanessa, who sat behind me. Robbie had broken up with her a few months back because, as he said, “I think each of us thought the other one was dumb.” Her offer seemed a little strange to me, and maybe she wasn’t Nicole, but she was cute and Robbie had always said, “She gets crazy.” In light of her offer, I entertained a brief fantasy in which “getting crazy” involved drinking, dancing, boob touching, and maybe even virginity taking. I smiled at Vanessa and said I’d need to talk with Robbie but would love to go to prom with her.

As we were walking to baseball practice after school, I asked Robbie if he was okay with me taking his ex.

“You can do her in the butt for all I care. I’m totally fine with it,” he said.

And so I accepted Vanessa’s gracious offer the next day in class.

“I just don’t want to go in a limo with Robbie and your friends,” she said, picking at the eraser on her pencil. “It has nothing to do with Robbie, though. You can tell him that,” she added.

I was disappointed that I couldn’t ride to prom with all my buddies and their dates, but I was going with a cute girl and optimistic that it still might be the best night of my life.

The following Friday evening, I drove the two miles to Vanessa’s house and picked her up in my mom’s 1992 Oldsmobile Achieva. I was wide-eyed with excitement. And also really sweaty, to the point that I pulled the car over right before I got to her house, unbuttoned my shirt, and toweled off my armpits with an old T-shirt. Vanessa looked fantastic. She was wearing smoky black eyeliner, and her hair looked like a thousand golden curly fries. I was wearing a black and white tuxedo I’d rented from the mall; it was two sizes too big, but I chose it because the teenage salesman told me I looked “like a straight-up pimp with a degree in pimping” when I tried it on. My dad thought I looked like “a penguin with AIDS.”

Before we took off, Vanessa’s mom asked to take a picture. “Put your arm around her,” she barked from behind her camera while the two of us posed awkwardly in their driveway. My palms were sweating from excitement, and when I removed my arm from around Vanessa’s shoulder, I saw a dark spot on her dress where my hand had been.

On the ride to the prom Vanessa was strangely silent. I fiddled with the A.C. for a while and then finally tried to break the ice.

“Everything okay?” I asked cheerfully.

“What did Robbie say when you told him you were going to prom with me?” she asked.

“He said he was fine with it,” I responded tentatively.

“That’s it? He said he was fine with it?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say exactly?” she asked again, the muscles in her jaws clenching.

I recalled the butt-sex comment and gulped. “That was the only thing he said. That he was fine with it,” I repeated.

“All he said was ‘I’m fine with it?’ He must have said something else.”

“That’s it. That’s all he said. I swear.”

“FUCK HIM! He’s fine with it? He’s not fine with it! He’s a fucking lying piece of shit!”

We sat quietly in the car as she stared out the window looking like a convict being hauled off to prison. When we arrived at the glass-walled downtown San Diego hotel where our prom was being held, I parked my mom’s car in the underground lot and reached under the seat to grab the bottle of peppermint Schnapps I’d bribed a homeless man to buy for me earlier that day. I offered Vanessa the first drink and she grabbed the handle and pounded it like she was trying to forget a memory from the Vietnam War. We traded swigs in complete silence for the next five minutes until I couldn’t feel my face. Then I tucked the near-empty bottle back under my seat and we got out and started walking toward the elevator.

As the Schnapps started kicking in, I began feeling a little confrontational.

“You didn’t really want to go with me, huh?”

Vanessa turned to me with a look of disbelief.

“Are you a retard? My ex-boyfriend is in there with some other girl,” she said, starting to cry. “I need to sit down or I’m gonna puke,” she added.

We wobbled across the dirty red carpet through the hotel lobby, decorated with tacky brass lamps, green polyester chairs, and a few women I assumed were prostitutes. As we walked past them, one raised her hand to her nostril, covered it with her thumb, and blew a snot rocket onto the ground by her feet.

We pushed through two double doors at the far end of the lobby and entered a huge dark ballroom that contained three hundred or so of our classmates swaying to the chorus of “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men. Our class had voted for a Rastafarian prom theme, so the room was strewn with pictures of Bob Marley and stickers that said “One Love,” most of which had been defaced so that “one” was crossed out and “Butt” was written in its place.

Vanessa and I sat on the opposite side of the room from the dance floor, near a spread of stale chips and crackers, curdled dips, and cheese cubes from Safeway. That was where we remained for the rest of the night, mostly in silence, watching our classmates laughing, dancing, and chatting it up while Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” and “Return of the Mack” played on continuous loop. The scowl on Vanessa’s face made sure none of my friends came near us, which, I’m pretty sure, was her goal. Nicole passed us a few times on the way to the bathroom, and though I wanted to say something to her, all I could muster was a smile. The dream of a dancing, boob-touching, bully-punching, virginity-losing prom was now dead, and there was no other way to spin it. I was disappointed and felt stupid for letting myself get so excited about one dumb night and for thinking it might be any different than the rest of high school. I slumped down in my chair and shoved a handful of nacho cheese Doritos into my mouth.

By the time the DJ announced the next song would be the last, most people had been sweating through their tuxedos and dresses for hours, and the whole place smelled like a bathroom stall in a public library. As Dave Matthews’s “Crash” began to play, all my classmates grabbed their partners and made their way to the dance floor—but one look from Vanessa told me I should follow her to the nearest exit and take her home.

“I’m drunk,” she hiccupped after a few minutes of driving in silence. “I’m sorry I called you a retard. I hope I didn’t ruin your night,” she added. When we arrived at her house, she got out of my mom’s car and walked up her steps without looking back.

As I sat there in the car watching her front door close behind her, I took a deep breath. It was ten p.m. and my senior prom was the exact opposite of everything I’d hoped. Even in the worst-case scenarios I’d dreamt up, it had all gone wrong because I’d punched out somebody I hated and gotten dragged away by the cops. This was a total letdown.

I couldn’t let the night end this way. I decided to turn my car around and head back toward the San Diego harbor, where the school-sanctioned, casino-themed after-party was being held at a restaurant called the Bali Hai.

When I got there, my sophomore history teacher, Mr. Bartess, was standing at the door with a clipboard. He glanced at me, scanned the clipboard, and shook his head.

“I have you marked as being here already. I’m sorry, no ins and outs. It says so on your ticket. We can’t have people leaving to go do cocaine or something and then coming back in here, on cocaine,” he said.

“But I haven’t been here. And I don’t do cocaine.”