Prom and Prejudice Read Online Free Page A

simultaneously crowding in on me and spinning away across the room. I wish I could run, and this desire reaches critical mass when my mom says, “I remember my senior prom,” and laughs. Luckily she doesn’t point out that her socially challenged daughter—that would be me—will no doubt be home on prom night. If she had, I would have burst into tears. Or flames.
    Because it’s all over. Again. Before it began. Again.
    Now it’s really too late.
    I don’t say much after that and neither does Michael, and when we walk back to our hotel, I’m a little ahead of everyone and don’t look directly at Michael when we say goodnight in the lobby. Oblivious as always, as we ride the elevator and open up our room, Mom chatters about how lovely Dr. Endicott is and how fine Michael seems and she doesn’t stop talking as she flops herself on her bed in a way that reminds me of Cassie.
    “That was fun!” she declares with the emphasis of someone planting a flag and staking a claim for queen and country. “I can’t bel ieve I thought about my senior prom for the first time in—what—twenty-five years?” She groans then at the sound of the number. “I wonder if Leigh will go with Alistair. I’m sure Cassie will have someone, too...”
    “I’m sure to be the only disappointment,” I sigh.
    “You’re not a disappointment, Georgie, you know that.” She lies with her arms behind her head, blinking at the ceiling, and her eyes seem very blue against the stark white backdrop of the pillowcase. I can see, in her unlined cheeks and those eyes and her still-gold curls, how absolutely gorgeous my mom must have been when she met my dad. He’d never stood a chance. “You’re just...different.”
    “Different from my sisters?”
    “No, different from me. I don’t always know what to do or to say with you.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’re probably like your dad was at your age. Of course, I didn’t know him in high school. And if I did, I probably would not have paid him a lot of attention.” She comes closer to a giggle at this than a middle-aged woman should. Kicking off her shoes, she turns to me, propping her head up on her hand, smoothing out the bedspread with her other ringed hand. “But when I met him in college, my senior year...I had an instant crush on him.”
    “Really?” I find this hard to imagine. And, frankly, the ideas of both (1) my parents hooking up and (2) a student and a teaching assistant hooking up seem pretty gross to me. Potentially distracting, but gross.
    “He was so smart, and so funny, and so passionate about what he was teaching. As a TA he mostly just read exams for the instructor and kept office hours, which I went to even if I didn’t need to.” She smiles then, lazily, and closes her eyes for a moment. “Your dad had so many ideas . He wasn’t like anyone else I had ever met.”
    “Aren’t there—I don’t know—rules about students and teachers...?” I venture before she gets carried away.
    “We didn’t start dating until the course was over. And I asked him out, because it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to.” It’s not hard to imagine Dad’s inability to act.
    I ask, “Did you have to ask him to marry you, too?”
    “No. He did that. Because of Tori.”
    I blink at her for a few seconds, wondering what Tori could possibly have had to do with anything, while my mom looks freakishly impish at the moment. I finally put it all together and gasp, “You mean you got married because you were pregnant?”
    “We would have gotten married anyway, but, yes.”
    “Wow. But why ? I mean, you didn’t have to get married, or be married, to have a baby back then. It’s not like it was the 1950s or something.”
    “Because we wanted to, and the medical insurance stuff and legal stuff was all easier if we were married.” She sits up and looks at me fish-eyed for a moment. “Do you mean we shouldn’t have had the baby?”
    “I don’t know. You were pretty young, and it seems