❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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shoutout to northwards in coming third for the Teen Helpline one-shot! Thanks so much for participating! :) Enjoy!
Chapter 38
Prom And Other Dates
Jem
"I don't understand why you're so invested in perfecting everything for Prom," I commented as Ellis dragged me on a Friday afternoon to shop for supplies at the local costume shop to decorate the school's gym in a fruitless endeavour to decorate a place where we performed our coerced marathon laps and sweat into something charming and elegant. If she could get rid of the stinky, sweaty gym socks rubbing on hard wood floor smell out first. But who knows? Maybe Ellis would be able to pull it off. "
It's just one night or a dance that's gonna last for, like, three hours."
"It's our senior prom," argued Ellis vigorously as she picked up a fur-embedded fedora and contemplated about putting it into the fire truck engine red basket of useless items she was going to buy. Already, the basket was overwhelmed with fluorescent orange tinsels, bloody posters of dead 1950s movie stars, black, Halloween accents- fake fur bats, pointy chiffon witch's hats, stringy spider webs spurned from yarn and cotton and sticky edible blood paint to smear and coat the walls in. "It has to be special."
"Why does everything has to be special?"
"Because," Ellis justified irritatedly, her tone was harboring on the statement that this whole conversation was pointless and she had already won this argument. "It's senior year. It's going to be our last prom as high-schoolers. It's a special, meaningful night."
"Oh God," I grumbled, grimacing- not just at the god-awful sparkly fur cape she pulled out from the weird section of the store, which looked as though the 1970s threw up all over it- but at her previous comment, because Ellis didn't strike me as a person who genuinely enjoyed high school (because, honestly, who does?). "Don't tell me you're one of those people who think a high school prom is a quintessential event that needs to be remembered. What happened to the girl who was like: high school is just a rest stop that I want to get over quickly and head straight to receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard?"
Ellis glowered at me and puffed up her lips disappointedly like she was about to rant, as she actually did seemed to like the rather queer sparkling fur cape as a suitable decor, not a vomit bag. She rubbed the sandpaper-like material, folded it and scrunching it up- much to the distaste of the goth girl at the counter, who had been squinting at us for the past fifteen minutes with an unacquainted hatred that exceeded normal standards-and plopped it into her basket. "What happens to the boy who's all like 'live in the moment'?"
"Yeah, but not for Prom. God, it's all just marketing scheme to get you to rent dresses, shop at places like these for decorations, ask your boyfriend to buy corsages and rent limos- it's a total gimmick to keep the commercial cycle going."
