Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Forty-Four: The Way You Are

Well, needless to say, my mom was right—she wouldn’t let me down. She dragged me up the stairs to her room and squealed for a straight minute before she threw open the doors to her closet, revealing the perfect dress with a ticket to the dance hooked onto the hanger. I stared at it for a straight minute before I slowly looked back at her, uncomprehending, and she just grinned at me and said, “Told you so.”

So that’s how we ended up here—sitting in my mother’s master bathroom that was the size of my entire room, all of my mother’s makeup spilled onto the counter, and I was being poked with a dozen bobby pins, all at once. My mother had them sticking out of her mouth, her hair thrown up in a crooked bun on the top of her head. She was looking down at me like she was a mad scientist and I was the unfortunate rat that she happened to pick for this painful experiment. I was facing away from the mirror, unable to see what my hair looked like, but I had a feeling that it was crooked, crazy, and awesome.

“I’m in a little bit of a rush,” my mother told me unnecessarily through a mouthful of bobby pins, “but I think we’re going to make it in time that you’ll only be an hour late. You just won’t have much time to eat.”

“I’m hungry,” I immediately complained. It was kind of like a reflex—someone says I can’t eat and my tummy starts rumbling. She rolled her eyes at me and continued to wrestle with my hair, not taking her eyes off of it.

“After I put on your makeup, I’ll go downstairs and get you a cream cheese Danish or something,” she told me. “Just as long as you don’t mess up your lipstick.”

“Am I even going to be on time?” I asked her anxiously, fidgeting. “It feels like it took Norma and Kline a million years to get ready.”

She shrugged noncommittally and I made a face. That wasn’t very reassuring.

I drummed on my knees for a couple of minutes before the boredom kicked in once again.

“What made you plan this?” I demanded, trying to look back at her, but she forced my chin down again as she worked. She stuck another pin into my hair and took her time answering, thinking about it first.

“I had a feeling that you wouldn’t want to go a month or so ago, when you started dressing averagely again,” she told me, and I noticed something—people didn’t say I was dressing normal; they said I was dressing averagely. “When you normally make changes like that, you usually chose not to do anything that’s social or fun. I just know you, what can I say. I was shopping one day and I saw the dress and I thought that you would love it, so I bought it. I figured that if you didn’t like it, then I would take it back, and if you don’t want to go this year then you could wear it your senior year.” She shrugged. “It just all kind of happened, I don’t know.”

“What about the ticket, though?” I asked her, frowning. “Did you go to school and buy it or something?”

She smiled a little and said, “That one wasn’t me—that was a certain hunky boy next door.”

It took a couple of seconds, but eventually that piece of information sunk in, and I stared up at her dumbly. “What?” I finally managed. “Quinton got me a ticket?”