How They Met, and Other Stories(25)
Author: David Levithan

Two days before I was supposed to meet him, my mother appeared in my doorway with a garment bag. Since my parents had an open-door policy regarding my room—it was only closed when I was asleep—she didn’t knock or even clear her voice to let me know she was there. She just stood in the doorway for a minute until I looked up from my homework and saw her.

“I have something for you to wear,” she said.

I can’t think of another time that my mother went out and bought me clothes. No, it was important to her to drag me along whenever my clothing was purchased, so she could show me the correct way to shop for and purchase it. It wasn’t fashion she was after, but education. Even at that moment, she couldn’t hand the garment bag over and let me open it as if it were a gift. No, instead she unzipped it herself, pulling out an astonishing blue dress and holding it out in front of me without a word of presentation.

It looked like an ocean—it was that kind of blue. And although the neckline was bordering on a turtle’s, it was sleeveless—something I couldn’t have imagined my mother buying for me before. It was a party dress, a fancy dress. My first thought was that my father had won some kind of award, and that there was going to be a dinner in his honor. I in no way related it to my upcoming encounter with Mr. Chang’s Son until my mother said, “I am sure Andrew will like it.”

“What kind of date is this?” I asked her.

She smiled knowingly. “A special one.”

I was going to protest, but here’s the thing: I really liked the dress. So I kept my mouth shut. I figured I’d already said I was going. I might as well get a dress out of it. And this dress wasn’t cheap.

Later that night my brother came into my room and saw it hanging from the top of my closet door.

“I can’t believe you’re letting them arrange your marriage,” he said.

“Don’t you have business school applications to fill out?” I replied.

He looked at me for a moment like I was the stupidest girl in the world, then said, “Have it your way.”

What I wouldn’t admit to him—what I would’ve never admitted to my parents—was that there was a small part of me that actually wanted it to work out. I was already burning out on high school dating, on making poorly educated guesses and committing myself to other people’s commitment issues. Perhaps, I figured, this was the way to do it: no anxiety, no flirting, no friends involved, no falling. Just a simple agreement. It didn’t even occur to me to call or IM or e-mail Andrew Chang and communicate with him before our date. It didn’t even occur to me to ask my parents more about him. I was playing by a certain set of rules, and I obeyed because the rules didn’t ask me to do anything. I simply had to wait. And then, when the day came, I had to make it work.

My mother told me to come straight home after school on Friday. The minute I walked through the door, she pointed me to the shower. When I got out, towel-wrapped and a little tired, she did something she hadn’t done in ages. She sat me down at her makeup mirror and she brushed out my hair. It hurt—there were knots in there that had been tangled for semesters. But she was persistent, and before I knew it the brush was running smoothly through my hair.

At the end, my mother put down the brush, looked at my reflection in the mirror, and said, satisfied, “There.”

I put on the dress. It made me feel grown up, like my own older sister.

As I was finishing up, I heard the garage door open. I figured it was my brother, but instead my father came up from the basement. I heard him ask my mother, “Is she ready?” I did not hear my mother’s reply.

I figured Mr. Chang’s Son was taking me to a nice restaurant, trying to impress my parents. And I figured my mother had gone a little overboard dressing me up, trying to impress his parents. But when Andrew Chang arrived at five-thirty in a limousine, I started to think that maybe things were going a little too far.

“What does Mr. Chang do?” I asked my mother after peeking out the window at the black stretch Cadillac. “Is that his car?”

The back door opened and nobody got out. I suddenly imagined a three-hundred-pound boy in the backseat, waiting for me. About thirty seconds passed before Andrew Chang realized he had to come out and get me. He emerged from the back door wearing a tuxedo, looking much cuter than I had any right to expect. He got to our front door and rang the doorbell.

My mother went to get it, me trailing behind. My father took out his camera.

I think my mother expected me to wait in the living room, because she seemed surprised to see me in the foyer when she ushered Andrew Chang inside.

“Here she is,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Andrew Chang replied. “Should we go?”

He was a little taller than I was, but not by much. He looked handsome, but I couldn’t tell whether that was all the tux’s doing. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with the situation, but he didn’t seem to be welcoming it, either.

My parents didn’t notice. They had us pose for some pictures before they let us leave. My mother was all smiles, my father all nods. Mr. Chang called my father to make sure Andrew had made it. In his loud business voice, my father said Andrew was here and that I looked good. I blushed, but Andrew seemed unfazed.

He had left the limo’s back door open, so he didn’t have to open it for me. Again, I was thinking it was all a little too much, but I also enjoyed the idea of telling my friends that a date had picked me up in a limo.

When I got to the backseat, it all started to kick in. There was a corsage waiting for me.

A corsage.

Andrew Chang joined me in the backseat, and as soon as he closed the door, the driver took us away from my house.

“Andrew?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“For you,” he said. “My mother picked it out. Your mother told her what you were wearing.”

“But where are we going?”

“To the prom.”

From his tone, I couldn’t tell whether he expected that I already knew this or whether he was aware that it was news to me.

“Your prom?”

“Yes. Do you like the flowers? My mother picked them out.”

“Andrew,” I said, remembering to keep his last name out of it, “I had no idea we were going to a prom. I thought this was a date. I mean, dinner. Friendship. That kind of thing.”

“Oh,” he said, looking out the window. “It’s a prom.”