How I Found the Perfect Dress

“tinker bell pajamas!” mЧ sister tammЧ Was the happiest girl in the world. “Look, Morgan! Look what Santa brung me!”

“That’s ‘brought,’ Tammy. Look what Santa brought me.” Even on four hours’ sleep, my mom could hear bad grammar coming a mile away. It was Christmas morning, six a.m. Mom was catatonic on the sofa in her bathrobe, dark circles under her eyes, mumbling about verbs. I was in a similarly groggy condition, except I was on the floor and couldn’t care less about verbs. My dad was in the kitchen, making coffee with the desperation of a bomb-squad guy dismantling a detonator that was already ticking: five—four—three—two—

Mom and Dad and I were basically trashed, in a festive, ho-ho-ho kind of way. But Tammy was happy and hyper and the living room was a blizzard of torn wrapping paper and ribbon and presents from the mall, and isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

I admit, I wasn’t feeling much holiday spirit this year. I’d still been stubbornly awake at one a.m., reading in the living room, when Mom tippy-toed down to the basement and hauled all the hidden presents upstairs, gently sliding each one under the tree without making the slightest crinkly paper sound. When I went to the kitchen to get some juice and made an accidental clink with the glass, she shushed me like a maniac.

“Don’t wake Tammy!” she mouthed. Trust me, waking Tammy was the last thing I wanted to do. For weeks the kid had been threatening to sleep under the tree on Christmas Eve so she could catch Santa in the act. It took me—me, magical big sister Morgan—an hour and a half to persuade her to go to bed in her room, and that’s only because I promised I’d wait up in her place and take a photo of jolly old Saint Nick himself, delivering his sack of loot.

I knew this was kind of a sucky lie to tell your sister on Christmas Eve, but it was the only way to shut her up. I figured the Christmas morning present-mania would make her forget all about the dumb Santa picture anyway, and so far I was right.

“Look! It’s Belle! It’s Belle from Beauty and the Beast!” Tammy clawed the wrapping paper off one of the smaller packages. “Maybe it’s a movie or a computer game! Oh, a book. Well, Belle likes books, I guess. . . .”

“Books are a wonderful present, honey.” Mom clutched her head in agony. “Not so loud, ’kay?” Mom’s always been a freak about Christmas, especially the Santa aspect. The old gal has it all figured out: Presents from Mom and Dad come in one kind of wrapping paper, presents from Santa come in another. She switches pens and even her handwriting, so the tags that read “from Santa” are written in this big curly script in red marker. It makes you wonder if the woman has ever considered a life of crime.

“Morgan, look!” Tammy twirled around the room, as my dad stumbled out of the kitchen holding two mugs of coffee. Black for him, a splash of milk for me. Mom switched to green tea a while back on the advice of some health magazine, but you could bet she was regretting that now.

“After breakfast,” Dad said, leaning heavily against the wall. “After Daddy takes his”—yawn—“nap.” Mom executed the sneaky middle-of-the-night present drop, but it was Dad’s job to take a man-sized bite out of the Santa cookie. He wouldn’t drink the milk, though. He just poured half of it down the sink. Dad’s commitment to putting on the annual Santa-is-real show stopped where his lactose intolerance began.

“Oooooh, tickets! Disney Princesses on Ice! We’re going to see the shoooooooooow!” Tammy started skating around the living room in her socks. “How does Ariel know how to ice skate? She’s a mermaid.”

Good question, I thought, feeling a fresh wave of cranky wash over me. No doubt there were some presents for me under the tree too, but not the one I wanted: about six feet tall, with heart-stopping cornflower blue eyes and a tendency to use off-color Irish slang when excited. His name was Colin. I’d fallen for him like a ton of shamrocks last summer when I was in Ireland, but he was twenty and I was sixteen and no fekkin’ way was his attitude about that. Plus he lived on the other side of the ocean, and not even Kris Kringle could swing that kind of Christmas surprise.

i had to give mom and dad Credit: an exhausting amount of planning and effort, lying and deceit went into Christmas at the Rawlinson family’s Connecticut abode, all designed to pull the wool over the eyes of a seven-year-old girl whose grip on reality was pretty woolly to begin with. What my parents didn’t seem to understand was that even Tammy was starting to get sick of it.

“Santa’s not really real, though, is he, Daddy?” she’d asked, about a week before the holiday. The three of us were in Christmas central, a.k.a. the East Norwich Mall, shopping for presents for Mom. “He’s more magic real, right?”

“Of course he’s real.” No way was Dad gonna be the Santa-killer; Mom would go ballistic. “Where do you think all the goodies come from?”

“Santa’s—workshop?” Tammy answered hesitantly, looking around. The sickening quantities of merchandise heaped everywhere we turned seemed to suggest otherwise, unless Santa had a serious collection of credit cards.

“Is he real, Morgan?” Tammy turned to me, desperate for a straight answer. In my sixteen and three-quarters years on the planet, I guess I’d acquired a reputation for being blunt. “Is Santa Claus true or not?”

Dad gave me the evil eye, but I had no intention of being the Santa-killer either. Not if I wanted to survive junior year. “Lots of things are true that people think are not,” I’d answered, not looking her in the eye. I was kind of the wrong person to ask at that point, though, after what happened to me last summer in Ireland. No biggie, just me riding a bike across the Irish countryside, finding out I was a legendary half-goddess, undoing a bunch of magical faery enchantments and oh, yeah, finding the love of my life. Colin. He’d probably forgotten all about me by now.

Maybe it was the snow on the ground or all the Christmas-in-Connecticut décor everywhere, but my summer adventure in Ireland was starting to feel very long ago and far away, as if I’d dreamed the whole thing. Maybe that’s why all I’d wanted to do on Christmas Eve was stay up late by the twinkling lights of our Christmas tree, reading and rereading the book Colin had given me the day I left Ireland.

The tree was adorned from top to bottom with angels and cherubs and winged, fantastical beings of every kind. The book was called The Magical Tales of Ireland.

“Чou Couldn’t get her a basketball hoop for the driveway? A paint-by-numbers set? A board game that wasn’t about princesses?”

“She gave me a list, Helen. She gave me her list for Santa and that’s what she wanted and that’s what I got. That princess stuff is all they have in the stores anyway.” Dad was driving, and he pulled away from the red light just extra-fast enough to show he was annoyed. “Next year, you do the Christmas shopping.”

Always a pleasure to be trapped in the backseat, listening to the marital discussions. They’d been particularly juicy the last couple of weeks, ever since Dad had been downsized from his job. It’s not like we were out of money or anything. First Bank of Connecticut doesn’t lay a vice president off right before Christmas without giving him a fat goodbye check. But who was used to having Dad around all the time? Not me. Not Tammy. And definitely not Mom.

“That’s not all they have.” I could hear Mom shifting into higher gear along with the Subaru. “They have blocks. They have Legos. They have—I don’t know! Decks of cards! This princess thing has become an obsession. It’s not healthy.” Mom nodded in my direction. “Morgan was never like that.”

That my mother should hold me up as the poster child for healthy psychological development was a sign of just how much things had changed in my house since the summer.

“Morgan was obsessed with other things.” Before I could say, Make a right, Dad flipped on the signal and turned onto Sarah’s street. I was surprised he remembered where it was. “What about Lamb Chop?”

“Exactly!” Mom would not be stopped. “Lamb Chop was age-appropriate. It wasn’t a show about a giggly princess whose goal in life is to twirl around in a flowy pink dress, waiting for some muscle-bound prince to show up.”

No, I thought, it was a show about a middle-aged woman who kept a sock on her hand for company. “What’s wrong with flowy dresses?” I threw out, just to keep the argument stoked after I left the car. “A dress is just a dress, you know? It’s your attitude that counts.”

Mom slammed her lips shut, but I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that Tammy wouldn’t grow up to be president now because her plastic princess tiara was slowly turning her brain into glitter.

Dad pulled up in front of Sarah’s house. “We’ll pick you up at six.” He sighed. “When do you take your road test again?”

“I can’t take it until May, Dad.” We’d been over this a zillion times and I knew the rules by heart. “I have to have my permit for, like, four months before I’m allowed to take the road test. And I still have to do my fifty hours of driving instruction. And even if I pass the road test, I can’t have any friends in the car with me for the first six months of my license because I’ll still only be seventeen.”

“For Pete’s sake, why don’t they just raise the driving age to thirty?” Dad grumbled. “Soon you’ll have to be eighteen to cross the street unescorted. . . . Damn bureaucrats keep adding new rules every day. . . . Grumble grumble grumble. . . ”

“But think of senior year!” Mom cut Dad off in midgrumble. “By then you won’t have to depend on us for rides everywhere.”

power tools? please. mЧ former best-friend-forever Sarah was in charge of the planning committee for the junior prom, and that’s what this get-together was all about.

A bit of background, here: The East Norwich senior prom was typically held at one of the local snooty country clubs. It was thrown by the PTA in full überprom style, with stretch limos, formal wear, photographers, the whole nine yards.

The student-thrown junior prom was originally a baby version of the senior prom, but over the years it had evolved into a kind of half-prom, half-prank spoof of the seniors’ ritzy event. The eighties fashion prom was tolerated by school officials, even with all the slutty Madonna outfits (the boys were no better; most of them came as Michael Jackson or Prince, take your pick). The bathing-suits-only prom was more controversial, with parents complaining about all the skin and students complaining that the pool was kept off-limits.

Strangely it was last year’s ASPCA benefit prom, where every attendee went home with an adopted puppy or kitten, that sent the school administration over the edge:

Because of the eccentric and even subversive junior proms organized in previous years by student-run prom committees, the administration feels the student body can no longer be trusted with this important responsibility. This year the PTA will engage a professional prom planner to coordinate all details, with appropriate student input welcome as always.

Or so said the memo from the principal, distributed to all juniors the first week of school. “‘Eccentric’? ‘Subversive’?” Sarah had gone wild when she’d read it. “Just because we might throw a prom that’s actually interesting?”

With the prom planner on board to make sure this year’s bash was nothing more or less than your typical annual festival of teenage girls in flowy princess dresses and teenage boys in search of a six-pack, the prom committee was reduced to offering opinions about food, music and décor, and selling tickets at school. I didn’t care. To me, being on the committee was just a way to get some face time with Sarah. Now that she had a boyfriend, her fascination with couples-oriented social events had skyrocketed.

Last year I’d been the one with the boyfriend. I’d been the one who acted like a jerk. To her credit, Sarah had hated Raphael from the start.

He’s arrogant and bossy. He treats you like you’re not smart. And he’ll make you drop all your friends, wait and see.

I didn’t get how right she was until after Raphael dumped me on the last day of sophomore year (after which I hacked off all my hair in a broken-hearted tantrum). It would have been nice to have Sarah’s shoulder to cry on about that, but I’d let the friendship slide because of my all-Raphael, all-the-time attitude. Now we were slowly building it back. Going to prom committee meetings was a small price to pay.

Sarah’s boyfriend, Dylan, couldn’t have been more different from Raph. He was a junior like us, smart and nice and genuinely crazy about Sarah from what I could tell. His only flaw was that he could be very solitary sometimes. We’d all learned that when Dylan went off on his own, you didn’t follow him around asking what’s wrong. He just needed his space.

Now, personally, I have no problem with short. It’s just that short guys tend to go after short girls, which Sarah most definitely was not. Sarah was tall—five feet ten-and-a-half inches in her bare feet, with good posture to boot. So it was just funny that she ended up with Dylan. Some kids made cracks about it, but most people thought they were all the more cool for not caring about the height difference. Sarah was one of the star players on the girls’ intramural basketball team and Dylan played drums in a band, so that helped in the coolness department too.

(I don’t know how it is at other schools, but at East Norwich, if you’re already a little bit cool, like Sarah and Dylan, and then you do something potentially uncool, it just makes you cooler than you were before. You have to have that starter cool first, though. Otherwise, no matter what you do, it’s just a downward spiral.)

Anyway, Sarah having a boyfriend made her a bit more forgiving of my atrocious behavior last year. Still, when the fall term started, we were awkward with each other for weeks. I guess she wanted to be one-hundred percent convinced that Raph and I were permanently broken up and that I was, maybe not the same old Morgan but a new, older and wiser version of the person she used to think was worthy of being her best friend.

Snacks Were another big draw of the prom Committee meetings, and the other members, Clementine and Deirdre, were halfway through a huge bag of Cheez Doodles by the time I arrived. Clementine and Deirdre were the kind of slightly creepy best friends who were always, always together. They’d been that way since middle school. At the moment, they even had matching orange lips.

Let’s talk about corsages, I prayed, as I took my seat at the dining room table. Unlike my family’s oversized, open-plan house, Sarah’s house had a nice cozy dining room with French doors at either end so people could sit and talk in privacy. Let’s pick color schemes. Anything but the big, bad question . . .

“So, who’s taking everybody to prom?” Deirdre squealed, like she didn’t start every meeting by asking the same fekkin’ thing.

“I think Tommy Vasquez is gonna ask me,” Clementine confided. “His friend Jordan told me that Tommy wanted to know if I had a date yet. If he asks me, what should I say? Should I say yes?”

“Tommy is cute,” Deirdre said. “But don’t say yes right away. ’Cause nobody knows yet who Mike Fitch will ask. And if he asked you, you wouldn’t want to be taken already, right?”

“Oh my God, Mike Fitch!” Clementine fanned herself and pretended to faint. In terms of popularity, Mike Fitch was definitely the rock star of the junior class, but in a good way. Unlike Raphael’s egomaniacal reign of terror over the seniors, Mike actually deserved to be popular. He was funny and kind and gorgeous, with pale blond hair and big brown eyes, plus he was the lead guitarist in Dylan’s band. The fact that it was a Kiss tribute band just added an extra touch of ironic sex appeal to the guy. Who would guess a good egg like Mike could do such a killer Gene Simmons impersonation?

“You think Mike Fitch might ask me? He’d never ask me. Would he?” Clem started to get revved and shoved a fistful of Cheez Doodles in her mouth to calm herself down.

“Nobody knows,” Sarah said mysteriously. “Nobody knows who Mike Fitch likes. Dylan says even Mike’s guy friends don’t know.” One major perk of Sarah having a boyfriend was that it gave us a mole in the enemy camp.

“So who, ummm, are you thinking, ummm, that you might go to prom with, Morgan?” I knew Deirdre was umming out of pity. It was common knowledge that I’d been damaged, dateless goods since getting dumped by Raph.

I didn’t answer right away and not just because Sarah was right. It did suck. It sucked that Colin was so far away and that he thought I was too young to really be his girlfriend and that, to tell the humiliating truth, I hadn’t heard from him in a while.

No, I didn’t answer because it was hard to know where to start and what to leave out. Was this a good time to tell the junior prom planning committee that I was part goddess? How might that news go over? I helped myself to a Cheez Doodle.