21 Proms by David Levithan

Author:David Levithan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic UK
Published: 2015-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Shutter

by Will Leitch

It occurred to Joe, in a way that depressed him in a way he couldn’t put a finger on, that Andrea seemed awfully relaxed for someone preparing for her senior prom. When he had gone to his prom, thirty years earlier, he spent a good fifteen minutes sitting in his car, idling, just around the corner from Jennie Dooley’s parents’ house. Fidgeting with the cross hanging from the dashboard mirror of his father’s Buick. Staring straight forward.

He remembered sweating a lot then, scratching at his cummerbund, doing everything he could to talk himself out of putting the car back in first and heading right back home. It would look bad. It would look very bad. Eventually, he made it to the Dooley front door and, after a few minutes of bringing his finger to the buzzer and pulling it back, he finally pushed it. There was no reason for him to be nervous; he’d met Jennie’s parents (her dad had even been his American Legion baseball coach), and Joe was charming, quick, the type of guy parents loved. But still. Something was making him sweat.

He found himself sweating more now, more than his daughter, so much so that she frowned and asked him if he’d taken his blood pressure medication. (She was always bothering him about this. He found it both sweet and annoying.) It was unlike him to be nervous these days; with her college applications, her scholarship rejections, his own endless nights out restoring power to the dark homes for the electric company, he hadn’t much time for nervousness these days. Too much happening, with Andrea, with all of it, to sweat. But there he was, anyway. Like a stuck pig, his father used to say. You’re sweating like a stuck pig. Joe had never understood this expression — wasn’t it bleeding like a stuck pig? But there was no doubt about it: Joe was sweating like a stuck pig.

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