prom

Tanner drove a beat up blue ford. It was his father’s and the old man had given it to him on his seventeenth birthday. Lotta memories in this beaut. Take good care o’ her. Tanner didn’t want to think too deeply about what his father might’ve done in that old blue ford. The man had always been strange, cruel, and mysterious. He disappeared for weeks at a time when Tanner was a young boy, leaving Tanner’s uncle Ray to do all the raising. Tanner never met his mom, never even saw a picture of her. But in his head, she looked just like him but more beautiful, with cascading brown curls and eyes that were both kind and sad. 

Tanner would be graduating high school in another two months. He wasn’t planning on going to college, in fact, the thought hadn’t ever crossed his mind for more than a split second at a time. Like how someone might think about going skydiving. His grades were bad and he didn’t like learning. Tanner was good with his hands though, really good. He took a carpentering class his sophomore year and he made a little wooden box for his girlfriend at the time, Rachel Trist. The box was engraved with miniature ballerinas because Rachel did ballet. When you opened it, a tiny dancer in a wooden tutu did pirouettes and you could see a couple of swans painted onto the inside of the lid. Tanner chose swans because he had been doing research to impress Rachel and Swan Lake was the first ballet that he came across. He actually even watched a Youtube video of an old performance, being moved to tears when Odette and Seigfried’s souls were reunited. Rachel hadn’t heard of Swan Lake and the swans on the inside of the box had confused her. 

Tanner wished he had never given that little box away. It was the best thing he ever made and Rachel broke up with him after seven months because she had to start taking herself more seriously. Tanner hadn’t really known what that meant, still didn’t, but he never saw her around anymore. He was dating Evelyn Leeks now. They’d started going out the fall of junior year after she took his virginity on the football field. Tanner and a few friends had stayed out after the homecoming game, taking shots of jager and racing each other through the field until they vomited. The other guys went home but Evelyn stayed and they started making out. Soon they were rolling around naked in the turf, breathing in the sweat and spit of the football players who had just tumbled through that same grass.

Tanner loved Evelyn a lot. Probably more than his teenage self would ever be able to admit. And he knew that she was going to break up with him after graduation. Evelyn was going to college in Chicago, which was about an eleven hour drive from Jackson. She was going to study biology, which Tanner had gotten a D+ in. She was going to read books which Tanner had never heard of and she was going to start using words which Tanner wouldn’t understand. 

Tanner asked Evelyn to prom and she said yes. He picked her up in that beat up blue ford and she was wearing a light yellow dress with a tulle skirt. They did some dancing and took some pictures and afterwards Tanner took the long way home so that he could drive down the road by the river. He used the hand crank to roll down his window and turned the radio off so that they could hear the cicadas and the toads. Except underneath all of that Tanner could hear a sniffling sound and he realized he was sobbing into the steering wheel. He pulled over, killed the engine, and just cried and cried and cried. Evelyn sat there and watched him sadly. When he finally went quiet, she put a hand on his shoulder and offered to drive.

Evelyn climbed over Tanner, her yellow tulle skirt dragging over his thighs, and popped into the driver’s seat. Tanner heaved himself into shotgun and stuck his head out of the window of the blue ford. A late spring breeze ran its fingers through his hair as the cicadas sang them home.