Speechless(130)

                “Andy does have a point,” Sam says carefully from his place at                     the grill. “If you want to go, go.”

                I push my eggs around on my plate, thinking. Looking at those                     dresses…it did sort of remind me of how much fun it is. Wearing the kind of                     formal wear you can’t get away with any other time of year and dancing my ass                     off to generic pop music.

                “You should!” Asha bounces on her stool. “We all should.”

                Sam and Andy stare at her as if she’s grown two heads.

                “Come on!” she says. “It’d be great! We could all get dressed                     up and go to the dance and then come back here. You, too, Andy.”

                “That sounds like a terrible idea,” he tells her. “Like,                     monumentally bad.”

                Sam runs his knuckles along his jaw. “I don’t know, man…”

                Oh, my God, is he seriously interested in going to Winter                     Formal? I almost choke on my orange juice.

                Andy must share my incredulity, because he says, “You can’t                     actually be considering this. You were the one talking about how much of a waste                     of time school functions are.”

                “I know, but if we all crash it as a group, maybe it would be                     fun.”

                “Yeah, and maybe we’d all get our asses kicked.”

                “You shouldn’t let them stop you from doing what you want to                     do,” Sam says back to him with a pointed look.

                Andy stares at him, and then he says, “You’re going to burn the                     omelet.”





                                      day twenty-four

                For the first time in a week, I’m actually home for                     dinner. The good news is that it isn’t tofu. The bad news is that the reason it                     isn’t is because Mom stopped buying organic foods since we’re now on a tighter                     budget. Dad resorted to his old standby: mac and cheese from the box.

                “I used to make this all the time when you were a kid,” he says                     as we sit down at the kitchen table.

                I remember. That was when Mom was taking night classes at the                     business school. The idea was that she’d eventually start her own chain of                     floral shops instead of just managing someone else’s, but she ended up dropping                     out before she could graduate. I don’t know why.