“If I can’t live to see you in a wedding dress, love, at least promise me a prom dress.”
Those had been Gran’s last conscious words as she’d squeezed Bree’s hand with gnarled and shaking fingers, her gaunt yellowed face a stark contrast to the starched white bed linens. It was as much an ultimatum as it was a plea. Do this one thing, if you won’t give me what I really want. A white wedding wasn’t exactly in the cards for Bree Tierney, at least not unless there was some major legislation sometime soon. It would kill her to marry against her wishes; it wouldn’t kill her to go to senior prom.
Probably.
She’d still had to spend a good few hours consideration and half a pack of Djarum Blacks, sitting on the hood of her Sunbird in the hospital parking lot and staring at the fountain like it would tell her something. In the end, she was out $3.50 and no more sure of what she was doing than before she’d gotten off of the elevator. She didn’t have a dress. She didn’t have a date. Elswen High didn’t even have a GSA… Where was Bree going to find a girl willing to go to prom with the resident freaky lesbo goth girl? Maybe she could call up her cousin Seamus. He was in college and would normally avoid the type of hormonal orgy that prom exuded, but maybe she could offer to wash his Harley.
First things first, Bree was going to have to do something that went against the nature of every fiber in her being. Bree was going to have to shop. Most of her clothing came from Goodwill, and she briefly considered just picking up something from there… But Gran would know. She would have to do this proper, or else.
That was how Bree found herself standing in front of a store nauseatingly titled the “Tenacious Dress Shop”, dressed in black from head to toe and feeling like a kid on the first day of Kindergarten. It was so… bright. Her palms felt a bit clammy, so she stuffed them into her pockets, giving a nod to the suits hovering by the door and attempting to convey a sense of knowing what the fuck she was doing as she perused the first discounted rack in sight. Even the prices on these made her look down at her own secondhand threads numbly.
Mother Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. How did people afford this crap?
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