Awkward Moments in Dating: Prom Rejection

(image via wikimedia)

I knew Francine was going to say no if I asked her to prom, but I had to ask her anyway.  I’d told my friends that I’d ask her.  Plus, I thought she was cool enough with our friendship to say yes.  Then I saw her melodramatic act in the hallway between classes, where she’d fake cried on her friend’s shoulder after her friend had pointed me out to her from a distance (you can get more details here ).

I admit, I might have misread the whole thing.  Maybe Francine had been fake crying over something else.  Stuff like that happened.  People misinterpreted situations all the time.  There had been a TV show on a few years earlier called Three’s Company, where characters often misinterpreted stuff (almost always in a sexual way).  It was a good lesson (not the sexual stuff, the misinterpretation stuff).

Despite the valuable lessons from Three’s Company, I was pretty sure I hadn’t misinterpreted the fake crying.  Somebody had told Francine that I was going to ask her to prom, and she didn’t want to go, and it put her in an awkward situation.  I couldn’t ask anybody for advice because it was embarrassing to admit you knew a girl probably didn’t want to go to prom with you.  I could just not ask her at all, but that would be cowardly.

I had to think quickly.  It was Thursday, and I didn’t want to ask on a Friday.  I don’t know what was wrong with Friday, but it felt wrong to do a suicidal prom request on a Friday.  I’d been ready on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  Francine was (probably) using delay tactics.  I just wanted to get it over with.

After school, I went straight to Francine’s locker and caught her by surprise.  I didn’t grab her or anything.  I just stood a comfortable distance and said her name.  She glanced over and her eyes widened, but that could have meant anything.

“Did you need a ride today?” I asked.  “I’m heading out.”

“Sure,” she said.  She could have said no to the ride.  That would have ended everything, but she said yes.  Maybe I’d been wrong.

I was really nervous as I drove her home that day.  I almost passed through a stop sign, but she yelled at me to stop in time.  The breaks screeched, and Francine jolted forward.

“You trying to kill us?” she said, readjusting herself in the seatbelt.

“I forget about those things sometimes,” I said, pointing out the stop signs. I accelerated the car forward again and obeyed all traffic laws.  “They’re so many of them, I stop noticing them.”

“They’re there so you know where to stop,” she said.

“I know,” I said.  “But they put them at every intersection.  It almost makes them impossible to notice.”

“That’s why they make them red.”

“That’s my point.  All of them are red.  It’s what makes them forgettable.  There should be some color variation.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.  She actually sounded mad.  I know I had almost driven through an intersection without stopping, but that shouldn’t have cancelled out her sense of humor.

“All the stop signs are red,” I said.  “Red, red, red, red, red.  My brain tunes them out after a while.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t drive, then.”

“Yet my driving record is perfect,” I said.

“You drove past a stop sign!”

“I almost drove past.  Technically, I stopped in time.”

“Because I told you to!”

“And I’m thankful.  But my record is still perfect.”

“How many stop signs have you driven through when I’m not in the car?”

I’d never been preoccupied with a prom date request while also driving before, I thought, but I couldn’t say that.

“Never,” I said.

“You wouldn’t know!”

The transition from my driving record to prom was going to be tough, I thought, but I had to do it.  As we pulled into her driveway, Francine was still ranting about how I had no credibility as a judge of my own driving ability, and I had to cut her off.

“Hey,” I said.  “I was wondering…”

She stopped talking.

“I was wondering… Would you like to go to prom with me?”

I could tell from the look on her face (or maybe it was just in her eyes because I can’t really describe what her expression was) what her answer was going to be.

“I promise to drive carefully,” I said.

She laughed, but it didn’t change her answer.

“I think I just want to go with some friends,” she said quickly, too quickly for it to be natural.  As soon as she said “I think….”, I knew what she was going to say.  Dejected, I glanced into the rear view mirror and fumbled with it, pretending to adjust it, doing anything I could to avoid eye contact with Francine at that moment.  What I saw in my rear view mirror changed my life forever.

A long stringy booger was dangling out of my nose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was gross, but I learned a valuable from this, and I’ll get to that next.

To be continued in  Awkward Moments in Dating: Hygiene and Grooming Issues .

And for more cringe-inducing romance, read Awkward Moments in Dating: The Coworker.