“I hate this one. Absolutely not,” Kensie, Anna’s best friend, said with a shake of her head as Anna spun around in the white lace gown that she was wearing on the pedestal.
“Why not? It’s nice,” Anna said as she appraised the dress in the mirror in front of her. “It’s kind of vintage.”
“Exactly. Don’t you want something modern? You’re not a grandma,” Kensie pointed out with a small laugh.
“Okay, what do you guys think?” Anna turned to me, Paige, and Sophie who were sitting on the bench beside Kensie, Anna’s mom, and Sarah, who was another one of Anna’s friends. Paige and Sophie had tagged along with us to the bridal shop when I had told them that the shop was huge and not only did they have wedding dresses, but they had prom dresses too and considering prom was coming up soon, they jumped at the chance to come with us.
“I like it,” I told her with a nod. “It is a little old though.”
“Too old,” Sophie said with a shake of her head. “I say no.”
“Alright,” Anna sighed. “I guess this isn’t the one.”
“Hey, if you think that it’s the one, then it’s the one. When it comes down to it, the only opinion that matters is your own,” Her mother, whose name was Theresa, told her daughter.
Anna turned to the mirror again to appraise the lace gown, “Well, now that you compared it to a grandma’s dress, I don’t think that I like it very much. Let’s try the next one.”
“Sure, dear,” Theresa nodded and then Anna disappeared into the back of the shop to try on her next choice. We’d been at the shop for about an hour while Anna tried on dress after dress and it was kind of fun and I wanted to prolong this part of the day for as long as possible because after Anna was done trying on her wedding dresses, it was time to look for our prom dresses, which I really didn’t want to do.
Sure, homecoming was fun but prom just felt like it was too much and I was only a junior so I could just wait until next year to go but when I told Sophie and Paige that, Sophie about had a conniption. This was her last prom because she was a senior so she wouldn’t be able to come to next year’s prom which meant that I absolutely had to go to the one this year.
I gave in easily because I guess prom didn’t seem too bad, and I would never oppose to seeing Carter in a tuxedo. Although I wasn’t even sure if Carter wanted to go to prom considering we hadn’t talked about it yet.
“This is it,” We all heard Anna say from the back.
“Come on out, dear, let’s see it,” Theresa eagerly said, looking relieved to have finally found the perfect dress.
After a bit of rustling around, Anna came around the corner of the dressing room and then stepped back up onto the pedestal in front of our little benches.
“That one is absolutely perfect,” Sarah decided with an eager nod.
“I agree,” Paige added. “That’s gorgeous.”
The dress was tight on the top and white lace, but not as grandma-ish as the last one, and the bottom of the dress poofs out at her mid-thigh like a mermaid dress in waves of white fabric. It really did look absolutely amazing on her and I could tell just by the way that she was grinning in the mirror at herself in the dress, I could tell that she just found the perfect dress.
“Mom, what do you think?” Anna wondered, her voice a bit shaky as she grew a bit emotional which was just absolutely adorable.
“I love it, darling. You look so beautiful,” Theresa mumbled, tearing up a bit and then wiping a single tear from her eye. “Stunning, really.”
“Okay, this is it,” Anna decided with a nod. “I want this one.”
“Well, our work here is done,” Sophie sighed as the tailor approached Anna after Theresa had waved her over so that they could make any modifications to the dress that were necessary. “We’re going to be in the prom dresses.”
“Have fun,” Anna sang before Sophie was practically dragging Paige and I toward the plethora of prom dresses, organized by color, on the other side of the large store.
“What color have you and Carter decided on? You know, to match your dress and his tie,” Sophie wondered as we started looking through all of the dresses.
“We haven’t talked about prom yet,” I told her. “So we don’t have a color.”
“He hasn’t asked you yet?” Paige asked me incredulously and then both girls turned to look at me with shocked expressions.
“Um, no?” I laughed, confused at their dramatic reactions. “I mean, I just assumed that we’re going together considering he’s kind of my boyfriend. Isn’t it just assumed?”
“Most definitely not,” Sophie shook her head at me as she started to pull her phone out of her jeans pocket. “I don’t care if you’ve been married since birth, he still needs to ask you to prom.”
“No, he really doesn’t,” I mumbled even though Paige was nodding her agreement with Sophie. “What are you doing, Soph?”
“I’m getting to the bottom of this,” She explained, putting her phone to her ear, obviously calling somebody.
“Are you calling Carter?” I wondered incredulously. When she didn’t answer me, I found it obvious that the answer to that question was ‘yes’. “Give me that!”
I quickly lunged forward, snatching her phone away from her ear so that she didn’t actually talk to Carter because that’d be really embarrassing, I think, for Sophie to demand that Carter ask me to prom, which I thought was just ridiculous.
“Hello?” Carter answered on the other end.
“Hey,” I sighed, unsure of what I should do now except for run from Sophie because she was lunging toward me to get her phone back.
“Maddie? Hey, what are you doing calling me from Sophie’s phone?” He wondered curiously.
“Oh, you know, just wanted to check in,” I said, still running from Sophie through the prom section of the store, trying to avoid all employees so that we didn’t get kicked out for playing around in the store.
“Did your phone die?”
“Yep. It definitely did that,” I piped just before I was tackled with a loud oomf sound and when I looked up, I found Paige sitting on top of me with a victorious smile as she snatched the phone from my hand and tossed it to Sophie.
“Hello, Carter,” Sophie grinned at me as she spoke into the phone. “Oh yeah, Maddie’s fine. And the dress shopping is going wonderfully.”
Paige shot me a sympathetic smile but said, “This is what has to be done,” She told me, not letting me off of the ground so that I wasn’t able to try and get Sophie’s phone again, which I would have done if she wasn’t pinning me down.
“Anyway, I have a bone to pick with you,” Sophie continued talking to Carter as I tried to wriggle free from Paige’s grip.
“We’re so not friends right now,” I huffed, glaring up at Paige even though I wasn’t actually mad at her or anything.
“Well, okay,” Sophie said to Carter. “So the thing is that we’re here at the dress shop looking for prom dresses and Maddie told me something very interesting. How can she possibly find the perfect prom dress if she hasn’t been asked to prom?”
I let out a loud groan of misery and defeat but I didn’t say anything, I just listened to what Sophie was telling my boyfriend.
“No, sir. That is just unacceptable. By the time that we get back to that house, you better have a very romantic proposal set up for Maddie and it better make me cry, do you understand? And also flowers to apologize for being so incredibly stupid.”
There was a pause as Carter spoke.
“No, not for me, dumbass, for Maddie,” She snapped at him, rolling her eyes. “Jeez, what would you two do without me? You have three hours, lover boy. Get to work.”
She then hung up the phone and Paige released me from her grip.
“You’re terrible,” I told Sophie.
“I did you a favor,” She grinned at me. “And you know that you love me.”
“Well, what did he say?” I wondered as we all went back to looking at all of the dresses hanging on the racks in front of us. I was looking at the blue dresses while Sophie grazed the green ones to my left and Paige searched the purple ones to my right.
“He just seemed very confused,” Sophie explained. “Which is so ridiculous. Is romance really that dead?”
“He is romantic,” I defended my boyfriend. “Prom just isn’t that big of a deal to us, I guess. How did Andy ask you?”
“He filled my car with balloons. I know that it’s cheesy, but it was really cute and I loved it.”
“But the only reason that he did that was because she threatened not to have sex with him for a while month if he didn’t wow her with a prom proposal,” Paige added with a small laugh.
“Be that as it may, it was still cute,” Sophie shrugged. “And what about you, Paige? Do you have a date yet?”
“Nope. I don’t,” She shrugged. “I don’t think that I’m going to get one either.”
“But what about-“
“Don’t say Ethan,” Paige said quickly and then I was silent because that was exactly what I was going to say. “Come on, guys, I’ve been pathetically pining over the guy for months. If he hasn’t asked me out yet, he isn’t just going to randomly ask me to prom.”
“You never know, Paige,” Sophie chimed. “Don’t be so pessimistic.”
“I was pessimistic in January,” She corrected Sophie. “Now, I’m just a realist. Maybe Garrett from my math class will ask me. He’s really nice and we talk sometimes.”
“Have faith,” I assured Paige with a small smile as we continued searching for dresses. When neither Sophie nor Paige were looking at me, I quickly pulled my own phone out of my pocket and sent Carter a quick text to tell him to ignore what Sophie had told him and that I didn’t need a big invitation to prom. Before Sophie could catch me, I put my phone back in my pocket, knowing for sure that she’d try and take my phone away so that I couldn’t negate her instructions to Carter. I really didn’t want to make a big deal out of this though.
After a while, Anna found us in the prom section and let us know that she, her mom, and her two friends were leaving to go back home. After spending all morning trying on wedding dresses, she was exhausted so we bid her a goodbye. It was an hour drive back home but we weren’t ready to leave yet and since we drove separately from Anna and the others, we could stay longer without making them wait.
And then two hours after that, we were also exhausted from trying on so many prom dresses, trying to find the right fit and everything. I’d found mine pretty easily because like Anna’s wedding dress, I just immediately knew that it was perfect the moment I tried it on. Unlike Sophie, who had narrowed it down to three favorites and couldn’t decide on which one to go with and then Paige who had five top favorites.
“I like the red one,” I told Sophie after the lady who worked at the store had taken my dress and put it in the back so that they could make the modifications and I could pick it up in about a week.
“But the zipper is kind of itchy,” Sophie told me.
“Well, then what about the purple one?”
“I like that one a lot but the black one is just so beautiful,” She explained.
“Then get the black one,” I said with a small laugh.
“But the purple one is so much fun, doesn’t it look fun?”
“I like the black one,” Paige interjected. “Andy will totally lose his mind when he sees you in that dress.”
“You’re right,” Sophie conceded and I just laughed. “Okay, fine. The black one.”
And then it took another half an hour to get Paige to narrow down her selection to just one dress as well. She was almost convinced that she was going to have to do a costume change in the middle of prom because she couldn’t decide between two of them but I had eventually talked her down to just one.
The whole way back to Rawlins, I was texting back and forth with Carter as I tried to get information out of him. If he listened to Sophie or if he listened to my text that told him not to do anything. His answers were vague and short though, so I had a bad feeling that he listened to Sophie.
When we got to the house, Sophie and Paige planned on staying the night with me that night so Sophie parked her car in the back by the garage and then all three of us walked into the house. In the living room, Will and some of his hockey friends were sitting on the couch and there was a path of scattered rose petals that lead from the front door to the stairs.
“It’s about time you guys got here,” Will glanced up at us from the TV with a small laugh. “Maddie’s here!”
I let out a soft groan as a blush started rising on my cheeks.
“I knew that he’d rise to the occasion,” Sophie chirped with a grin.
“I told him not to do anything,” I mumbled, hesitant to go upstairs because I knew that Sophie and Paige were both going to follow me up there. It wasn’t like I was against romantic gestures- I was absolutely swooning when Carter created a private restaurant in a corn field. It doesn’t really count though, when somebody else told him to be romantic, especially when I didn’t want the romantic gesture in the first place.
“Well, I think that he’s kind of afraid of me,” Sophie added, offering me a small smile.
“Okay, but you don’t give him head when he’s had a bad day,” Will said teasingly and I just thwacked the back of his head as I headed for the stairs as Will just laughed at his own joke.
“We’ll stay down here. Let us know how it goes,” Sophie sang as I headed up the stairs alone. Following the cheesy rose petals, I see that they’re leading me up to my room. Opening the door, I let out a loud gasp when I see that my room was absolutely covered in bouquets of flowers of all different types. They were scattered on my bed, on my dresser, on the floor, on the bench by the window. Everywhere.
However, looking around the room with wide eyes, I couldn’t find Carter until I turned completely around and saw him standing behind me, leaning against the door frame of the door that I had just walked through, so he must have quietly followed me into the room. He was wearing a nice sports jacket and dress pants and sneakers, holding another bouquet, only this one was of roses, which was the only bouquet of roses in the whole room.
“I told you not to do anything,” I mumbled but I couldn’t hide a wide blushing grin that spreads across my face.
“I know that but Sophie scares me,” He joked, walking into the room and I found it ironic that those were almost exactly Sophie’s words too.
“Sure but Sophie doesn’t hold your sex life in her palm,” I refuted, paraphrasing Will’s comeback to Sophie’s remark. “So siding with Sophie wasn’t the best idea.”
“You’re not really mad,” He shook his head.
“I am,” I insisted but I giggled, calling out my own lie. “What am I supposed to do with all of these flowers?”
“I didn’t think it through that far,” He admitted, handing me the roses and I accepted them, careful not to prick myself on the thorns. “But anyway, I didn’t know that prom was such a big deal to you.”
“It’s not. It’s such a big deal to Sophie.”
“Anyway,” He said again, giving me a teasing glare and then a handsome grin before he got down on one knee as if he was asking me to marry him or something, which I know obviously wasn’t the case. “Madison Baker, will you do me the absolute honor of going to prom with me?”
I actually did feel a tear start to fill up behind my eye but I didn’t let it fall because it was so ridiculous to almost be crying right now. “Shut up,” I mumbled in a waving voice as I rolled my eyes at him and then held his hand in mine, pulling him back up to his feet. “Obviously, we’re going to prom together.”
He grinned at me again and then wrapped his arms tightly around me. “You can pretend that you don’t like it but I know that you absolutely love it.”
“I absolutely love you,” I said so that I didn’t have to deny it or admit that he was right.
“Well, that’s a major relief,” Carter said before kissing my lips with a long, lingering kiss. “Because I absolutely love you too.”