How to Make an Entrance

He’s downstairs. Holy hell.

The doorbell rang while I was shimmying into my slip, and Dad must’ve opened the door and let him in, and now I can hear them talking in the hallway.

“Damnit, he’s already here,” I whisper as Mom drops the shimmering satin dress over my head.

“Jessie, don’t cuss,” Mom says. She threads my hands through the dress’s armholes and zips me up. “You’ll survive.”

I stare into the mirror. It should reflect a pretty girl in a pretty dress except that girl has a look of absolute horror plastered on her face that no amount of makeup can hide. “Oh, God, this is gonna be so embarrassing.”

Mom snorts. “Adolescence is nothing but a series of embarrassments. Get over it. Maybe he’ll think your entrance is cool.”

“He’ll see right up my dress.”

Now she laughs. “Fix you hair. I’ll see if I can distract him.”

She leaves the room, and I hear her shoes clunk down the ladder. That’ll be me in a few minutes. Descending a wooden ladder in my satin dress to meet my prom date. Could this get any more humiliating? What if my dress rips on that old nail that keeps working its way loose? What if I fall? I’ve already tumbled off that damn ladder once, when I was trying to carry a plate of mid-term study snacks up to my room. I sprained my ankle and had to sleep on the downstairs couch for two weeks.

“I’ll get the stairs put in ASAP, hon,” Dad had said. “Then you won’t have to use the ladder anymore.”

He stated that brash lie a full month ago. A pile of boards is propped up against the house but it hasn’t morphed into anything that remotely resembles stairs yet.

The house. I still have a hard time calling it that. Six months ago, it wasn’t a house at all. It was simply the abandoned cow barn I would hide in when I wanted to escape the cramped confines of the trailer that we were living in. I had fixed up the old feed room with a used couch and hung some of my watercolors on the walls, and that’s where I’d go to read in peace, away from Dad’s screaming sports shows blaring from the TV and Mom’s constant nagging.

Then, the cheap trailer with the shoddy electric wiring burned down one day, and the dilapidated barn was the only building left unscathed and standing. So, we moved into it.

<<<>>>

I had hated the trailer. We’d moved to it when Dad landed a job in Virginia and cheerily made us pull up roots and move there. I’d left all my old friends behind in Pennsylvania, and my opinion of Virginia, once I was stuck living in it, was that it sucked. The three acres my parents had bought, complete with the crappy trailer and crumbling barn, sucked. My new school and all its snooty students who laughed at newcomers sucked. Everything about the move, in the eyes of a morose fourteen-year-old girl, completely and utterly sucked.

“Living in the trailer is only temporary, sweetie,” Dad said. “I’ll build us a real house soon.”

He (emphatically) made that statement three years ago, but he instantly got too busy to follow-through with his grand plans. We would have remained in that moldy, depressing, rat hole forever if it hadn’t decided to hasten its demise by bursting into flames. Luckily, we weren’t in it at the time. We had temporarily escaped its miserable confines for a few blissful hours and were touring the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC when it happened. By the time we got home, all that was left of the Trailer from Hell was a smoldering heap of nothing.

“That could’ve been us,” Mom whispered as we stared at the still smoking remains. “We could’ve been in there.”

“Well,” Dad said, “we weren’t.”

“But where will we live now?” I choked out between sobs. I wasn’t sad that the trailer had burned to a crisp, but every possession I owned had burned up with it.

“Well,” Dad said, “a motel I guess, for a bit. Until I can build the house.”

“That’ll take months,” Mom said. “We can’t live in a motel for months.”

Dad turned his eyes to the old barn with its rusting tin roof and broken windows. “Well, we could build a house faster if we convert the barn.”

Mom let out her trademarked contemptuous snort. “That dilapidated old thing? Are you serious?”

“Sure, why not? It’s got a solid foundation and thick beams. Most of the wood is still good. It’ll make a perfect house. A unique house.”

“The roof is half caved in and there’s no plumbing or electricity,” Mom pointed out. “You’d be better off demolishing the whole thing and starting from scratch.”

Dad had already got the excited, sparkly-eyed look he gets when he’s planning a great project, though. “Who wants to live in a boring old house when we can live in a barn? All I have to do is fix it up.”

So, with terrific gusto, he started the project. Amazingly, in six months he’d cobbled together a working kitchen and a living room where the cow stalls once stood, and three bedrooms carved into the hayloft. It wasn’t the prettiest job. Dad was adamant that he could do anything better and cheaper than a professional, which really meant that it took ten times as long for him to finish anything. So, even though he managed to patch the leaky roof and he’d rigged up some sort of plumbing system that sporadically worked, we still had no stairs to the bedrooms, just the old hayloft ladder because Dad’s interest in the whole project petered out after he’d finished the tricky stuff. Even my bout with the sprained ankle hadn’t jostled him into action.

“I just don’t have time now,” he said. “I’m slam busy at work; it’s the craziest time of the year. Why don’t you come up with a design, Jessie? I bet you could build it.”

“Last time I tried to use a hammer, I punched a hole in the drywall with it and you yelled at me not to pick one up, ever again,” I said.

He laughed. “Sweetie, I was just mad that day. I’ll tell you what…I’ll teach you some carpentry tricks. We’ll put up those stairs together.”

But that idea petered out too. He was too busy and I was too busy, and it was easier to use the ladder than spend time coming up with a solution. So, there we were.

<<<>>>

And here I sit, in front of the mirror, my stomach clenching into pretzel-like knots. What was I thinking? Why hadn’t I just gotten dressed in the kitchen? Then I wouldn’t have to shimmy down the stupid ladder in front of everyone. What will my date think?

The problem is, I don’t know this boy that well. He was just a kid in my chemistry class. A cute kid, one that made me blush every time he even glanced my way, but I’d never really talked to him. I didn’t have the nerve to try. So, when he approached my table at lunch two weeks ago and asked me to the prom, I had blurted out “yes” so fast the milk I’d been drinking almost blurted out my nose.

Now I’m rethinking my quick acceptance to his invitation. I hadn’t thought through the consequences. Like him picking me up at my old barn-house with the rooms that have drywall up but no paint on them yet, the half-tiled bathroom, and the nonexistent stairs. The Prom—the most important night of any kid’s high school experience—is our very first date. What was I thinking? What kind of desperate person says “yes” to the prom with a boy she hasn’t even gone out to the movies with yet? And what kind of girl meets her prom date by climbing down a rickety ladder in a fancy dress?

The idea of changing back into jeans and a sweat shirt flits through my head. But then I hear my mother’s high-pitched, snorting laughter and my father’s grating guffaws and wonder what sort of embarrassing childhood story they might be regaling my date with, and I decide climbing down that ladder won’t be as humiliating and leaving that poor boy alone with my parents.

I vacate the safety of my bedroom and climb down the ladder.

Mom hasn’t even attempted to surreptitiously move my date into another room where he can’t see me make my grand entrance. She still standing with him in the foyer. They’re both laughing at something she’s said. Dad has his cell phone pulled out, and he begins snapping pictures as soon as my foot hits the first rung. I’m too busy making sure I don’t slip to yell at him to stop.

I land on my feet. No torn dress, no sprained ankle. I turn and force a smile on my face, and say, “Hi!”

His eyes sparkle, and he has a goofy grin on his face, “Wow!” he says, “That’s the best entrance ever!”

And then he insists on climbing the ladder. Because he may be my prom date, and we may be going to a grown-up restaurant before we hit the dance floor, but he’s still seventeen. And ladders are fun, if you aren’t worried about ripping a dress.

“I meant to have the stairs done,” Dad says, “but I just got too busy. Jessie was going to try to finish them, but she hasn’t practiced enough with the hammer.”

My date shimmies back down the ladder. “I love building things,” he says to me. “Maybe we can both work on it. If you’d be okay with that.”

I smile. The pretzel-like knots in my stomach have relaxed and untangled themselves. “Sounds great,” I say. “That’s a date.”