Page 8 of The Promposal

“Still there.”

Jennifer let out a frustrated sound. “I can’t move my vowels!”

“Does that mean you’re consonated?” Dad asked, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes so hard that I almost detached my retinas. He’d always been into stupid dad jokes, but since he’d started dating Jennifer, he’d taken his puns to a whole new terrible level. The kind that made me want to deny any genetic link between us whatsoever.

But even I had to admit that my father and my favorite art teacher were a match made in dork heaven.

“So you actually saw Bradley Debeer’s promposal?” Ella asked Jennifer.

“What’s a promposal?” my dad interrupted. He looked completely confused, which made sense given that he was generally clueless about most things in life since he spent so much time in his art studio. He rarely, if ever, got my and Ella’s cultural references.

“It’s an elaborately staged request to be someone’s date to the prom. The more creative and outlandish, the better,” Jennifer responded.

“Whatever happened to the good old days? Asking was never that complicated for us.”

I slid his bowl of pretzels toward me. “Was that back when you lit a bonfire on top of the hill and hoped your date could interpret your smoke signals?”

He gave me a disgruntled frown. “I’m not that old.”

“Ask him to tell you about how people used to beep him on his pager, and he’d have to call them back on a landline or a pay phone,” Jennifer said, her voice light and teasing.

“I don’t even know what any of those words mean.”

My dad added an “ING” to the “ANNOY” already on the board, giving me a pointed look. “I meant where your best friend asks her best friend if she would go to prom with you. No need to ... what did that Brian kid do again?”

“Bradley,” Ella corrected him.

Jennifer laid down a single tile to pluralize a word. “He painted Van Gogh’sThe Starry Nightbut turned the stars into the lettersP,R,O, andM.”

Wow. That was some dedication.

“So did the girl agree to Van Gogh with him?” My father looked far too pleased with himself, and I refrained from groaning out loud from the pain he was causing my eardrums with his stupid jokes.

“She did,” Jennifer said.

Ella spelled out the word “SWIFT” from a “W” tile already on the board. “That’s not nearly as exciting as Pedro Franklin’s promposal. He used lighter fluid to spell out ‘Go to prom with me?” in the street in front of Jenna’s house.”

“This already sounds potentially bad,” I said.

“Yep. When he lit it on fire, it burned straight toward the driveway and caught both Pedro’s and Jenna’s dad’s cars on fire. Apparently, the bottle he was using had a slow leak. I don’t think Jenna will be going with him.”

My father shook his head and mumbled something about “whole generation obsessed with being noticed thanks to their gratuitous self-promotion.”

I stood up. “Well, I’ve got some homework to finish.” Jake would call me in about an hour, and I wanted to be done with all my other stuff first.

“Your grandmother sent you a package,” my dad said as I leaned down to hug him good night. “It’s in the living room.”

I hadn’t even noticed it when I came in. My dad’s mom had passed away when I was little, but my maternal grandmother was this lovely, tiny Japanese woman that had inexplicably birthed my she-devil of a mother. My grandmother didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Japanese, and we had to rely on a translation app to communicate. She sent me gifts all the time. I pulled at the packing tape and got the box open. Inside was a beautiful, formal purple kimono with a garden scene in white and silver along the hem. It was good to know that she’d understood my last message to her about the prom. It was so sweet that she even matched the colors!

“That’s pretty,” Ella cooed as she perched on the couch next to me, running her fingertips along the silken edge of the kimono.

“Very pretty. I can’t wear it anywhere, but she really is the sweetest.” I’d have to send her a thank-you note before Jake called.

My dad’s laptop was next to the box, and I grabbed his computer, intending to send a note now before I forgot. By the time I got back to my room and waited for my computer to start up, it could slip my mind.

Not that that had ever happened to me before.

Okay, at least six times.

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