sarahsaturday

I never wanted to be the prom queen.

Where I grew up, in a town of about 10,000 people in the middle of Wisconsin, prom was as typical as it gets: blonde-haired, blue-eyed football star and the head cheerleader with the impossibly skinny legs being crowned while nerds and castaways stand dateless on the edge of the gym, glaring on.

I remember going to the prom my sophomore year, watching them crown the king and queen: they looked like Barbie and Ken, which was the farthest thing from my style or my scene. It never occurred to me that one year later I might be standing up there while Barbie put a crown on MY head.

So ten months later, when they started passing out the ballots for our junior class to elect candidates to the court, I didn’t think anything of it. The first round of voting was for the guys, and I wrote in my good friend Steve.

Steve was one of my best friends and we were part of a close-knit group of friends in our class, sometimes nicknamed “Snow White and The Seven Dwarves.” We had found each other starting in junior high school and by our junior year of high school had solidified into an inseparable unit.

What set us apart from the other groups and cliques in school was that we centralized ourselves, and befriended EVERYONE.

We had the class president, the lead singer of the band, the guy who wore eyeliner and tutus to school, the book-smart guy who had all the secret hookups, the snowboarder/skater kid, the artist, and then Steve: the industrial theater kid with dyed black hair and Joy Division shirts. And me.

I was all over the board in high school: I played bass in a rock band, was on the basketball and tennis teams, dabbled in band and choir, loved art and creative writing, and got in trouble from time to time for my anti-establishment tendencies (like petitioning against firing progressive teachers, or being late to homeroom almost every single day).

Together, our little clan had somehow managed to unite the different groups of kids in our class, and it wasn’t that weird to see jocks and art geeks and punks sitting at the same table during lunch. So when it was announced a couple of weeks later that the votes had been counted and my good friend Steve had been nominated for prom court, nobody was that surprised.

The surprising part came next. The now-nominated guys needed to pick the girls they wanted to join them on prom court. Several agonizing days went by, during which all the guys were talking to their friends and figuring out who would be best-suited to join each of them in the race for the crown. I still didn’t consider that Steve might ask me, even though we were such close friends. I guess I figured I was just “one of the guys.” So when he did ask me, I was blown away, but touched by the gesture and happily accepted.

Plans for prom started coming together; I found a dress that I loved and decided to ask my very first boyfriend-turned-friend to be my date for the big night. Our gang decided we’d host our own after-prom party at our friend’s parents’ farmhouse where we could be loud and stay up late and have plenty of couches to sleep on. Being that none of us liked typical approaches to old clichés, we didn’t get a limo or go to fancy dinners. My date and I went to one of our favorite restaurants and met up with everyone at the dance.

The final voting for the prom king and queen had ended the day before the dance, but Steve and I had already decided that there was no way we’d be voted the winners. While we got along great with most people in our class, the odds were against us with several other couples in the court being the typical blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauties and the obvious next-of-kin to last year’s Barbie and Ken.

But we were happy just to be part of the whole experience, and happy that our friends supported us so much and we were all there together.

Maybe that’s why, when we were all standing on the risers waiting for them to announce the king and queen, Steve and I were totally calm and just smiling about the irony of the whole situation, never expecting that we would hear our names over the loudspeakers.

And maybe that’s why, when we did hear our names, it didn’t register with either of us right away, and a full three or four seconds passed before we realized they had called US, and that everyone in the gymnasium was cheering for us, and that Barbie and Ken from last year’s prom were beckoning us down to accept our crowns.

It wasn’t the fact that we won that made the moment so surreal, and so moving. It was the fact that our class had elected the two least-likely people to represent them as their prom king and queen. In a tiny, off-the-map farm town that should have succumbed to stereotypical typecasting and run-of-the-mill high school plotlines, one high school class completely broke the rules and turned two ugly ducklings into swans, proving that people from all sides of the tracks can get along, be friends, appreciate each other’s differences, and promote individuality.

For those reasons, being prom queen meant something different to me; it showed me that there is hope for the character in human beings, and it made me proud to be my own, unique individual.