Personal Narrative Draft (just a day late, but better than never.)

On the Worst Possible Night

            “Guys, did you hear?” asked the girl sitting across from me as I slid into my seat in photography class. It was the Monday morning after senior prom; the bell had barely rung to announce the start of another school day and already gossip was flying through the air. I smiled and began pulling out a folder while students all over the classroom, eager to hear the news, turned in our direction, leaned expectantly toward my neighbor, and asked the inevitable “what?”

            “So while my date and I were in line Saturday night for prom pictures, this girl in the line ahead of us just passed out.”

            I froze with the folder halfway out of my backpack, not daring to look up yet.

            “Yeah, I think that she went to the hospital! Someone said she hit her head pretty hard.”

            “I heard she got so drunk before prom even started, she passed out here at school.”

            “I wonder who it was?”

            The last one I heard, that question, made me sit up straight and finish pulling out my folder while a slow grin crept over my face. “I know who it was.” Everyone in the room went quiet and suddenly all my classmates and even the teacher were looking my way. With what had to have been a sheepish look, I admitted “Guys, that was me.”

            Early Saturday morning I woke up, expecting to feel the normal excited buzz that came with the knowledge prom was just a couple hours away. Not just any prom either: this was my senior prom. Yet as I swung my legs out of bed I realized something was wrong; my head felt fuzzy, and my stomach hurt. But anticipation for the night ahead made me brush it aside.

            As the day wore on my hair, make-up and nails started coming together, but I didn’t. At a point I realized something was really wrong. Yet I was determined that whatever bug  or virus I’d caught, too bad for them because I was a seventeen-year-old girl who was not going to miss prom. That’s the state my mom found me in on the couch, wearing sweats and an old tee shirt, right as my date was knocking on the door. With a lot of stalling on her and my dad’s part, I managed to sneak over to my bedroom and change while they kept my date occupied.

            Walking out of my room I had never felt so great; I loved my crazy floral-print mermaid dress and it looked awesome; my hair was perfect. My date gave me an appraising once-over, then raised his eyes to mine and beamed. Instead of beaming back, I suddenly knew I was about to throw up. Luckily for me I ran to the bathroom, because that’s exactly what happened.

            Twenty minutes later, despite having thrown up three more times, we were headed to the high school, where everyone met to take pictures and load onto the buses that would bring us to the actual prom location.. My date and I slapped high fives or ran to hug other friends, respectively, as we made our way to the line of done-up teenagers snaking from the gym where pictures were. We found our group laughing and joking, so we joined them while we waited. In the stone corridor connecting the gym and hallway I suddenly found myself getting dizzy and everything started spinning. With concern, my date grabbed my hand and asked repeatedly, “are you ok?” Every time I smiled and replied that of course I was, although I clearly was not. He was unconvinced; yet being a teenager heard a funny comment and turned away from me, laughing, then turned back as he felt my hand leave his in time to see me hit the floor, unconscious.

            Waking up on the cold, dusty gym floor is not a pleasant experience to have, especially when immediately afterwards you find yourself throwing up into a nasty king-sized school trash can. It was a confusing scene, with my date holding my hand and face while asking “are you ok? What can I do? What do you need?”; behind him a friend and her parents were watching me like a hawk ( as I later learned, her dad- who is the size of a bouncer- was the one who carried me into the gym after I passed out); nearby I saw another friend crying hysterically, wailing something about me dying. Then the principle lurking nearby saw that I was awake.

             “Don’t worry sweetie, the ambulance is on the way!”

            At that, I balked. I was still throwing up but I was not going to leave the high school in an ambulance. I had my date call my parents, who showed up and convinced the principle that they would just take me home and that the hospital wasn’t really necessary. I managed to stop throwing up long enough for my date and I to take the requisite arms-around-each-other prom pictures, and then we made a quick escape.

            I spent senior prom night, what felt like the pinnacle of my four year-long social life, on my couch with my prom date watching Remember the Titans. I was devastated. Over and over I apologized to him until finally he said “Kaley, it’s really not that big of a deal. Life goes on.”

            As I lay there eating saltine crackers and trying not to lose them, I thought I might be holding the hand of the wisest seventeen-year old boy on the planet. Until this point I had never really thought about what would happen after high school; after receiving my diploma, there was this giant blank in my mind. Because of that, I had built high school and all the events in, like prom, up so much that when something went wrong, like missing prom, it felt like my whole life fell apart. And food poisoning wasn’t very fun, but I also had a true gentleman there keeping me company. Suddenly I smiled, glad that not everyone was as shortsighted as me.

            “Your right; it does.”