Middle Aged Prom Dress #8

Lael Littke's Prom Dress: Chapter Eight

May 04, 2023

Hi, friends,

Welcome back to my deep dive into YA horror of the ‘80s and ‘90s!

If you’d like to start from the beginning of my Prom Dress coverage, the first seven installments are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

My recapping of Christopher Pike’s Slumber Party starts here.

Scholastic Point edition of Lael Littke’s *Prom Dress*

Miss Feldstrom herself brought the letter to Robin. She and Cynthie came together, smiling tentatively as they peered into the room.

—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke

Scene One: Back with Robin at the hospital

Lael Littke has proved herself to be an ABSOLUTE STINKER: She switched focus back to ole Robin, leaving Felicia stranded out in the cold, dark night, maybe barefoot and wearing her boyfriend’s Dean’s wife’s stolen clothes.

Which makes me think of a W.P. Kinsella short story I read a million years ago that involved Flannery O’Connor answering a knock at the door, only to be confronted by one of her characters, who said—I’m paraphrasing, like I said, it’s been a million years—WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE ME THERE LIKE THAT, WHAT KIND OF MONSTER ARE YOU?

Apologies, I digress—but I will warn you that I’ve scanned ahead, and there is more action in my digression than in the entirety of chapter eight. Onward!!

Miss Feldstrom, Robin’s dance instructor, and Cynthie come to visit. Cynthie is her usual bubbly and Jokey Smurf self, and Miss Feldstrom tries to lighten the mood similarly, but every time she does it, it just FALLS. FLAT.

She keeps trying, though, and it’s all very embarrassing for everyone involved, including the reader.

The major reason they’ve come to visit is so that Miss Feldstrom can tell Robin that she’s won the dance scholarship, and that the university is willing to hold it for her until she’s back up and dancing. Given the extent of her injuries, that announcement goes over about as well as you’d expect:

Robin turned back to them and stared silently at Miss Feldstrom. Would they hold the scholarship for a lifetime? Or would they let her come and dance in a wheelchair? Why had they ever bothered to send it? Why had Miss Feldstrom bothered to bring it?
“Oh, good,” she said bitterly. “I’ll put taps on my wheels.”

Miss Feldstrom makes some noises about the possibility of Robin being a dance coach, but the whole situation is just so uncomfortable that Cynthie jumps in and starts talking about Robin’s Gorgeous Prom Dress and heads to the closet to bring it out to show to Miss Feldstrom. Which leads to the one FRACTION OF A SUSPENSEFUL MOMENT in the entire chapter:

“Fer sure, fer sure.” Cynthie walked over and put her hands on the closet doorknob just as a businesslike nurse bustled into the room.

It helps if you imagine Jaws music.

Anyway, thus distracted, Cynthie does NOT open the closet, so the Lack of Dress is not discovered.

The nurse—who is NOT, obviously, Felicia—offers Miss Feldstrom and Cynthie hospital food as a way of clearing them out. Which, points to Lael Littke, is pretty funny. Although I’d love to know how much Robin would have been charged if they’d taken her up on the offer.

Dammit, Cynthie, it’s 4AM and now I want a cheeseburger:

“I just remembered an urgent appointment at the Golden Arches.” Cynthie headed for the door. “I’ll smuggle in a Big Mac for you if you want,” she stage-whispered to Robin.

And yes, I mostly just included that because she says “fer sure,” which made me laugh. Out of everyone we’ve met in this ridiculous book, I think Cynthie and Gabrielle are the only ones I could POSSIBLY handle being around in real life?

Robin was dancing alone on a brightly lit stage, pirouetting across the gleaming floor for an audience of one — Tyler. Tyler sat in the dim, cavernous auditorium and clapped his approval as she completed each maneuver of her intricate dance.

—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke

Scene Two: DREAM! SEQUENCE!

Robin’s dream begins with the image quoted above, but quickly shifts into Nightmare Mode, with Miss Catherine appearing behind Tyler, in the way back of the balcony:

“Give me my golden arm,” she whispered, and suddenly she was in a front seat of the balcony. “Give me my golden arm,” she cried out.

And then Miss Catherine flashes forward again—it’s very late-90s-early-00s Asian horror—and attacks Robin directly:

Now Miss Catherine was right on stage with her, tearing at the lacy, cream-colored dress Robin wore. She couldn’t get away from the tearing hands. Her feet had turned to lead.

She calls to Tyler for help, and is clearly talking in her sleep, because his voice in the dream morphs into his voice in real life, and she wakes up and has a big cry and then they’re barfily schmoopy for a while but I’ll spare you.

After Tyler left, Robin cried again because it was all make-believe, with no more substance than her dream. She wouldn’t be hiking or dancing. That wasn’t what Dr. Blake had said, exactly, but he’d showed her X rays of her feet. He’d explained about the hundreds of tiny bones in the feet and said jokingly that brain surgery was a snap compared to foot surgery.

Lotta comedians in this hospital, yeesh.

As always, after he’s gone, Robin’s thoughts turn to WHEN IS TYLER GOING TO LEAVE ME:

What had happened to Miss Catherine’s beau after Rowena threw the acid that scarred her face? Had he stayed true to her? Or had he been repulsed by the ugly scar? Did he turn away from Catherine after her beauty was gone, leaving her to spend her life alone?

Which honestly isn’t all that different from what she felt like BEFORE the accident—she was constantly ready for him to bop off to greener pastures.

Gabrielle came about twenty minutes after Tyler left. She entered the room pink-cheeked, saying she’d been talking to Tyler in the hospital lobby.

—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke

Scene Three: Visiting with Gabby

Robin tells Gabby about her nightmare, and Gabby immediately recognizes it:

Gabrielle laughed. “That’s from the old ghost story Daddy used to tell us. Remember? The one where the man steals a golden arm from a corpse and then the dead guy follows him all over asking for it?”

Which, not the point, but I HAVE QUESTIONS. The major one being: Wouldn’t a gold arm be ridiculously heavy? If I learned anything from Arrested Development, it’s that gold weighs a lot. A prosthetic arm made of gold just seems INCREDIBLY impractical.

Gabby gives Robin a Crucial Update from the homefront:

“Miss Catherine’s back, by the way.” Gabby stood up and paced over to the window where she stood for a moment, looking out. “She called yesterday to see when you were coming back to work. I told her what happened to you. She didn’t ask about the dress, so I guess she was more concerned about you than it.

Robin gets all squirrelly about everything. Obviously Gabby notices because she’s one of the few Actually Sentient Characters in this book, and so Robin explains it away as concern about the minor damage to the dress, but THEN, in the SAME PARAGRAPH, we get this:

Fervently she wished she’d taken Gabrielle into her confidence before Miss Catherine had come back. Maybe Gabby could have sneaked it back up to its hiding place in the attic. She knew Miss Catherine was going to be furious. It was going to be a long time before Robin could walk up those stairs — if ever.

LITERALLY NOTHING IS STOPPING YOU FROM TELLING HER NOW, ROBIN. THIS IS SO DUMB, and right along the lines of books/movies that pull this nonsense:

Character A: I have to tell you someth-
*random interruption*
Character B: What were you saying?
Character A, obviously lying: Never mind, it was nothing.

I HATE THAT, UGHHHHHH. So lazy.

Oh no, I’m digressing again, sorry. Back to Robin and Gabby.

Gabby’s like, SPEAKING OF YOUR DRESS’S INJURIES, and pulls out a sewing kit. And then they do some back-and-forth about who is going to actually do the sewing—Gabby was planning on leaving the kit with Robin, Robin suggests that Gabby do it because she has “talented fingers”—and the most interesting thing that comes up during THAT exchange is this:

Gabby liked to read biographies of her favorite composers and was always complaining that nobody but Tyler ever wanted to hear about the things she’d read.

Which, AGAIN—RETCON ALERT??—feels NOTHING like the Tyler from the first chapter.

But EVENTUALLY, Gabby opens the closet door and they FINALLY discover that it’s gone:

The dress couldn’t be gone. But Robin could see with her own eyes that it was, and no amount of staring into the closet was going to make it materialize.

They call the Businesslike Nurse:

Mrs. Hill returned. “There’s no record of anyone moving your dress, Robin. But I did find out that Felicia Martin was on duty the night you were brought in. She must have put the dress somewhere. We’ll find out when she comes in tomorrow.” That settled, Nurse Hill went out again.

Immediately after that, we get this, which makes me think we’re about to go in a direction that I really didn’t think we were going to go in:

Gabby didn’t stay much longer. She seemed nervous. Fidgety. As if someone was waiting outside for her.
Tyler? Was Tyler waiting to drive her home?
But Gabby wouldn’t do that to her. She wouldn’t flirt with Tyler while Robin was helpless. Would she?

Sooooooo, on one hand, a Tyler/Gabby pairing might parallel whatever happened with Miss Catherine and Rowena—though we still don’t have the whole story there. But on the OTHER, Gabby is *checks notes* FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, so maybe everyone involved, including Lael Littke, should take a deep breath and consider their life choices.

She slept again. She was running this time, not dancing. She was running down a long corridor, with doors on each side. They were all closed. Then the corridor slanted upwards, and Robin ran until her heart wanted to leap out of her body. She came to Miss Catherine’s attic, to the door of the dark little closet under the eaves. As she stood panting, the door creaked open. Miss Catherine was there, standing among the cobwebs, the right side of her face smiling. She reached out for Robin, whose feet suddenly felt as if they were nailed to the floor.

—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke

Scene Four: ANOTHER! DREAM! SEQUENCE!

In her dream, Miss Catherine demands her golden arm again, and THEN:

The [sic] the scar on her face faded, to be replaced by a dark red splotch, which covered her entire left cheek, and Robin knew that it was Rowena there in the dismal closet.
Rowena, who was criminally insane.

I don’t know how Lael Littke restrained herself from using an exclamation point there. Obviously, it SHOULD have read:

Rowena, who was criminally! INSANEEEEEE!!!!!!

And then some ghost noises.

(Cripes, I’m TRYING to make my own fun here.)

Okay, so what do you think the odds are that Miss Catherine is ACTUALLY ROWENA, and that she acid-faced HERSELF in order to obscure her identifying birthmark? I can think of like 90 plot holes that would create, but I don’t think that would stop our Intrepid Author.

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