Middle Aged Prom Dress #9
Lael Littke's Prom Dress: Chapter Nine
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 eight installments are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
My recapping of Christopher Pike’s Slumber Party starts here.
Felicia didn’t stop to put her shoes on again. She could run better in her stocking feet anyway. If she was lucky, the bus would be there at the edge of the small campus, and she could get right on it. She’d take the dress back to the hospital and somehow get it into the closet in Robin’s room. Surely Robin would be asleep by now, and she could just tiptoe in and leave it.
—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke
Scene One: Run, Felicia, run
We have returned to Felicia, thank GOD, and no time has passed. She’s running away from Dean Goudy’s house in stolen clothes, barefoot, carrying the bag—also stolen—that contains her shoes and The Dress.
As she runs, she starts to reconsider her life choices:
The night air was making her more rational. Suddenly the whole thing didn’t sound like such a good idea any more. Maybe she should just go back and make up some story. What kind of story? What possible explanation could there be for her behavior?
I mean, if she was actually being rational, she’d just drop everything and move to another country. That’s clearly the only option at this point.
But she doesn’t turn around. She keeps running.
She hears someone chasing her, so she speeds up, makes it to the bus stop, and sprints right up onto the bus:
The bus driver grinned. “The cops after you, girlie?”
GIRLIE. What fresh horror is this, who even says that?
She chucks two dollars at him—he tells her he doesn’t make change and she’s like KEEP IT—and she makes her way to the mostly-empty back of the bus and collapses into a seat.
The bus was in semi-darkness. One of the overhead lights was out, and another one kept flickering on and off, making the movements of the passengers look jerky, like an old-time movie. It gave Felicia an eerie, disoriented feeling, but she hoped the darkness hid her frightened eyes and tear-streaked face.
—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke
Scene Two: On the bus
She sits there for a while and rehashes everything AGAIN—she has been doing this throughout, but I figured I’d spare you—and then she starts gaslighting HERSELF?
Could it have been her imagination? How could anything as beautiful as that dress be evil?
Semi-related interlude
Clearly Felicia never read that Berenstain Bears book about STRANGER DANGER with the perfect shiny apple that’s all rotten inside and the lumpy ugly apple that’s beautiful inside. And speaking of Stan and Jan Berenstain, never forget:
On the bus, continued
She opens the bag to reconsider the dress—she is surprised to see that it looks “crumpled and innocent,” rather than “glimmer[ing] with some devilish light of its own,” which makes her continue to question her own experience and perception. She thinks briefly about going BACK to the house, sneaking upstairs, putting the dress back ON, and then coming downstairs like nothing ever happened??
Thankfully, she decides against that course of action. She figures that she’ll get off the bus, walk the rest of the way to the hospital, return the dress, change into a spare uniform, ditch the stolen clothes, and then go home. Which won’t fix things with her boring boyfriend, but it’ll at least put out the Stolen Dress fire.
As she preps to get off the bus, she takes off the cap and drops it out the window—ah, the days when you could open a bus window—and roots around in the bag for her shoes.
She finds them… but she also finds a VELVET POUCH:
With trembling hands, Felicia opened the pouch. Inside was a strand of pearls and a pair of earrings. She touched the pearls. They felt slightly rough. These were not costume jewelry pearls. They were real. They were expensive.
Felicia groaned.
Same, Felicia. Same.
She zips up the bag and jams it under her seat. Rather understandably, she doesn’t even want to THINK about its existence at the moment, and how she is—as the book puts it—“a thief twice over,” which isn’t even counting Mrs. Goudy’s clothes.
This new development has her almost in a fugue state—she doesn’t get off the bus at the hospital—and she just sits there as the bus continues on its route. Eventually, she starts MOANING and CRYING, which seems likely to attract unwanted attention, but feelings are feelings. She is also rehashing everything AGAIN, which makes me wonder if Lael Littke had a page count to hit, because good lord.
EVENTUALLY:
The bus stopped again, and somebody got on. She felt the vibration of feet as they came running to the back of the bus.
“Felicia!”
She looked up. It was Mark.
After some back and forth with Mark and the bus driver and some dude from the party—it turns out to be Bill—she gets off the bus with them.
BUT SHE LEAVES THE BAG ON THE BUS.
Numbly, Felicia followed Mark and the other man off the bus. The bus shooshed off, and she saw Mark’s car standing on the other side of the street, its front doors open as if its occupants had gotten out in a hurry.
—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke
Scene Three: On the sidewalk
I really like the descriptor of the bus ‘shooshing’ off.
Felicia almost immediately realizes that she’s left the bag on the bus, and she makes up the most UNBELIEVABLE story to explain her actions:
“Mark. The man with the cap,” she said breathlessly. Thank goodness she’d had the sense to throw the cap away. “He took it. He made me take the dress off at the house and he put it in a blue bag that he found in a closet.”
Somehow, Felicia is able to come up with an answer to every question Mark and Bill ask:
Where’s the guy? Oh, he got off the bus a few stops back.
Why didn’t you ask the bus driver for help? I was too scared.
But we only saw one person running from the house? He made me run in the shadows.
Did he have a gun? …
That last question was from Bill—and reads a little BUT DIDN’T YOU FIGHT BACK to me, but is also kind of fair given that her story is PATENTLY ABSURD—but results in Mark getting protective of Ole Weepy Felicia, and so he cuts off the questioning and says that THE POLICE CAN HANDLE IT when they get back to Dean Goudy’s place.
Which leads to Felicia thinking:
The police! What did they do to you for lying to the police? Mentally, Felicia added perjury to her list of crimes.
Which, credit where it is due, made me laugh out loud.
The police were polite. That made it easier to lie. Felicia told her story of the intruder upstairs. She almost was beginning to believe it. She said she’d been feeling sick from a choking episode, which Mrs. Goudy verified. The man, who’d worn a cap, had been hiding in a closet and had demanded that she take off her obviously expensive dress, which he stuffed into a blue bag along with some other things.
—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke
Scene Four: In which the police officers are bigger dummies than Mark
I can’t even with the story that Felicia settled on— my major issue being WHY WOULD THIS DUDE ROB THE HOUSE NOT ONLY WHEN PEOPLE WERE HOME, BUT DURING A DINNER PARTY???—but she’s reached that point where she has told the story so many times that she’s almost starting to believe it, AND is maybe starting to ALMOST enjoy herself:
“Your shoes, too?” the taller of the policeman asked.
“Yes,” Felicia said smoothly. “I guess he didn’t want me to make noise when we went downstairs.”
The policeman nodded. Felicia congratulated herself on her adroit answer.
They contact the bus company—I guess it’s not a city department?—and the bus driver remembers Felicia being out of breath, that she’d paid double fare and had been carrying a bag, that someone at some point had been wearing a cap.
(Felicia tells everyone that she was carrying the bag because The Cap Man made her. Still imagining it as a poker visor, thank you Tanita.)
The driver checks the bus for the bag, but it’s GONE. (Which works for Felicia, because that tracks with her story about the guy getting off a few stops before Mark found her, but UH OH.)
The police are like WELP, SORRY YOUR HOUSE GOT ROBBED. They leave.
We end the scene with Felicia being enormously relieved and teetering on the brink of being smugly self-congratulatory—she’s not even all that worried about repercussions at the hospital, because apparently things get stolen there all the time, LOL. On one hand I get the relief, but on the other, I still find it hilarious given that three-quarters of this entire chapter has been her banging on about how her life is over.
Mark stayed a while when he took her home to her apartment.
—Prom Dress, by Lael Littke
Scene Five: Finally safe(???) at home
Mark offers to stay over—ON THE COUCH—but Felicia sends him home because:
Sometimes she talked in her sleep, especially after something traumatic happened.
Which begs the question: HOW DOES SHE KNOW THAT and how many Similarly Traumatic Things have happened to this woman?
As Mark leaves, he kisses her “tenderly” (barf) and tells her that the Dean thinks she’s “a real trooper,” and so does he.
CHUMPS!! THESE DUDES ARE CHUMPS!!
And the chapter ends:
Felicia smiled. She couldn’t believe things had worked out so well. Too well, actually. Somewhere there had to be a pit waiting for her. Sometime she would fall in and struggle to get out again. Suddenly she felt as if her web of lies was tightening around her the same way the dress had.
HER WEB OF LIES!! Never change, Lael Littke.
IS SHE GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT? IF SO, I HAVE SO. MANY. QUESTIONS.
Like: How much power does the dress have? Does it only really work if you’re wearing it? Is that why Felicia has largely—SO FAR—gotten out of this tangle without major injury? Did Robin suffer more violent consequences because she stole the dress directly from Miss Catherine? What is going to happen when she goes back to work? WHERE IS THE DRESS GOING TO END UP?? ARE WE EVER GOING TO GET BACK TO MISS CATHERINE???
WILL ANY OF THESE QUESTIONS BE ANSWERED NEXT WEEK, OR WILL LAEL LITTKE INTRODUCE YET ANOTHER PLOTLINE????????????
Talk soon,
Leila
I... I... feel ...robbed?
This chapter is just as DAZZLINGLY BANANA-PANTS as it can be, but the equally stratospheric levels of TSTL are kind of wearing me out. Some MAN abducts her and forces her into the Dean's wife's clothes? And takes her obviously fabulous dress? Which is fully believable to every dude in the room? (Where is a female police officer when you need one? Someone needs to give her BIG old side-eye.) Also, what fugue state must you be in to change clothes and then randomly STEAL A VELVET BAG OF PEARLS AND NOT NOTICE?
I mean...
And, she basically only got body-hugs and a little panic attack, but no crushed legs and terrible scars? COLOR ME CONFUSED!! Surely the dress is not done with its malevolence yet!!! Especially since now she's all smooth and smug and working my nerves. I mean, come ON, dress. What are you waiting for?
Yes. we have reached the sad point where I am fully ROOTING FOR THE DRESS. It was stolen from its cozy closet. It has the right to remain pissed.
Watch, the bus driver took it and lied about it (BEHOLD, THE POWER OF THE DRESS) and will be taking his best girl out tonight... and since it's going into a lower socio-economic strata, it's going to wreak real havoc.
Meanwhile, for Felicia, my slightly-more-than-horrible-suspicion is that Bill - isn't he Pastor McHandsy? - is going to Figure It Out and blackmail her, but I may need to remember this IS a YA novel...? And so she isn't going to be put at the mercy of a sexually harassing religious dude... right? I mean, only mauling and bloodshed is okay for America's children, yes? Yes.
Please bleach my eyeballs from seeing Stan and Jan seduction imagery ever, ever again. ::shudder::