Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay

acceptable.
    Already people were pairing off. Bernard Leeson, who would do anything for an A, within a week had asked Jessica Schneck. Even girls who hadn’t yet been asked were spending hours after school at Nancy’s Look Great! Shop, examining rainbows of eyeshadow, requesting special antiperspirant for delicate fabrics, researching nail polish and face powder and adhesive cups that could keep anyone’s breasts perky under a strapless dress for up to eighteen hours. There were lipsticks that doubled as blush, and hair rollers you heated up before clipping them in. Mack heard all about these innovations during gym class, where, adorned in team pinnies soaked with the previous classes’ sweat, the girls formed little gangs in the outfield to discuss whether they wanted baby’s breath or ivy in their corsages.
    When it came to boys like Mack, Madame Lipsky appeared to expect them to take their time. But one Friday she told the class, “We have a problem.”
    The students braced themselves for another assignment.
    Carmine Bocchino, Madame Lipsky explained, had asked five girls and still didn’t have a date.
    Carmine wasn’t even in their French class. He had a speech impediment and was in the “slow” track. But the kids in the “slow” track were constantly picking on him, because he was short and scrawny and talked funny. And so he didn’t really have any friends. In fact, no one had ever given him any thought at all until the business about the prom.
    Within minutes it was clear to everyone in Fourth Year French what the problem was: Carmine had reached far out of his league. First he had asked Natalie Lopez, the editor of the school paper, who was petite and extremely pretty and not the sort of person even Mack would ever feel comfortable approaching. When Natalie called Carmine the next night to tell him an official No thank you (it had taken her a whole day to formulate a polite, well-worded rejection of just the right tone), Carmine waited approximately two minutes before phoning Trini Prince, who had starred in every single school play except
The Man Who
Came to Dinner
(and that was only because she had mononucleosis that semester). Trini, too, asked Carmine if she could call him back, and, after practicing the lines briefly, delivered her refusal in a kindly and optimistic yet firm manner.
    At school the next morning, Carmine had cornered Molly Lang, the star of the girls’ basketball team (and a good foot taller than Carmine); she told him she was waiting for “a special someone.” And so Carmine had moved on to Geraldine Crowley, the head cheerleader, and when she said a flat-out Sorry, no, went straight to Belle Gardner, who was seven months pregnant yet hadn’t lost her habit of threatening to beat up anyone who annoyed her. She told Carmine that if he didn’t get away from her that second she would beat him up.
    All of these facts emerged in a matter of minutes, as the girls of Fourth Year French began sharing information they had promised never to reveal to anyone.
    “Natalie told me right afterward; she couldn’t believe he had the nerve to ask her.”
    “Trini was so shocked, she had to rehearse her lines with me.”
    “Geraldine was totally grossed out; we had to go buy her some aspirin.”
    “I was right there at my locker when Belle grabbed him by his shirt.”
    (No one could figure out, though, who Molly Lang’s “special someone” might be.)
    But with Madame Lipsky so concerned, no one dared make fun of Carmine. No one said he had been foolish to ask all the school’s best girls. After all, wasn’t he doing what all the boys wished they could? They forgot that they had ever thought of him as ridiculous. His predicament began to seem, even to them, slightly tragic.
    Now the Fourth Year French girls who didn’t have dates were preparing polite rejections, trying them out on one another, since it seemed you never knew when or where Carmine might pop up. Madame Lipsky told them to