Page 59 of One to Watch

“You look so pretty.” He smiled shyly as she approached him, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

“You too,” she sputtered, suddenly very aware of the onlookers surrounding them.

“I got this for you.” He held out a plastic box, and Bea felt like they were reenacting a memory she didn’t have as she held out her wrist and he slipped on the red rose corsage. “Well, the producers did. It’s nice, though, don’t you think?”

Bea kissed his cheek and agreed that it was.

“Aren’t you chivalrous,” Bea joked as he held open the limo door, and he blushed bright red. Even though Wyatt was ruggedly handsome, the total picture of idealized Marlboro Man masculinity, there was something fragile about him—something Bea couldn’t explain but instinctively felt she needed to protect. It was a bizarre sensation, particularly since the rest of the men in the house could seem like a many-headed Hydra, different faces of one monster ready to attack.

“What was your prom like?” Bea asked when they were in the limo and en route to her old high school, two cameras rolling to capture their conversation.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt admitted. “I stayed home.”

“Really?” Bea was taken aback. “But you were on the football team, right? In our school, those guys were like kings.”

“I wasn’t really part of that,” Wyatt demurred. “The other guys—we got along and everything, but we didn’t really spend time together outside practice.”

“Why not?” Bea was genuinely curious.

Wyatt shrugged. “Different interests.”

“Oh,” Bea replied, wanting to know more, but not about to pry.

“What about you?” He nudged her knee. “I’ll bet you were the best-dressed girl at your prom.”

Bea shook her head. “I didn’t go either.”

“How come?”

“No one to go with.” Bea sighed. “I was friends with the theater tech kids; we were kind of antisocial. School dances were so not their scene.”

“But you wanted to go, didn’t you?”

Bea felt her chest tighten. She didn’t just want to go—she’d been absolutely desperate.

“I made my stepdad tape Pretty in Pink off cable, and I watched it over and over,” Bea confessed. “I thought Andie was so brave, going to prom alone. But she was beautiful, and all these guys secretly loved her. If I went to prom alone, everyone would have laughed.”

“Why did you think that?” Wyatt coaxed gently. “Were people at your school mean to you?”

Bea thought back to another football player—blond and tall, like Wyatt, but where Wyatt was gentle, he’d been rough. Where Wyatt was warm and inquisitive, he’d been cold and indifferent, his existence a daily punishment for Bea having had the audacity to have feelings for him.

“No.” Bea smiled as she lied. “They were fine.”

Cheshire High’s real prom wasn’t until late May—that would be a rubbery chicken dinner at a local banquet venue with ostentatious carpets and faux gilt chandeliers. This “prom,” staged for the purpose of this week’s episode, was a bonus dance funded by the Main Squeeze production. The Cheshire High School gym, scene of many of Bea’s athletic humiliations and faked period cramps to avoid the same, was decked out with streamers, balloons, and swirls of rainbow-colored spotlights, and filled to the brim with high school kids in off-brand formalwear dancing to the music of some band no one had heard of (whose label had surely paid for this opportunity to get them on TV). The band—which was actually pretty good, Bea noted, punky women in black lipstick and torn fishnets—was playing on a makeshift stage the crew had constructed under one of the basketball nets, illuminated by heavy production lights.

Bea and Wyatt waited to make their big entrance in a far less glamorous location: the gym’s equipment closet, lined with smelly pinnies and stacks of basketballs.

“Are you nervous?” Wyatt asked her.

“A little,” Bea admitted. “Teenagers are terrifying.”

Wyatt looked wan; Bea realized he was considerably more tense than she was. The band finished its song, and Bea and Wyatt’s field producer ushered them into place for their entrance. They heard thunderous applause as Johnny took the stage and shouted, “Cheshire High, how are you doing tonight?”

The kids cheered gamely, and in a matter of moments, the producer was shoving Bea and Wyatt through the door and into the gym, where they pushed toward the stage despite a blinding spotlight and what felt like a throng of screaming fans, light and noise pressing in on them from every angle.

“Give it up for Cheshire’s own Bea Schumacher!” Johnny shouted as Bea and Wyatt ascended the stairs to the little stage, and the kids applauded. “So, Bea, I understand you never went to a dance when you were in high school. What do you think of your very first prom?”

Bea heard some snarky murmurs from the kids—terrific, one more moment of feeling like a loser in the Cheshire High gym.