The 2020 Prom, Held at the 2025 Class Reunion by Celia Knapp

No amount of strobe lighting or pineapple White Claw could make Brendan Dixon look like anything other than the face of death. He is still the color of cornstarch, still proportioned like Gumby, still chronically dehydrated so his spit hangs in pillars between his teeth whenever he opens his mouth to speak. I wish he wouldn’t.

I used to think his words could fix something in me. That time, in his basement, when he said I was too quiet. He said he knew how to get me to open up, the way he knew how to uncork a wine bottle with a shoe. In calc that Monday, Laura Erlanger told me that she heard I looked good naked. She tilted her head like I was supposed to fight her. Instead, I did nothing, like the winter I lost a button off my coat and walked around at loose ends with a gaping hole over my chest. The world moved on.

Now, we are back in the gym, and an under-filled balloon is falling from the rafters, bouncing off a gold-and-blue banner before settling in a shadow next to the bleachers. We Made It!, the banner tells me.

“It’s so nice that they did this for us,” Laura says.

If they’d asked me what I wanted, if there’d been a school survey on recompense, I wouldn’t have asked for a prom. I would have said, take back those weeks you made us come to school and Kayleigh’s mom died and we never talked about why. Who made that happen? It’s somewhere between nobody and everybody. Don’t say it wasn’t you.

But maybe I wouldn’t have said anything. Because that would mean I’d have to put myself on the scales of justice and declare that I have weight.

I learned there is a Korean term, han, for the rage and sorrow from a million unrepaired injustices across generations, a tsunami that sloshes around inside you and your descendants forever. When my daughter’s daughter’s daughter straps herself into too-tight heels to sway around her high school gym, will this feeling be there, too?

---

CELIA KNAPP — Celia Ampel Knapp is the co-author of The Self-Confidence Workbook (Althea Press). She is a former journalist whose work has appeared in the Miami Herald, the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Oklahoman, Law.com, the South Florida Business Journal, and Tucson Weekly. Celia is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. Find her online at celiaknapp.com.

Art by ALAINA HAMMOND — Alaina is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, short stories, and paintings have been published both online and in print. Publications include Nomad’s Choir Poetry Journal, The Word’s Faire, Littoral Magazine, Spinozablue, Third Wednesday Magazine, [Alternate Route], Paddler Press, Verse-Virtual, Macrame Literary Journal, Route 7 Review, Sublunary Review, Quail Bell Magazine, Assignment Literary Magazine, Superpresent, and Jelly Squid. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.