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Brian Sloan is an independent filmmaker. His first feature, the screwball comedy I Think I Do, was praised by the New York Times as "hysterically funny and very smart." Brian broke onto the indie scene with the short film Pool Days, his NYU thesis project. Dealing with the sexual misadventures of a teenage lifeguard, the film screened at more than fifty film festivals, including Sundance and New Directors. Brian helped assemble a package of three short films (including Pool Days) around the theme of teen-agers coming out, Boys Life, which eventually spawned three sequels.

A Really Nice Prom Mess is his first novel. Brian lives in New York City.

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A Really Nice Prom Mess

Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

Chapter One

Virginia McKinley is a wild beauty.

That's exactly what I was thinking as she emerged from her bedroom and stood behind an elegant white railing on the second-story landing of her swank Georgetown mini manse. Virginia had untamed, naturally beautiful features, unsullied by hair, skin, or facial care products; a large square face, like a vintage movie star, accented by the sharp jawline of a supermodel and eyes that were the most dangerous looking orbs since Bette Davis. Up top was an explosion of unruly hair that was not merely a fiery shade of orange but, from a distance, looked like it truly could have been ablaze. And finally, draped over her tall, robust, and generously voluptuous form was an Oscar-worthy prom dress in red velvet (see Catherine Zeta-Jones) with a neckline that risked an NC-17. I mean, whoa! Bathed in the smoky rays of an early summer sunset streaming through the foyer, her porcelain skin glowing with the radiance of an old-school goddess, Virginia McKinley truly took my breath away. Honest. Which is not too bad, considering I'm totally gay.

All right, well, I guess not that totally if I was taking Virginia to the senior prom. But you know what? Attending a conservative, all-boys school in Washington, D.C., it's not like there's a lot of other options for a guy like me when it comes to the prom. Sure, I've read stories online about radical formals in left-leaning hamlets such as Seattle or San Francisco where these bold guys take each other to the main event. But Washington is seriously conservative, and not just because President Bush is in charge. I mean, let's be real here....It's not like there were dude couples macking to Mariah on the dance floor during the Clinton years. Please!

So that said, you must be wondering what the hell I was doing going on a fake date to the prom anyway. This is the new millennium and all, and you'd think people would be over that sorta fifties Rock Hudson, playing-it-straight crap. Well, you know what? I am totally with you on that one. This whole prom thing was not my idea. Honest. I mean, I have nothing against the prom per se as an institutional rite of passage. I'm not some Starbucks-smashing anarchist who wants to firebomb the Marriott ballroom or something in protest of the hypocrisy of male-female slow dancing in a world where love is a whole lot more complicated (and generally, like, faster) than that.

Actually, I have to admit that in theory I'm fond of the prom. In fact, I'm a bit of a sucker for a good tacky high school prom movie. You know the genre: Down to You, Never Been Kissed, Pretty in Pink, etc. But let's be real here; those movies are about as honest as your average member of Congress. It's a fantasy, people! The reality of the prom is not so pretty in pink or turquoise or lavender....It's just pretty terrible. C'mon, you've heard the stories. (Hell, you've probably lived some of them.) Anyway, here's a few that pop to mind: the poor band geek who has to ask about ten girls before some tragic junior on the Potomac Forensics Team says yes; the insecure rich chick who buys her Stella McCartney gown at Nordstrom's, only to have her intended say it looks "kinda weird"; longtime steadies who plan their prom night like it's their friggin' wedding, only to have one of them drink too much and puke all over the back of the limo, causing a melodramatic breakup and ruining any chance of their getting hitched for real. Okay -- do you want me to go on? I mean, seriously, do you really think anything approaching romance happens at the goddamn prom?!

Sorry -- I'm getting a little hysterical. You see, I'm still a bit raw over the events that transpired on the evening of June 6, a.k.a. prom night. Though a couple weeks have passed, I'm still trying to piece it all together. It was absolutely insane. What -- you think I'm being all exaggerated and über-dramatic? Oh, I wish it were the case.

If you think those previous anecdotes about the prom are scary, what happened to me is downright frightening. If you take those tales and multiply all of them by 10 and add about five other tangential incidents, that might begin to approach the manner in which my wonderful night at the senior prom devolved from the highest romance imaginable to the most utter chaos in just under five hours flat. And that's not even getting into the part where the police got involved. Or the strippers. But I'm really getting ahead of myself.

So let's get back to Virginia, where I left her, standing at the top of the stairs. Where, in major retrospect, I probably should have left her. You see, the first hint of trouble was when Virginia tried to come down those stairs. To put it nicely, she was a little wobbly. I know, I know -- Virginia's a statuesque girl wearing vertiginous heels, and is relatively new to this adult balancing act that began with her debut at the Mayflower Hotel last November. I should have cut her some slack. Let the record show, I did. Until, that is, she tripped over her own left foot and went down.

"Virginia," I said, rushing up to her, sprawled out over five steps. "Are you okay?"

"Shit," she said, reaching for one of her Jimmy Choo's that had escaped the grip of her big, floppy foot. "What do you think, asshole?"

What did I think? Asshole? Let's see...uh, the first thing I thought was that her severe tone of voice and mildly abusive language were not really the nicest way to address her prom date, even if he was a big homo.

"Oh my god -- Virginia!"

That was Virginia's mother. On hearing her daughter's collapse, Mrs. McKinley came racing in from the kitchen, a highball in one hand and a copy of Town & Country in the other. She was an equally tall woman with similarly reddish hair, except that hers, whipped into a curly meringue and radiating a color found only on Mars, was clearly a wig.

"What happened?"

Huffily, Virginia pushed herself up on her elbows.

"What does it look like, Mother?"

Given Mrs. McKinley's mortified look on Virginia's use of the same venomous tone of voice with her, I offered an answer.

"She, uh, she tripped."

"I told you those heels were too high for you, Virginia."

As she went up to help her daughter, bad morphed into worse when Mrs. McKinley tripped on the stairs as well. The magazine went flying but miraculously the drink barely sloshed as the lady of the house went down, losing one of her flats in the process. It was a pretty remarkable feat, this saving of the booze. I thought to myself, Hmmm, maybe Virginia's mother is a woman who has had some experience falling down with a cocktail.

"Jesus Christ, Mother!" said Virginia, standing up now and slipping her Choo back on while clinging tightly to the ornately carved handrail. "You're gonna spill all over my Armani. Gimme that."

Virginia reached for the tumbler, snatching it out of her mother's hand. Flustered, her mother tried to pretend that this hadn't happened, attempting to finesse the snatch with a question.

"Would you like a sip, darling?"

Ignoring this moot question, Virginia turned toward me with a wicked glance. I had seen this look before. I remembered it distinctly from the night I first met Virginia at an illegal parents-out-of-town party on Q Street, where she challenged some members of the football team to five consecutive shots of Jagermeister, one for all the games they'd lost so far that year. (With a grand total of only three hundred male students, my school is severely sports...