Page 41 of The Promposal

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Were auditory hallucinations a thing? Because there was no other way to explain what Shoshana had just said. “Not going to be a prom?” I echoed. I must have misheard. She must have actually said, “North Korea’s going to drop a nuclear bomb” or “A 9.7 earthquake is coming and we have to stay calm.” Something that would make actual sense.

“Shoshana, what are you talking about?” Ella asked in a ridiculously mellow voice. How was she not panicking? We either had a bomb, an earthquake, or Promageddon to deal with. Was it bad that I was still holding out hope for one of the first two?

“There’s. No. Prom.” Shoshana said each word slowly.

“There’s no prom?” I repeated. This news had turned me into some kind of confused parrot, incapable of forming my own thoughts and just saying whatever the people around me said. I understood each of her words individually, but not the combination she was using them in.

“I called the manager at La Caille.”

That I understood. I had wanted to have prom at La Caille since I was twelve years old and my dad had taken me there for the wedding of some art friend. It looked like a French château. The ballrooms had been decorated with white fairy lights and had large windows that overlooked a nearby city. It had the most beautiful gardens I’d ever seen, streams and trees and flowers and bridges. They had peacocks and little families of quails that darted in and out of the bushes. It was just ... perfect. Before I took office, the school’s proms were always held at nearby hotels to make it easier for the alumni to attend. But since the students were the only ones going this year, we could have it at an out of the way château.

The day I became president, it was the first phone call I’d made, and I’d arranged our prom date based on their availability. The only French food I liked were French fries, French toast, and French vanilla ice cream, and I didn’t even care about what they would serve. I only cared about how magical and fairy-tale-esque our surroundings would be.

“Why did you call the manager?” Ella encouraged Shoshana to keep talking.

“I was calling to ask them when we could start bringing the decorations over, if they had a place for us to store them because I have stuff that would interfere this week, and it would be easier to do it today or tomorrow instead of waiting for Saturday and doing it all last minute—”

“What did the manager say?” I demanded, uninterested in her tangent.

“She said that there had been a stop payment put on our deposit check, and so they rented the venue out to someone else.”

“What?” Was this what a heart attack felt like? A crushing blow against your chest that made it impossible to breathe? And like your heart was going to explode everywhere?

I also couldn’t understand how there was a money issue. We had tens of thousands of dollars in our activities account. There was no way this could be happening.

“Mattie?” Ella was asking what I wanted to do next.

This wasn’t a time to wallow and freak out. It was a time to get stuff done. “Call an emergency student government meetingright now.”

“But everybody has to get to first period,” Shoshana reminded me.

“I don’t care.Get them. Now.” This had to be some kind of mistake. Something where when we all got together and talked it would make sense. “Before you go, give me the phone number. Let me call the manager.”

Shoshana brought up the number on her phone and showed it to me. “The manager’s name is Tricia Monson.”

Monson. For some reason the name made me think of monsoon, which made my stomach feel even more twisty and upset.

I dialed the number and put the phone up to my ear. It rang twice before someone answered. “Can I speak to Ms. Monson, please?” I glanced at the immobile Shoshana. “What are you waiting for? Go get everyone!”

She ran off, and Ella said, “I’m going to go help round them all up.”

I nodded and walked toward the student government room.

“This is Ms. Monson.”

“Hello. This is Mattie Lowe. I’m the student body president at Malibu Prep, and we’ve had your venue reserved this Saturday for our prom since September, and now I’m being told that there’s some kind of problem?”

“There’s no problem on our end, I’m afraid. We were unable to deposit your check, and as per our agreement, we couldn’t hold the venue. We have a very long waiting list.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut. “I don’t know how that happened because we have the money. We have plenty of money.” Even if the well had somehow gone dry, I would have had my dad cover the deposit and then paid him back. “This was some kind of mistake, and we’ve sold all these tickets, and our entire senior and junior classes are expecting to be there on Saturday.”

“Ms. Lowe, I sympathize with your position, but there’s nothing to be done. We’ve already accepted a deposit check from someone else.”

“Who?” Maybe I could bribe them and get them to give La Caille back to us.

“I can’t give out that information.”

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