“Why? I was just joking!”
Mike looked at the group of students standing around us, then back at his daughter.
“Then you should have no trouble explaining why your joke was supposed to be funny.”
Nobody laughed this time.
My mother, Linda, stood beside me in her beautiful blue gown. Just a few minutes earlier, she’d been smiling so brightly that I thought she might burst with happiness. Now she was looking at the ground, discreetly wiping beneath one eye.
I knew that expression.
It was the same one she wore whenever someone reminded her that her life hadn’t turned out the way she’d once imagined.
And seeing it on prom night made my chest ache.
“Mike, please,” Mom whispered. “It’s all right. We don’t need to make a scene.”
He turned toward her, and his expression softened immediately.
“Linda, you’ve spent years making sure everyone else is all right. Just give me a minute.”
Then he faced Brianna again.
“Do you know why your stepsister invited her mother to prom?”
Brianna crossed her arms.
“Because she thinks it’s cute or something?”
“No,” Mike said. “She invited her because her mother sacrificed something important when she was still a teenager herself.”
He paused.
“Your stepsister’s mother missed her own prom because she was preparing to raise a child alone. She worked when other teenagers were going out with friends. She studied when other people were sleeping. She gave up opportunities because she had a baby who depended on her.”
My mother shook her head gently, clearly uncomfortable with being the center of attention.
Mike continued anyway.
“And today, that child grew up and wanted to give her mother one evening she never got to experience.”
He glanced at me.
“That isn’t pathetic, Brianna. That’s love.”
The courtyard had become so quiet that I could hear the faint music coming from the gymnasium doors.
Brianna’s cheeks turned pink.
“Dad, you’re making me sound like a terrible person. I didn’t know all that.”
“You knew enough to see that she was happy,” he replied. “And you chose to humiliate her anyway.”
“I was joking!”
Mike took a breath.
“Let me tell you something about jokes. If everyone is laughing except the person you’re targeting, maybe the problem isn’t that they don’t have a sense of humor.”
One of Brianna’s friends suddenly became very interested in adjusting her bracelet. Another looked away.
For the first time that evening, Brianna seemed to realize that the people around her weren’t going to rescue her from the moment she’d created.
But Mike wasn’t finished.
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small, cream-colored envelope.
“Do you know what this is?”
Brianna stared at it.
“No.”
“It’s a photograph.”
He opened the envelope carefully and removed an old picture. The edges were worn, and the colors had faded slightly with time.
He held it up.
It showed a teenage girl standing outside a school gym in a simple dress. Her hair was curled, and she was smiling, but there was something uncertain in her expression.