I walked nervously up and down our sunroom, stared at the clock on the wall and listened to the ticking of each second. Two more minutes. I was already in my dark red dress; my long hair fell down my back in curls. My heart started to race every time I thought about what was going to happen. I was waiting for my friend to pick me up for Prom. I still couldn’t believe it was actually going to happen. All this time, I had wanted Rikki to ask me to go with him, and in the end I had just asked him to be my escort, so that I didn’t have to go with my two best friends and their boyfriends. We all decided to meet for dinner, but Rikki was going to pick me up. In 60 seconds. The bell rang. My heart jumped, I took a deep breath and opened the door. Two dark blue eyes smiled at me.

“You look lovely, Anna”, he said.

“Thanks. You look quite nice, too”, I smiled back.
And like that my nervousness was gone. Rikki was my best friend. No reason to be nervous, right? Seeing his familiar smile made me breathe normally again, and I could think like my usual self. He showed me the wrist corsage he had bought for me and I took out the boutonniere I had gotten for him. My hand wasn’t shaking anymore when he put the beautiful white orchids with the red bow around my wrist. My dad told him that he’d better bring me home safely because he had a gun waiting in his bedroom. We all laughed and my mom followed us outside to take pictures in the garden. I blushed when he held the door of his truck open for me to get in, and then we drove off.
We met Britney and Francis in front of an Italian restaurant and waited together for Claire and Jamie. Britney had put her short blonde hair up and wore a beautiful navy blue dress. We saw Claire’s bright red dress from far away as she was walking through the parking lot with Jamie.

“Aww, you look so pretty!” all three of us squeaked excitedly at the same time, and we laughed.
We sat down at a table, and Claire leaned over to me. She pointed with her eyes to Rikki on the opposite side of the table who had put on a red dress shirt to match with me.
“You two look nice together”, she winked at me.
The dinner passed with a lot of laughter. All six of us were excited and happy about the evening, and now and then I could catch a sparkle in Rikki’s blue eyes when he looked at me. It made me hold my breath for a moment, wondering if it was just my imagination.
The music at the dance was really bad, but it always was. We didn’t care and had as much fun dancing as if they were continuously playing our favorite songs. The DJ announced the first slow song. I had wondered before, if Rikki would actually ask me to dance. Surprisingly, he held out his hand for me to take and saying “Come on, Anna!” with so much confidence that he almost made me jump. I took his hand and told him that I really was a terrible dancer, just to warn him. “Don’t worry, I got this”, was his answer, which surprised me even more.
I had no idea Rikki could dance, but he put my arms around his neck, put his on my hips, and we danced. And it felt good. It wasn’t strange because we were best friends, so we always found something to talk about, avoiding awkward silence. If we were silent, it wasn’t awkward. When we messed something up, we were already used to making fun of each other, such that nobody’s feelings got hurt. Dancing with Rikki was easy. It was simple, it was fun, and there was no need to worry. But every song had to end, and so did this one. We stepped away from each other and let the rest of our group join in to rebuild our little dance circle. Looking forward to a second dance with Rikki, now that I knew it was not going to be awkward, I was a little disappointed when Britney came up to me to dance to the next slow song. We started dancing with her arms around my neck, and since Francis didn’t have his girlfriend to dance with anymore, he and Rikki found each other. Britney and I couldn’t help but laugh at the strange couple, but they looked adorable.
This way the dance passed, and all six of us were sad when we found out that the DJ did not intend to play a third slow song. Instead, he stayed with his really bad dance music. We left the dance at eleven and decided to drive to the closest grocery store to share ice cream with our ‘dates’ in the parking lot. While Britney and Francis, and Claire and Jamie stayed inside the boys’ cars to eat their ice cream, Rikki and I sat outside on the back of his truck.
“I wish they had ended the dance with another slow song”, I sighed, accidently thinking aloud.
Rikki put his eyes on me for a second, sat the cup of ice cream aside, turned around to turn up the music that was coming out of the radio of the truck and held out his hand. I hesitated, but laughed when he grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. Again, he put my arms around his neck and his on my hips. I caught another sparkle in his blue eyes when he told me that I really did look quite lovely in that dress, and we gently moved to the best song we had listened to that night.