“Bobby, would you want to go to prom with me?”

Uhh, that, I hadn’t seen coming. It was Alicia, my mom’s little sister who’d just asked me for a real live date.

Alicia is my aunt, ‘Auntie’, I often call her. Well, she’s ‘sort of’ my aunt. My grandmother, Mom’s mom, passed away from brain cancer when I was one, she was forty-two. I have no recollection of her at all, except pictures. ‘Papa’, I’ve called him ever since I could talk, remarried three years later to a pretty lady, Jessica, who was seven years younger than him.

Jessica’s prior husband was killed in an avalanche, climbing Mt Hood in Oregon. She was pregnant at the time and had Alicia four months later. The story Papa tells is that he met Jessica at a library book fair, both volunteering to help sort mountains of donated books for sale. Jessica was thirty-eight, Alicia three, her birthday four months before mine.

So anyway, that explains how Alicia came to be my ‘elderly’ aunt, both of us eighteen when I got that phone call, just about to graduate high school. But Alicia and I grown up more like brother and sister, it seemed that either I was at her house or she was at ours.

When we were little, her little school didn’t have a kindergarten, so she’d sometimes spend the night at our house and go to kindergarten with me. I loved those times, getting to show off my ‘auntie’.

I remember that when we were eight, how we played in the creek that ran through Papa’s farm, how we’d build a dam and wade in the eight-inch deep pool we’d created.

When we were a little older, I don’t recall exactly when, we started playing Monopoly together. We’d play for hours at a time, keeping careful records of who owed who how much money, that accumulated from game to game, year to year. We were still playing the same ‘game’ years later when she called and asked me to go to her prom with her. Our ledger filled half a spiral notebook. I believe she owed me $814,329 at the time. I kept expecting it to even out, but for some reason, it never did.

We had a couple horses at the farm that we loved to ride together, usually just around the farm, but occasionally Papa and Nana would even take us up in the mountains with the horse trailer and we’d find new trails to ride.

I guess the point I’m trying to convey is that we were close, probably closer than most brothers and sisters as we lived nearly thirty miles apart, her farm just out of Othello, me in Kennewick, yet we were nearly always together, the best of both worlds.

As we got older, I noticed that Alicia was getting prettier and that she had ‘girl parts’, but it never made a difference. There wasn’t any hint of a ‘romantic’ element in our lives. We dated others a little, but I hadn’t yet met a girl that I really liked, and as far as Alicia had said, she hadn’t met a guy, either. It’s just that she and I were never an ‘item’ that way. Sure, we went out to a restaurant or some other such thing occasionally, but it was never a ‘date’, just something we did together.

Alicia and I both loved animals. We’d spent a lot of those horseback hours talking about what we wanted to do in life. For me, I wanted to be a veterinarian, I’d even been accepted into the Washington State University Veterinarian Program. She was undecided, yes, she loved animals but was also a creative, independent thinker, and loved to draw, sketching out her ideas. One day at my home, she sat down and sketched out what she thought a veterinary clinic should consist of. I thought it was perfect. “You should go into architecture,” I suggested to her.

She sat there a minute, with a smile on her face, and started drawing again, “Why can’t I do both?” she asked, sounding like she was mostly asking herself. The house she drew that day looked more like a medieval castle, complete with a moat and drawbridge. Where the hell had that come from? I wondered.

The long and short of it was that Alicia did apply for Veterinarian School, but with architecture as a minor. We even talked about renting an apartment together.

All of that was the reason that her phone call that morning was such a surprise. The first thought that went through my mind was ‘are you even supposed to go out with your aunt?’ Somehow, it seemed kind of, I don’t know ... spooky? Kinky? Going on a real date with your mom’s sister? But the more I thought about it, you know after five or six seconds of indecision, it sounded kind of fun, maybe even a lot fun. There sure wasn’t a girl I wanted to invite to my school’s prom, which happened to be on the same night.

So, anyway, prom night came. Mom had made me buy a suit (well, she bought it, I just had to wear it). I had a corsage for Alicia, and I got to drive Mom and Dad’s little sports car, a bright red, nearly new Mazda Miata (that is one cool car!) to pick up Alicia. I thought I looked quite dapper in my new suit and the Miata. I’d washed and waxed it, scrubbed the interior, and reconditioned all the leather over the last couple days, not that I was worried about impressing my auntie, but she deserved a nice ride to her prom.

Their farm is a little over forty minutes from our house. Not to brag, but I made it in thirty-two in the Miata. I climbed out, checking one last time to be sure the car was perfect, took the corsage package, and walked to the door that I’d just marched through hundreds of times before. This time, I rang the doorbell and stood, waiting.

Nana Jessica opened the door and stood there with a smile on her face, looking me up and down. “You look very nice, Robert,” she told me, “Alicia is just finishing up, she should be right down.”

I guessed that grandmothers had to say things like ‘you look very nice’, it was a law or something.

I sat down in the living room, for the first time, nervous about picking up my ‘auntie’. This seemed so different than the other 5,318 times I’d been there, give or take one or two.

The chair I sat in doesn’t face the stairway, so I was startled when I heard Alicia behind me, “I’m ready,” in that feminine voice I was so familiar with.

I stood and turned ... and almost fell back down. Who the fuck? This was Alicia? She sort of looked like Alicia, but...

She was wearing a satiny green dress, nearly to the floor but a long slit up one side. God, she looked ... beautiful, like a guy’s best dreams! I’d never seen ‘Auntie’ looking like this, her long, red hair curled and, I’d guess ‘flouncy’ would be the term, quite a departure from her normal ponytail.

This was NOT what I’d expected when I agreed to take my aunt to her prom. What did I expect? Hell, I don’t know, just not this ... this Goddess, the only word I can think of to do her justice.

My hands were shaking when I opened the corsage package. I looked at it, confused, trying to not be too much a nerd, but ... how...?

Alicia giggled, “I think it goes on my wrist,” she said, holding her left hand out to me. I could see it then, how to put it on her, three white roses, greenery, and the prettiest ribbon. Mom had gotten it. I fastened it underneath, beautiful! Thank you, Mom!

Alicia had a boutonniere, when she pinned it to my jacket’s lapel, I got a strong dose of her scent and thought I’d gone straight to heaven. God, this was not the same girl who owed me $814,329 in Monopoly money.

And then she turned to get her little clutch purse, and the breath went out of me all over again, her dress was backless, nothing but a few straps holding it in place!

Her dad, my ‘Papa’, was there with his camera, taking picture after picture of the two of us snuggled up together, so many different poses. Alicia and I had touched or held hands for one reason or another probably thousands of times over the last fifteen years, but it had never felt like this!

I don’t think I’d ever seen her with makeup, lipstick, or anything like it, but tonight ... just holy shit! I think in those first twenty minutes, I must have thought, ‘this is Alicia?’ at least a hundred times.

And then she kissed me on the cheek and told me how nice I looked ... and I about died. That perfume!

Alicia picked up her sweater, “It’s going to get cooler, later,” she explained. I walked her to the car, and her smile was about a mile wide when she saw that I’d brought the Miata instead of my old pickup. I opened the door for her and she slid in. It was the first I’d noticed her shiny, emerald-green high-heels. “You can walk in those?” I asked her, kind of a stupid question, she’d just shown that she could.

She laughed, “I’ve been practicing the last two weeks, ever since I bought them.”

“Well, they’re nice,” and then I turned and looked at her, smiling at her, “You’re ... different, so beautiful, everything about you,” I told her.

She smiled back, “Maybe I wanted you to know how I really felt about you, have for a long time,” she said, then leaned across the little center console and kissed me ... on the lips. And I was like ... holy shit, all over again! I’d kissed a couple other girls, but neither of them had soft lips even remotely like Alicia’s.

The dance was being held at the golf club banquet hall, a place neither of us had ever been since we didn’t golf. She introduced me to some of her friends, and we sat at a table with three other couples, all friends of Alicia. Of course, the way Alicia described it, in a school with forty-two seniors, pretty much everyone was friends to some degree.

We started out talking about softball. Alicia was a pitcher and shortstop. I knew that because I was at almost all her games. Me, I wasn’t athletic, so no sports, just a spectator. Alicia’s team was pretty so-so, a nine-eight record so far, but they had fun playing.

We were there for probably fifteen-twenty minutes when the music started, and Alicia pulled me up to dance with her. I was happy then that my mom had insisted on giving me dance lessons over the last few weeks. “But, Mom, it’s just Alicia,” I’d told her.

She laughed and said, “You’ll thank me later, come here,” and put on some music. We practiced to fast and slow music, Mom showing me how to twirl a girl, “Girls love to be twirled,” she’d told me, and showed me how to hold her hand so as not to twist it off. She taught me how to lead, and how to ‘read’ a girl’s desires. “If she just puts her hands on your shoulders, hold her around the waist loosely, but if she wraps her arms around your neck,” and she showed me what she meant, “don’t be afraid to snuggle in close, it’s probably what she wants.” She smiled at me and added, “It’s how your dad and I always used to dance.”