Rebelling in Pink Taffeta

by Em
(Brooklyn, NY, USA)

I grew up in Fairfield County, CT. Sometimes called the Orange County of the East, it was breeding grounds for ivy league-educated lawyers, investment bankers and housewives. It was laden with yacht clubs and popped collars. Needless to say, my blue hair fit in about as well as a watermelon fits into a thimble.

Somehow through the forest of polo shirts I found my first love. I’ll call him K. K was the suburbanized version of goth, with black eyeliner and pentacle necklaces. We were two freaks in a pod.

However, our mutual outcast status did not spare us from the typical teenage melodrama. We were prone to cycles of breakups and make-ups. He promised me, though, that despite everything, he would under any circumstance take me to prom. I couldn’t count on him to resist a larger bosom, but prom, that was something so grand and fated that we both accepted it as fact.

That was until it actually rolled around. K asked a C-cup to prom, leaving my modest 18-year-old chest under my blue mop head in the lurch.

Despite my juvenile heartache, I found myself a date. I decided that the most rebellious thing I could possibly do, beyond my piercings and predilection for hair in shades of Jell-o flavors, would be to show up to prom as the embodiment of adolescent femininity.

I scoured the internet for the perfect dress and settled on a vintage 1950s pink taffeta strapless gown. I loved the material and the volume, which was so voluminous that it overwhelmed three chairs at our prom table. It was a giant pink middle finger pointing in every direction -- to my cookie-cutter classmates, to my ample-bosomed nemesis, and most importantly, to K.