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.I tried to imagine the place and its contents.It had obviously been a large store, so my difficulty with picturing this many unnecessary, impractical clothes for sale—many of them for one-time use—still persisted, or was even compounded.Whatever clothes or pieces of clothing that were lying around had been weathered down to an even, lifeless grey, like fading smoke or useless, dead ash.I was still fascinated by the place; at once it exuded the hopelessness of a cemetery and the promise of a lost, ruined paradise.“What colors were these clothes?” I asked softly.The place seemed to call for a certain reverence, not like the loud clanging and crashing we had just been making in the building supply store.“Were there certain colors people wore to this ‘prom’ thing?”We were shining our flashlights into the few remaining corners of darkness, surprising a few more rodents, but nothing more threatening.“They could be any color, especially the girls’ dresses,” Mr.Caine ventured.“But the boys’ tuxedoes were almost always black, and most of the girls’ dresses were white.”I kept moving the beam of my flashlight around, examining the wreckage for anything recognizable.“Why would boys and girls wear opposite colors?” Again, in all my reading, I had come across plenty of descriptions of men and women wearing quite different clothing to the same event, but it was still jarringly different from most of our practices, where clothes were functional and mostly unisex.We moved slowly and cautiously into the store, but still found nothing other than grey rags and rodent droppings.“White always means innocence and purity, I suppose,” Mr.Caine speculated.“And prom always took place in the spring, so there were probably some resonances with springtime festivals of rebirth and courtship.”“But then why black for the boys? It sounds like mourning or something bad.” I knew I was nitpicking, but it really was making so little sense to me I had to pursue it.“Opposites attract,” my dad offered.“I don’t think that’s changed too much.”“I guess not.” It was a piece of folk wisdom I had heard before, but at that point it was still part of the mystery of boys.Having just seen the ugly, brutal version of masculinity the day before, I didn’t want to consider their oppositeness too much, so I filed it away for future reference.We had made it far enough into the store that we were now under the remnants of the roof, and the clothes there had been protected from at least some of the elements.Here they were recognizable as black pants and jackets, with white shirts, though they were utterly ruined by bugs and other small animals making their homes in them.“Who’d you go to prom with, Jonah?” my dad asked as we inched forward.“Carrie Talbot,” Mr.Caine answered.I was a little surprised he hadn’t paused at all to remember something that had happened so long ago.My dad snickered.“Wow, must’ve made an impression on you.You didn’t have to think one second to remember her name.”“I certainly didn’t, because I think of her often, though I doubt the thoughts are reciprocated at this point.” His sense of humor was always a little weird, bordering and frequently stepping over into the absurd, irreverent, and macabre, but once you got used to it, it made the oddness and frustrations of life a little more tolerable.Dad laughed a little louder.“Well, maybe back before she was a zombie it was mutual.”“I doubt it, but you never know.It never hurts to hope.”“Was she pretty?” I asked.“I liked her, so I thought she was very pretty, Zoey.That’s what you think of someone when you like them.”He’d phrased it oddly, I thought at the time, though now it seems quite obvious to me, as an adult.“You thought she was pretty because you liked her?”“Of course.That’s how it works.” This was a novel and interesting interpretation to me and I filed it away as well.Our flashlights glinted off something glass in front of us.We stepped closer and saw that at the end of one long rack against the right hand wall, an area had been separated by a glass wall.This glass wall appeared intact.Behind it was a compartment, like a big closet that we could see into.I got up close to it and looked at the contents [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]