June 2024 Flash Lit 3.3 - Watermelon

Lynn rubbed the fat tube of lip gloss over her mouth again.  It wasn’t helping.  Unless her goal was to smell like fake fruit salad.  Who thought watermelon lip gloss was a good idea?

 

But Lynn’s mom was sure Lynn was too young to wear lipstick.  No matter how many layers of Bonnie Bell she put on, Lynn was never going to achieve the red-lipped glamour of an old-fashioned movie star.

 

The mirror was the messenger of despair.  Lynn saw frazzle-ended permed hair, a mouth full of braces over teeth that looked too big to be hers, and a big fat zit not quite centered on her chin.  Lynn looked nothing like Lauren Bacall or Grace Kelly.  She sighed and went downstairs in her not-high-enough heels that were all she could talk her mom into.

 

Elena and her dad arrived.  “Ready?” he asked as the girls united in the hope that none of their parents would do anything embarrassing.  Too late:  “I just want to get a picture,” Lynn’s mom said.  “The girls’ first school dance!”

 

Finally, they were out of the house, out of Elena’s dad’s boring white sedan, and clustering with other kids at the gym door.

 

No amount of crepe paper and no disco ball could make the gym look less sweaty and more like a ballroom, but Lynn still believed that it was going to be all right.

 

Then Sam asked her to dance.  Lynn looked around, horrified, to find that John was already there dancing with Marty.  That’s not how it was supposed to go.  But Lynn’s manners took over and she said yes, mechanically smiling in the face of Sam’s awkward flailing.

 

Watermelon tasted like disappointment.