Driving down the road alone

[randomness]

Maybe Amanda had made a mistake. No, scratch that, she had definitely made a mistake somewhere. She didn't have a date, she didn't have a plan, she had simply turned up in the hopes of something happening. Well, planning wasn't exactly her strong suit anyway. After all, she was supposed to have helped planned this, but between her tight schedule during soccer season and her terminal inability to actually concentrate on big projects, she had quickly found that she needed a replacement to take her place. Finding replacements was much better than just leaving the committee really, even if it had taken her the entirety of high school to finally work that out.

She twirled her drink around a little in its little plastic cup, as if she was some kind of connoisseur appreciating a glass of wine. The punch wasn't half bad for once, she mused, not watered down like she had half-expected it to be. The food seemed to be good too, half the sandwiches had already been cleared off the plates on this side of the room. Actually, the whole thing had turned out much better planned than she had expected. Not that she was hoping that they'd muck things up or anything, but it felt a little weird to know that the result of her absence on the committee was a perfectly average event and she wasn't even sure whether her involvement might have improved things at all.

Well, nothing she could do about it now. She was here as a participant and she was going to have to find a way to have fun. That was the entire point of being here in the first place. Even with the familiar faces about Amanda wasn't exactly sure what she was planning to do. Dances were a thing as foreign to her as she still sometimes felt in this country. Parties maybe, the company she kept made sure she knew what parties were going around school and even though they tended to bring out the obnoxious side in too many people, she didn't mind them so much. She knew what she was getting into with a party at least but dances were a thing that she didn't really think about much, much less plan for. Sadie Hawkins felt like it was just another flimsy reason to have a school dance and Amanda could only wonder exactly when and why dances had become such an integral part of the American school system.

But she had thought that it might have been fun anyway and with two parts curiosity, one part wanting a good reason to dress up and another part hoping that someone cool might actually manage to sweep her off her feet, she had decided to actually turn up after all and she was now finding herself uncharacteristically standing near the corner of a gymansium, in a white, summery dress that in no way matched the theme at all. Perhaps she could go over and disturb Cristo? No, it looked like he was having a good time chatting with Al and Rene. No point disturbing them.

Michelle had given her a few tips about dances after her own prom, and they may have had been useful, if not for the fact that most of it was about how to get a date and what to do with one rather than on what to do now that you've shown up without one. Clearly Michelle should have known that would be a possibility, given Amanda's absolutely brilliant dating record, but then again that whole conversation was more about gossip than anything else.

A slow song had started, sounding like something out of a early 2000s coffee commercial but Amanda didn't really care what was playing. Thinking about her options any longer was just going to waste time that she wasn't going to get back. Amanda made her way to the dance floor without a second thought. Today, she was going to dance and she was going to enjoy it.