It smelled like fresh pressed suits, horrifically mixed with billed hats, hair spray, and hormones.

An atrocious mess, if you were to ask me.
It was, to say it easily, pathetic, for the most part.
I sat by the wall and I watched. I watched them flake away into the sad mess that made up my moronic generation.
Not ten feet away, a girls skirt was so short that, in the words of the date beside me, if she moved, she'd have become pregnant.
The girl who was carried out to her car in what people thought was a cute gesture considering the mud on the ground, would later brag behind me in class that it was because she was so high she couldn't walk.
A woman overlooking the crowd flashed lights on couples who preferred having sex with their clothes on while dancing.
Later on the woman's daughter would whine in my ear to her friends that she'd 'never speak to her mother again'.
And I'd whisper under my breath that she needed to get over herself.
I suppose that to some extent I didn't mind the loud music.
I did, however, mind the amount of screaming whenever a new song started.
I wasn't sure these people grasped the idea of how small the room was.
Our prison guards took to walls and doorways. Happy smile stitched themselves to their faces as they didn't blink for a moment, staring us down.
If there was ever a situation where the word degrading came to mind, it was this one.

My hair was curled and frozen in its place. My cheeks made out to look not like 'color' in my face, but rather like I'd been sick, or out in the cold too long. There was too much substance around my eye lids to rub them. There were too many layers of cream on my skin that gave me the appearance of pilled cotton. My eyelashes resembled spider’s legs, a rotten cherry on top. The dress, while modest, was uncomfortable.

It felt, very clearly, like I was trapped inside my own body and staring out from the safety inside. Bones and blood and muscle and tissue, a safe house of the only thing these people couldn't see.

I'm not sure how long I wore that little smile of mine, but I apologize to the boy who had to see it. Lying is much easier that ducking out heads first.

I couldn't see where the significance of this all was. It was just a very disturbing, immature, sad excuse for a school dance.

"You won't know what it's like until you go to one. Afterwards you might like it." My mother said.
Unfortunately I had a feeling this is exactly what it would be like, and I'm still not pleased.