Chapter Text
May 1993
It was the night of Junior Prom. Shawn and Gus were going to rock the house. Or, more accurately, rock the school gymnasium.
Gus, in a blue frilled shirt and a blue suit, was looking pretty damn cool. Shawn fully intended to match him in her equally as awesome suit.
She would of course wear the suit better.
Gus agreed to disagree.
Henry just disagreed.
‘You’re going to prom, Shawn,’ her father had insisted. ‘And you’re going to wear a dress. That’s that. Your mother would kill me if I let you go in anything else.’
‘But Dad,’ Shawn had groaned. ‘Gus gets to look like Tommy Ross in his blue suit. If I wear a stupid dress I’m going to look like Carrie.’
‘I am nothing like William Katt, Shawn,’ said Gus, offended. ‘If anything I’m John Travolta.’
Shawn had snorted. Not likely.
‘Have you guys been watching scary movies again?’ Henry asked sternly.
Shawn laughed full of the confidence of youth.
‘I’m sixteen now, Dad.’
Henry looked horrified at the thought. Kids grew up so fast.
‘I know,’ he said mournfully.
Henry Spencer lamented youthful rebellion. In a blink of an eye Gus and Shawn had turned into typical teenagers with incomprehensible lingo and the need to go against everything Henry said.
Henry hoped fervently that it was just a phase.
If the worst thing Shawn did whilst not under the radar of adult supervision was watching some rated R horror movies Henry would be okay. But this was Shawn and Henry didn’t need to be hyper observant to strongly suspect that was not the case.
Shawn smiled innocently as if reading her father’s mind.
It failed to instil Henry’s confidence. He shook his head sadly.
But all protests aside Shawn had been forced out of her usual jeans and sneakers combo and into an atrocity of a pink and cream dress, complete with itchy taffeta, shoulder pads and powder-blue accessories so she matched Gus’ suit. She wore heels. She wore pink lipstick. She had a bona-fide hairstyle which made her feel 8% Shawn and 92% hair product. She looked like a Brunette-Backcombed Barbie.
Gus laughed about it for weeks.
Henry had taken photo after photo, worse than a doting mother. Those weren’t tears in his eyes, he had insisted. It was allergies.
Perhaps he had just been allergic to seeing his baby girl all grown up. Shawn hadn’t passed comment. She was too busy struggling to walk in her heels and to breathe in her dress-cum-meringue.
Gus’ mother and father, who had come to Shawn’s house to take see the pair off and take some photos of their own, had doted and cooed. No matter how much of a bad influence Shawn was on their precious Gus, they were relieved that Gus needn’t be going to prom alone. That had always been a distinct possibility for the youngest Gustor.
Leaving the Spencer residence, having borrowed Gus’ father’s car for the evening, Shawn and Gus made their way to prom, eager to escape the embarrassment of loving parents.
At first things failed to get much better when Shawn and Gus had finally gotten to prom. Shawn still found the dress too formal, too tight for comfortable movement. In fact the only thing that had stopped her from ‘accidentally’ spilling the entirety of the over-enthusiastically spiked punchbowl over her atrocity of a prom dress, and then using it as an excuse to leave, was the surprising fact that many of her male classmates seemed to find Shawn dressed as a cake topper very attractive.
Apparently Shawn scrubbed up well.
Shawn found the attention fun to say the least. Or at least it certainly brightened up the evening. But she didn’t let the attention go to her head. Her father had taught her better than that.
‘If you’re not worth their attention when you’re not dressed up then they’re not worth your attention when you are dressed up, Shawn,’ he father had warned her sternly. ‘You’re a beautiful young woman who’s dressed up beautifully. But looks have nothing to do with it Shawn. You don’t need clothes to impress anybody. Let your intelligence and your perceptiveness do that for you.’
Shawn was sceptical how much of that her father actually believed. If all that really had been true then he would have let her wear a suit to prom. But on the other hand her father did have the largest collection of hideous shirts she had ever seen. His clothes certainly didn’t impress anybody.
It seemed the jury was out.
So Shawn didn’t take the boy’s admirations to heart. She let them flirt shamelessly with her and let their comments wash over her, feeding her ego, but she didn’t pay them much heed. Instead Shawn focussed her attention on the one boy she knew deserved her attention.
Gus.
And boy was Shawn determined to make prom great for Gus.
She had seen the way Gus looked at the girl across the room. Shawn didn’t know her name, but she knew that the girl was the head of the school’s Book Club. Quiet and mousy, Book Club Girl was a wallflower in a plain cream dress that evening at prom. Shawn knew the type, socially inept and geeky. She would have a low self-esteem and a high IQ.
Gus had been crushing on Book Club Girl for a while now and Shawn decided that tonight would be a perfect opportunity for the two of them to actually speak. Yearning glances were only acceptable for so long. But Gus was rather fond of poetically longing for a girl for months on end. He thought it was romantic. But Shawn was never the patient sort. She had seen Book Club Girl sneaking brief glances at Gus when he wasn’t looking and her little smiles when she caught him looking at her.
Working her magic, Shawn was confident that the two love-birds, or should she say love-nerds, might be able to conduct a little science experiment on what happens when two people with braces kiss.
Even at sixteen Shawn was a spectacular wing-woman. Gus left his house that evening only to come home a man.
Or at least, a man who had reached second base.
Shawn left Gus and Book Club Girl alone so they could have some privacy and returned to the punchbowl where she flirted idly with some of her fellow students. There, she did a little experimenting of her own.
Hello Boys.
Perhaps it was the combination of pink taffeta and shoulder pads the rough height and diameter of Mount Everest that the guys found attractive. Maybe it was the itchy corsage placed on her wrist attracting the guys like bees to pollen. It certainly couldn’t have been the way Shawn practically hobbled from place to place uncomfortably in her high-heeled shoes. Shoes which, by the end of the night, had been cast off so that Shawn could dance freely and not be in constant danger of falling on her ass or cause her to make more of a fool of herself than she already did on a regular basis.
Overall the evening was enjoyable. The meal had been enjoyable and the music hadn’t been terrible. Gus had gotten his first kiss. Maybe he had even touched his first boob. Shawn hadn’t gotten expelled, drunk or pregnant. That was all that Henry could possibly have asked of her.
But when Shawn got home and took off her dress and her heels she was the happiest she had been all evening.
She could walk.
She could breathe.
She could say with upmost sincerity that Shawn Spencer was never going to wear a dress again.