Prompt from Anonymous: Maura asks Jane to the Sadie Hawkins dance.
For the first time in her sixteen years, Maura Isles was grounded. She had broken curfew when she was at her best friend’s house the weekend prior and, regardless of how many times Maura told them she was working on a project with her best friend and lost track of time, Mr. and Mrs. Isles insisted on grounding her. “If we don’t ground you for this, you’ll think you can get away with anything,” Mr. Isles told her. “Now you’re just breaking curfew, but next time you might even experiment with drugs.” Maura saw no correlation between staying an extra fifteen minutes at her best friend’s house with adult supervision and experimenting with drugs in the future but, according to Mr. Isles, if he let his teenage daughter get away with even the slightest unruly behavior, it could lead to her doing just about anything.
She was still allowed internet privileges while she was grounded so, that Friday night, Maura browsed the selection of ‘80s teen movies on Netflix. They were movies from her parents’ generation, but with an ‘80s-themed Sadie Hawkins dance just three weeks away, Maura decided to watch them in hopes of getting ideas for what to wear to the dance. Most of the clothes she saw in the movies were similar to the clothes her mom wore in high school and she was grateful that she still had them in an armoire in the attic. As excited as she was to sift through the clothes it would have to wait until tomorrow because, that night, she had become more invested in the movies than she had planned.
The ‘80s teen movies she watched showed the good and the bad about high school, but it was always kids like her—the underdogs—that came out on top. Friends were there for each other and were often like family and the geeks got the girl or the guy or someone else that was even better. It was during this movie marathon that Maura felt inspired to do the unthinkable. I’m going to sneak out and ask the girl I love to go to Sadies with me. It was after midnight and she knew she’d be grounded if she got caught, but it was what the teens in ‘80s movies would have done and she’d be damned if she went another day without knowing if Jane Rizzoli would be her date for the Sadie Hawkins dance.
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