I Wore My Mom’s Prom Dress — My Stepmother Tried to Destroy It the Night Before

I hid it in the back of my closet, inside a garment bag.

Sometimes I’d take it out just to touch it.

It still felt like her.

That dress became the only thing I had left that didn’t feel like it disappeared.

Then my dad remarried.

Stephanie.

She didn’t like anything in the house that existed before her.

The photos disappeared first.

Then decorations. Then furniture.

“Old,” she called it.

“Tacky.”

One day I came home and our dining table — the one we used every holiday — was gone.

“Refreshing the space,” she said.

It stopped feeling like home after that.

The first time she saw the dress, she laughed.

I was trying it on in my room, standing in front of the mirror.

“You’re not serious,” she said. “You’re wearing that to prom?”

“It was my mom’s,” I told her.

She looked at it like it offended her.