Saylor was already crying when I got there because her cap kept sliding, and that’s the only reason she let me run the lint roller down the back of her gown for what my husband Travis later confirmed was eleven minutes and forty seconds. The first sheet came off teal. The second sheet came off teal but with what I am calling ‘undertones.’ The third sheet came off a color I have only ever seen on the inside of a swimming pool noodle, and at that point a junior pulled up in a Jetta and asked if I was okay.
I was not okay. I had spent the previous Tuesday in a Facebook group called Polyester and the Garments They Pretend Are Ceremonial, and a woman in Tulsa had posted a thread, with photographs, of what came off her son’s rented gown when she steamed it over a stockpot. It looked like cotton candy if cotton candy were trying to tell you something. I screenshotted every single image and sent them to my sister-in-law Marlee, who runs the front desk at a pediatric ENT and is basically a nurse, and Marlee replied with three words: ‘oh, oh no.’
Here is what Marlee then explained to me, which I am passing along because every mother of a 2025 graduate deserves to hear it before Saturday. A polyester graduation gown is not, in the chemical sense, a garment. It is a sheet of plastic that has been lightly pretending. When it heats up — say, on a teenager standing in a gymnasium in late May, under the kind of fluorescent light my friend Coach Drennan calls ‘the bad light’ in his newsletter — it begins what Marlee called ‘soft-releasing.’ I asked her to elaborate. She said she would rather not on a work phone.
It gets worse, and I am sorry. The gowns at Reynolds are not bought, they are rented, and the rental company is a warehouse in Reidsville that supplies seventeen Western North Carolina high schools and one community college. A woman in the Polyester group, whose husband drives a box truck, says the gowns get washed between schools but only on what he called ‘gentle.’ By the time a gown reaches a senior, it has been worn by, by her count, fourteen previous children. Fourteen children’s worth of sebum. Fourteen children’s worth of body spray. One of those children was almost certainly vaping in it.
Now. I want to be fair. The cap is, structurally, cardboard with a fabric overlay, and cardboard is a forest product, so the cap is fine. The tassel I have more questions about — Marlee believes the tassel is acetate, which she says is ‘cousins’ with rayon, which she says is ‘cousins’ with regret — but a tassel touches no skin and is held by the hand of a child who, God willing, has washed it. I am willing to call the cap and the tassel a wash. The gown, however, is not a wash. The gown is the event.
So I did what any mother in a parking lot would do. I unfolded the king-size percale sheet I had brought from the linen closet — 100 percent cotton, inherited from Travis’s grandmother, washed in vinegar, sun-dried in March — and I helped Saylor step into it like a tunic, with two slits I cut on the way over with kitchen shears at a red light. We then put the rented gown on over the sheet, as a kind of decoy. Was it a little bulky? Yes. Did her aunt Marlee, watching from the bleachers, mouth the words ‘what is happening’ across the gym? Also yes. Did Saylor walk the stage essentially wearing a 1974 bedsheet under a piece of industrial film? She did. And she walked it with her shoulders down for the first time all spring.
Saylor’s mother, my sister Jenna, took a long minute in the parking lot afterward. She said, and I am quoting, ‘Brooke, I’m not going to thank you, but I’m not going to fight you either.’ Jenna is a Costco person. Jenna does not believe in undertones. For Jenna to land on neutrality is, in our family, an embrace. She then asked if I had a spare sheet for her younger one’s eighth-grade promotion, and I said of course, and I sent her home with a queen flat in a tote bag.
I have, in the last four hours, received seventeen texts from Reynolds moms asking for the slit pattern. I am not a seamstress and I am not a chemist and I am not, despite what the PTA working group continues to suggest, a problem. I am simply a woman with a lint roller, a linen closet, and a sister-in-law who knows what she knows. If your senior walks the stage this weekend in nothing but the gown they handed her, I am not going to say a word. I am going to mind my business in the third row, in a cotton sundress, with a tote bag of sheets, available.
