By Tina Huang

Staff Writer

As junior Mikayla Wecker walked downstairs when her boyfriend, senior Everett Schau, arrived at her house, one thing caught her eye – a fish. Wecker has tweeted about, talked about and has even gone so far as to petition for a pet fish. She had been asking her parents for one for a long time, but still had not received one. Schau saw this problem as an opportunity.

“[Wecker] was so excited that she didn’t even realize that I had asked her to prom on the fish bowl at first,” Schau said.

This is just one of many prom proposals that have been asked unexpectedly on a date.

Seniors in Coppell have already begun planning for prom 2013 on April 13. The prom proposals are just as important as the actual event. As prom season begins, seniors are finding themselves in the midst of proposals and their corresponding ideas.

Senior Kacey Hutchins was fishing with her boyfriend, junior Bart Schulz, when she asked him.

“[Schulz] likes to fish, so when I was deciding how to ask him, the first thing that popped into mind was to ask him [when we were fishing],” Hutchins said.

Hutchins put the letters P-R-O-M on the end of her fishing pole and jokingly dangled the letters in front of Schulz as they were fishing.

Hutchins was one of the few girls who did the asking to prom.

“[Schulz and I] had been dating for a while now, so it was obvious we were going to prom together, but I wanted to ask him,” Hutchins said. “It was different to be the one asking since for everything else like homecoming, the guy always asked, but it was fun to be on the other side. It let me be creative.”

Another unique proposal is to someone at another school.

“Having a girlfriend who goes to a different school definitely made the prom proposal more difficult to plan,” senior Nick Valenta said.

Even so, he still managed to pull it off in a special way for his girlfriend Renay Moore, a senior at Trinity Christian Academy in Addison.

“I drove [Moore’s] car onto a median in the road and I placed a ticket on her windshield. On the ticket it said ‘girl, you are fine like a ticket’ and on the back it said ‘court punishment: prom with Nick,’” Valenta said. “I came up with this because she is always joking that she has never gotten ticket before.”

Some prom proposals even have a buildup, which is how senior Josh Chung asked his girlfriend, senior Annie Webb.

Chung saw the week of Valentine’s Day as the perfect way to lead into his prom proposal. On Sunday, he took Webb to the duck pond where they lit up heart-shaped floating paper lanterns. Tuesday he played love songs outside her house. Thursday, on Valentine’s Day, he set up string lights in his home which led Webb in a path to his backyard where he was standing behind candles on the ground that read “Prom?”

“Even though it can get a little out of hand, it is still always fun to see what everyone is doing,” Hutchins said. “It’s prom. It’s nice to have something special just for the seniors.”

On the day of prom, CHS seniors and their dates will head to Dallas Trade Mart, topping off all the proposals, pictures, and dinners.

“[The proposals] can get ridiculously extravagant, [but] I think [prom] is good to have for the experience overall; it’s good for the memories,” Schau said.