Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

Her husband's OK with it. So is his mom. Becky Looney and Shane Green, hanging out at the Motor Mile Speedway where they met, are going to prom together.

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• See and hear more from Shane Green and Becky Looney

PEARISBURG -- Magic Mart's having a sale on potting soil, but potting soil is the last thing on Shane Green's mind today, the final day of Giles High School's spring break.

Shane's thinking about his first tuxedo. His first big date. His first prom.

The 18-year-old senior schleps alongside his mother, Joan Green, through Magic Mart's double doors, past gum ball and temporary tattoo machines in the lobby and into the sprawling store with its bright fluorescent hum.

"You have to go to Magic Mart," Joan Green explains. "It's the only game in town as far as tuxes go, unless you go to Blacksburg."

Mother and son head for men's apparel. This is where they'll meet Teresa Perdue, the nice sales lady with the businesslike approach, the woman who holds the tape measure.

Aargh! The tape measure.

Shane Green does not like the tape measure.

"I blew up in third grade," the hazel-eyed teenager says abashedly, explaining that he hates trying on clothes "because most of the time they don't fit."

Shane ferries 349 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame, and he knows all the fat jokes.

"Yeah, I'm watching my weight -- watching it go up."

"Yeah, I haven't seen my toes in years."

"Yeah, that's funny."

"Shane's so overweight it's hard for him to get a date with anyone," Joan Green offers.

Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

Joan Green helped her son Shane pick out his tux for the big day. "You have to go to Magic Mart," she explains. "It's the only game in town as far as tuxes go."

But in her mother's heart, Shane is still her baby.

Joan Green's younger son weighed just over 4 pounds when he was born on a hot August day in 1987. It didn't take him long to catch up to his older brother, Jason, who now tips the scales at 339.

But Shane's skin was thinner than Jason's. He didn't take teasing lightly and the rejection hurt.

"It gets old," Shane says of the badgering. "Some of them don't know when to stop."

Three years ago, he became depressed. At school, he would act as if nothing bothered him. But at home, his mom says, he took it out on the entire family.

"He had some thyroid problems and it took them forever to find that," she says. Her son takes the prescription drug Levoxyl to regulate his thyroid.

He also takes antidepressant medication and knows that insulin may be in his future; he's borderline diabetic.

But for a high school senior, there's more to worry about than health problems.

Girls, for instance.

'We didn't believe him...'

Shane says the girls he knows like him because he's "safe."

"They don't think you're going to try anything," he reasons.

A few times, Shane worked up the courage to invite girls on dates.

"I asked one if she wanted to go to the race because I had extra tickets. She said she had plans.

"I asked another girl if she wanted to go to our Christmas party ... but she said she had to work. Come to find out, she didn't have to work. She went with someone else."

Shane's eyes lose their spark momentarily.

Most of the time, he masks his feelings with words -- and humor.

"Shane's pretty fun. Talks a lot, though," says Keith Reynolds, a member of Shane's auto mechanics class and a senior who played center on the state champion Spartans football team for which Shane was a manager.

Of Shane's romantic aspirations, Keith observes: "He tries a lot. Every single girl he sees, he tries to pick up. He'll find him somebody one day."

"We didn't believe him when he told us he was taking a married woman to the prom," adds D.J. Blankenship, another senior in auto mechanics. "We all had a good laugh."

D.J. shakes his head.

"Found out he wasn't lying, though."

'We went racing'

Becky Looney is a perfect size 8 with wispy blond hair, pink fingernails and a bone structure as delicate as a bird's. She wears a tiny diamond stud in her left nostril and turns heads in her tight-fitting jeans.

She is the 27-year-old mother of Meaghan, 6, and the wife of Mike, the man she married 10 years ago.

She dropped out of school when she got married but earned her General Educational Development diploma and was allowed to march with the graduating class of 1997 at Craig County High School.

She wasn't allowed to go to the prom, though.

"Three days before Mike and I were going to the prom, the principal decided he didn't want us to go. I wasn't a student at the school then and we were already married. We got dressed up, had photos made, then went to dinner with our friends.

"They went to the prom," she recalls. "We went racing."

Becky has been following her husband to races ever since.

A regular at Dublin's Motor Mile Speedway, Mike Looney won the Limited Sportsman division championship there in 2000 and moved up to the Late Model Stock division.

"Got to win me a Late Model race before I can quit," the 28-year-old driver says now.

Becky knows better.

"He'll race till he dies, I guess," she says, explaining that she has accepted her husband's personal obsession and has even learned not to worry when he climbs into his No. 47 Chevy Monte Carlo.

"I used to worry but I don't anymore," she shrugs. "After he wrecks, like, 150 times, you get over it."

Besides, Becky says, the people she has met at the speedway are like family now. She and Meaghan always sit in the same spot in the grandstand where fans come week after week to savor the smell of burning rubber.

This is where she met Shane Green and his family.

'I'll go with you'

Shane loves racing. If he could do anything he wants in life, he says he would drive race cars -- but he's not counting on it.

"I'd probably get stuck in the windows," he groans.

"We met two or three years ago," Becky says of her relationship with Shane's family.

"Every weekend, it seemed we always sat together. Shane was saying last year that he didn't think he would go to the prom because he couldn't get a date."

Not known for being shy, Becky made Shane an offer he couldn't refuse.

"I said, 'Well, I'll go with you!' "

For Becky, the offer was purely selfish.

"I'm very excited," she says, her blue-gray eyes shining. "I'll finally get to go to the prom. I just want to go and have fun -- like everyone else."

Becky, who works nights as a courier, lost a day of sleep searching for the perfect prom dress, a sleek number in pale pink that she found on the sale rack at David's Bridal.

She took the dress home and modeled it for her husband because she "wanted to make sure I didn't look like an old lady in it."

Mike Looney gave the dress -- and his wife -- a thumb's up. He's not jealous that his wife is going to the prom with a younger man, he says, because "she's never given me a reason to be jealous."

"I think it's fine. She never got to go to the prom with me because I was racin'. That was a no-brainer for me -- go to a stupid dance or race."

For Becky, the Giles High School prom is a second chance.

"I've always wanted to get a pretty dress and do the girly thing," she says, adding that she's also thrilled with her choice for a date.

"Shane's a sweetheart," she says. "He just needs to be more confident in himself."

'You like it, Mama?'

Years of being the "big guy" -- the target of thoughtless jokes and teeny-bopper snubs -- have brought Shane Green to where he is now: Standing awkwardly in the middle of Magic Mart with a tape measure around his chest.

Teresa Perdue jots down his measurements.

"You're going to be a 60 regular, Shane," she announces finally.

"I like the bolo," Shane says, pointing to the "Western Goes Formal" suit he'll choose for his prom. "I don't like a tie, period, but if I have to wear one . . . "

Shane rejects the popular Tommy Hilfiger tux that Perdue says most of the boys are ordering. He snorts at the five-button Nehru style reminiscent of the 1960s and the four-button peak zoot with its '40s gangster style. He laughs out loud at the Andrew Fezza two-button numbers in lavender and sage.

He'll go for the Garth Brooks look, a long duster jacket in black with a black and silver vest. No cummerbund. He doesn't wear things he can't pronounce. He'll top off the outfit with the brown cowboy hat he's got at home.

Nooo way. His mother vetoes that idea.

"You ain't wearing no brown hat with that black tux," she protests.

Kim Woodyard, Magic Mart's assistant manager, rushes down the menswear aisle and returns with a black felt topper that she plops onto Shane's head.

"You like it, Mama?" he says, peering in the mirror at the well-timed Western touch.

"Yeah," she replies. "It don't look bad."

And it's settled.

Perdue will order Shane's first tuxedo rental. She'll call him when it arrives.

Five minutes later, Shane's heading to the Magic Mart parking lot.

"Looks like I really am going to the prom after all," he says, smiling.

He still carries 349 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame.

But his step is a whole lot lighter.