Heroine.
The word took some getting used to.
But there was no time for Emily to get used to it. She and Matt danced: a wild rock number that used up a little of Matt’s tremendous energy and totally sapped what was left of Emily’s. She sank onto a bench and put her feet up on what looked like a rose arbor lying down. How strange.
Matt kept right on dancing in front of her, having a great time, not caring in the slightest that he no longer had a partner. Everybody kept coming up to Emily to tell her how terrific she was—how proud they were to know her!
Emily kept laughing.
This is impossible. I’m the one whose name they haven’t been able to remember for sixteen years!
Sue and Jimmy. Gary and Beth Rose. Caitlin and somebody unknown. Pammy and Jason. Megan and Roy.
Will it last? thought Emily, laughing, talking with every kid she’d ever dreamed of being friends with. Will they be my friends on Monday? Tuesday? And ever after?
Or is it just tonight?
The lights came on when Gary and Beth Rose had gotten as far as the custodian’s closet. Their eyes hadn’t adjusted to the light when some kid half in, half out of the closet said, “Hey, Gary. Take this snow shovel, will you?”
“It’s turned to snow out there?” Gary asked. “I didn’t know it was that cold.”
“No, it’s pumpkin. The junior high kids had a pumpkin fight. I don’t know what else to clean it up with.”
Gary laughed. “I’m a great pumpkin shoveler from way back.” He took the snow shovel and the other kid took a roll of paper towels and a can of spray cleaner. “I’ll find you after we’ve cleaned it up,” Gary said to Beth, smiling. He said nothing about the dress he had promised to notice when the lights came on, and his eyes weren’t on the dress, anyhow; they were on the shovel.
Beth sighed.
Gary said, “I’m really sorry. I forget your name.”
“Mike Robinson.”
I thought he meant me, Beth thought, relieved.
“Yeah. Did Kip line you up for cleaning crew?” Gary asked.
“No. I was just there. The kids who are on clean-up brought blue jeans to change into. But I’m just wearing an old sports jacket and pants, anyway. No problem for me, they don’t even have to be dry cleaned.”
Fascinating, thought Beth. Intoxicating. Thrilling. My idea of romantic talk, too. Oh, well, it was nice of them to clean up for Kip.
The pumpkin really had created a hideous mess. Those junior high kids had had only five minutes, but they had been a very destructive five minutes. Beth Rose stood in awe of the ability to smash pumpkins in a hurry. The dance floor was now half as big, due to squashed pumpkin on the other half.
Kip didn’t even look mad.
In fact, she was dancing, which seemed most unlike Kip. You would have expected her to be supervising.
The fact that Gary was going to drive her home gave Beth Rose a curious poise. Even though nobody else knew about it, she was able now to walk out onto the jammed dance floor and begin dancing alone. Jennie and Bob were on her right, Caitlin and her date, Sue and Jimmy, and all the rest.
When the electricity returned, people had wanted more light than before. There was no dim romantic atmosphere left. It was a real cafeteria now, with acoustical tiles hung with fishing wire and felt and mylar and satin leaves. Half the props and decorations had been shifted, or someone had fallen on them and broken something off. Beth would have expected Kip to be beside herself, but Kip didn’t appear to have noticed anything wrong. She was dancing away like everybody else, lost in the beat and the music.
Sue stopped dancing so abruptly that both Beth Rose and Jimmy plowed right into her. “Look at that!” she exclaimed, with such astonishment that they all whirled.
“Must be tyrannosaurus rex or something,” said Jimmy, laughing at Sue.
It was a television crew.
Sue squealed with pleasure. “We’ll be on the eleven-thirty news! Our first dance in three years! We’re important enough for the news. Jimmy! How does my hair look?”
“Gotta be too late for the evening news,” said Roddy.
“It’s not. It’s five of eleven. They’ll make it if they hurry.”
“Hurry?” said Gary skeptically. “They’ll have to fly.” He was leaning on his shovel, framed against the orange of the pumpkin remains. What a color shot it would make: handsome Gary in his tuxedo, the pumpkins strewn around his feet!
Beth walked over to him. “Let’s be on tv,” she said, smiling.
He grinned, put down the shovel, offered her his arm, and waltzed her toward the crew.
Chapter 19
THE CLOUDS WERE GONE. Stars spangled the black sky. Anne stared at their patterns, looking for answers, finding none.
A car pulled very very slowly into the parking lot. A car she knew very well. She knew every ripple of the corduroy upholstery and every scratch on the crimson finish. Con’s car.
At the foot of the steps, the car idled. She stood still. Con saw her. A full minute later he turned off the ignition, got out of the car, and slowly walked up the steps toward her. Anne looked at him. She was so drained of emotion that she felt none, looking at him, and no expression crossed her face because there was no feeling left in her heart.
“You don’t have a coat on,” Con said to her. “It’s freezing out here. Why are you standing outside without your coat?”
She didn’t answer. He pulled his own jacket off and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t react. “Are you waiting for your mother?” he said. “Did you call her?”
She shook her head.
“Well, stand inside. You’re going to die of hypothermia.” He walked her inside the school and the warmth hit her. Now she realized how cold she was. She looked at her hands: transparently blue, trembling. Con took them in his own and began to rub them. She watched the friction of their hands.
After a while Anne looked into his eyes, trying to see past the dark pools of iris into the mind that made Con drive back. His eyes told her nothing. She looked away.
Con drew a deep breath and stopped rubbing her hands. He simply pressed them between his own, as if they were both praying. “I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “Me, too.”
He couldn’t seem to think of anything to add. He didn’t touch her in his old way, either. He stood apart, and when he began rubbing the still-cold hands again, it was more like a medic with a stranger.
Inside the school, down the hall, they heard the music spring to life. Moments later the television crew rushed down the same hall, elbowing Anne and Con out of the way in their rush to get to the studio on time. Anne had never seen them to start with and barely saw them now. Con saw, but could not fathom what a tv crew could be doing at the school and forgot them the instant he looked back at Anne.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Once I broke a piece of my mother’s wedding crystal, and I said ‘I’m sorry’ and she said ‘Being sorry doesn’t make the crystal whole.’”
Con swallowed. “Okay. Okay. You threw it at me so fast I couldn’t think. I couldn’t believe I had to handle that in front of everybody I’ve ever known. I just had to get out of there. I’m sorry, Anne. I really am.”
Is he sorry he walked out of the dance? Sorry I told him so quickly? Sorry I’m pregnant? Sorry he has to get involved? Anne thought, I will have to interrogate him to know, and I don’t have the strength.
Con had never seen Anne like this. Stunned. Cold inside as well as outside. “I’ll drive you home, Anne,” he said finally. “I don’t—I don’t want any part of this. I want it not to be. But—but okay. I’ll go home with you. I’ll be there when you tell your mother.”
Anne looked at him again and narrowed her eyes trying to focus on him. But she couldn’t see him clearly. She shivered.
“Okay,” he said, drawing a deep breath. “Okay. We’ll tell your mother.”
She tilted her head slightly and the beginnings of a
slight smile touched her lips. “You’re pretty brave, fella.”
“Yeah. That’s me. Pure raw courage.”
“I like that in a man.”
“Let’s go, then. Let’s get it over with.”
“No,” said Anne Stephens. “I don’t want to go. We’ve missed the whole dance. I want to go back to the dance.”
It was Con’s turn to freeze. “Anne,” he said, dreading the sentence he had to speak, “they all know in there. There was gossip starting when I left. Molly started it. I guess she heard you telling Kip about it. There’s not a person in the cafeteria that doesn’t know.”
Nothing could have amazed Con more than Anne’s sudden happy smile. “Really? I thought it was Kip. I thought Kip told.”
“No. Kip wouldn’t do this to us. Molly started the rumor.”
Anne’s smile faded. “Oh, it’s a rumor now?” she said in a hard voice.
Oh, Con thought, and we have her mother and grandmother to go. “No. It’s not a rumor. You’re pregnant and I walked away from it. Left you here alone.” The muscle began twitching in his cheek again. He tried to relax, letting go of each muscle the way they learned in gym, but it didn’t work. The muscle twitched involuntarily.
And after I face her family, I have to face mine, he thought. He knew what his mother and father would say. Con, we trusted you absolutely. We gave you freedom in which to be responsible. And look what you’ve done. …
Anne’s chin lifted. “I don’t care what everybody is thinking. We’re going back in there and dance the last dance, Con. Together.”
He would rather have fought a world war with his bare hands. Five hundred kids in there, all quoting Molly who described him—rightly—as the rat who abandoned Anne?
“Okay,” he said. His stomach knotted like chicken wire. Calm down, he told himself. You’re walking in together. She had to walk out of there alone. Con put his arm around her, feeling very shy, as if Anne were a woman he had never met. “You warm enough now?” he said, because temperature was a safe topic.
“I’m okay.”
They walked toward the cafeteria door.
The muscle in his cheek throbbed until his jaw hurt.
Anne leaned on him.
Con seriously considered picking her up bodily and hauling her to the car. The car! “The car,” he said happily, “is not in a real parking space. We have to go move it. And since we’re moving it anyway, we might as well just drive on to your—”
“So we get a parking ticket. Big deal. What’s a ticket at a time like this?”
“Right,” said Con, who was having to take such deep breaths his own breathing winded him. My parents told me one more ticket and they’d ground me, he thought. That’ll be the pits. I’m the father of this baby, I’m the rat who abandoned her, and I also don’t have a car to drive.
He swung open the door to escort her in and it was the most difficult motion in his life. Walking away was a snap. Staying was pretty grim.
Everybody was dancing. Good. They’d be too busy to look up. Anne and Con could just slide along the wall, hopping over the apple barrels and the—
But they were not too busy to look up. Sue and Jimmy looked up, Bob and Jennie, Gary and Beth Rose, Kip and Roddy.
“You had to do this to me,” Con said. “You had to give me an audience.”
“I’m sorry. Bad timing. I couldn’t help it. I was going insane and I split apart at the wrong moment.
“Next time tell me sooner.”
“Next time?” she snorted. “If you think there’s going to be a next time, you’re out of your mind!”
He laughed. It was a real laugh, and so was Anne’s. He kissed her, and it was a real kiss, and so was hers. “I love you, Anne,” he whispered.
She began to cry.
“Oh, no, don’t cry on me!” he begged.
“I’m not,” she whispered back. “I’m really laughing.”
“Then why are there tears running down your cheeks?” he murmured.
“You’re fibbing,” she said. “There aren’t any.”
He wiped them away with his right hand and held her chin lightly the way he often did before a kiss. “You’re right,” he said. “There aren’t any.”
They had gotten halfway across the room and reached the edge of the dancers. Con prayed the music wouldn’t stop. He could not talk to a single person right now and that included Anne. The music was fast, which was bad, because he could hardly move, let alone dance fast.
“Wish it was a slow one,” he mumbled to Anne. He was out of breath, as if they’d climbed into the cafeteria.
“So we’ll dance slow.” She leaned on him and they danced slow, paying no attention to the drums that whipped the rest along. He was glad they were the same height because her golden hair partially shielded his face, and when he saw kids looking at him, he simply moved her fractionally to the side, and her hair gave him privacy from the stares.
“First test,” Anne said to him.
Con groaned. “Out of how many?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying not to think that far ahead.”
The music stopped.
Gary and Beth Rose walked over. Con felt panicky. Gary said, “You missed a good pumpkin fight, Con. I was the one who got to shovel it all up, ankle deep in pumpkin pulp.”
“Kip give you a medal?” Con asked.
“No, but I got a pat on the back and that’s something from Kip.” Gary talked about the power blackout Con had missed. The tv crew, and Emily and Matt’s rescue of the dying stranger. Con was able to look only at Gary, and not see the rest of the kids, and Anne was able to look only at Beth Rose.
The music began again and after that it was easier.
Beth Rose wondered if Gary knew how many gifts he had given that evening. Had he seen that he gave Emily a breather so she wouldn’t have to talk into a terrifying microphone? Had he seen that he gave Beth herself a moment to cherish all her life—a moment of being utterly irresistible and beautiful? Had he planned to rescue Con from a whole room of curiosity seekers?
She had a sense that Gary was kind unawares. That he had a knack for doing nice things without noticing himself doing them. Perhaps that was the definition of charity: to do good without ordering yourself to do it.
“You keep doing this to me,” Gary said.
“What?” Beth Rose asked.
“Just standing there in a daydream when I want to dance.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m used to it now. Doesn’t throw me.”
We’re getting used to each other, she thought. Does that mean something? Do I dare read something into that?
Chapter 20
THE LAST DANCE.
The band was exhausted. The long evening was over. Happy to be playing the final number, the musicians were grinning at each other, half performing, half packed to go.
The food was long since devoured.
The junior high waiters and waitresses abandoned the tables and found their own partners for the last dance. A few of them sported telltale patches of orange pumpkin pulp.
The clean-up crew, mostly freshmen and sophomores Kip had corralled by telling them it would look good on their records (an absolute lie: Records at Westerly mentioned only grades and test scores), were waiting by the exit. They were envious of the dancers and irritated by them, because they wanted to get the cleaning done so they could go home.
Kip and Roddy danced as if they had been partners all their lives. Roddy thought it was because Kip liked him now. Kip thought it was because Roddy mattered so little to her that it had become easy to be with him. But she smiled at him.
And there was her flashlight friend. Dancing by in the company of so many people that she could not tell which girl—if any—was with him. “Hi, there,” he said to Kip.
“Flashlight,” she said. “I never thanked you properly.”
“I know. And I got Gary to shovel up the pumpkin for you and you never thanked me for
that, either.”
“If you’d introduce yourself properly, I could thank you properly,” said Kip. She was shaking all over. Is this what falling in love is? The shakes? Then I’ve never fallen in love before because I’ve never trembled all over before.
“Mike Robinson,” he said.
She stopped dancing with Roddy and shook Mike’s hand. She liked his handshake. Firm without crunching. What would his kiss be like? What would it be like to have the name Kip Elliott Robinson? Would he have heart failure right now, this Mike Robinson, if he could read her thoughts? “Mike,” she said, “welcome to Westerly High.”
Roddy coughed slightly.
“And this is Roddy McDonald,” Kip added. The boys nodded at each other. Kip fancied that Mike was sizing Roddy up to see what the competition was. Believe me, said Kip silently, you have no competition in this school, Mike Robinson.
“Who are you with, Mike?” she said, unable to stand the suspense.
“Nobody. I didn’t know anybody to ask.”
Perfect answer. Kip smiled at him, sending messages through her eyes, but whether or not he could interpret them she didn’t know.
A pair on the clean-up crew approached her. “Can we start taking down the shed?” they asked.
“Sure, go ahead. It’s a prefab workshop that the principal loaned me out of his backyard. It’s in six parts. Stack them in his pickup truck, which is parked outside right next to the kitchen door.”
“Gotcha.”
Roddy said admiringly, “You always have everything lined up, don’t you, Kip?”
“Yes,” she said, and prayed that he would forgive her for lining something else up, too. “Roddy, do you feel like working with me? I have to stay until clean-up is finished.”
Pure fib. She had arranged everything under another kid’s supervision because she had not expected to be at the dance. Roddy, of all people, should see through this fib. But he nodded eagerly, ready to help. She winced. “You could start with the fountain,” she said. “It’s hollow underneath and you wind up the hose and—”