Friends.
Okay, they would go to the Last Dance and be friends.
After all, Kip had close to seventeen years of experience at this “we’re just friends” stuff. It wasn’t as if she was a beginner at being “just friends.”
Tomorrow, summer vacation would begin.
Kip had her first full-time job: waitressing at a fish house.
If when she came home smelling of fried flounder and tartar sauce, she knew that after her shower, Mike would take her out, it would all be bearable. But she had her doubts. Mike had his first full-time job coming up, too, and it wasn’t in Westerly: he’d be driving every day to Lynnwood to work on a construction site. And he was, Kip thought gloomily, just as excited about his summer job as he had been about baseball.
Please, please, don’t let this really be our last dance, Kip Elliott thought. I want to dance with Mike forever!
The L word.
It was what all the girls wanted to hear.
But, oh, it was a scary word, that L word, and rare was the boy who was willing to use it.
Anne Stephens, trembling with fear, sat waiting for Con to come and get her. Con wasn’t about to use the old L word, that was for sure, but he was taking her, and he had promised over and over not to leave her. Not for one dance, not for one soda, not for one minute.
She was only going because Con said she had to. It would be good for her, he explained. She would get tough. She had to face everybody sometime, and it might as well be now.
Anne agreed only because there was no school the next day. She would not have to see anybody again until September 5, if she chose.
Last year, on September 5, she and Con started junior year as the most loved couple: the most beautiful girl and the handsomest boy, the brightest, funniest, most popular pair in the entire high school. Ah, but that was last year. And this was the last dance.
But it was Anne’s first. First in many months.
Okay, stay calm, Anne told herself. Either kids will ask about it or they won’t; either they’ll be nice or they won’t. You can’t control it.
But what will I say? she asked herself for the thousandth time. When they say, “Where’ve you been since January, Anne?” do I say, “Oh, off having a baby.” When they say. “What did you name the baby?” do I say, “Whoever adopts it gets to name it?”
Anne had held the baby for ten minutes. It was a little girl, so tiny she had a hard time believing that’s what a baby was. She had thought they were much more substantial. She kissed its tiny bald head, and her tears fell gently on its red wrinkled skin and Anne thought, I can’t give her away! I have to take care of her, and feed her, and see her grow, and—
And give this miniature daughter no father, no family, no home, no future?
And for herself, Anne—no high school diploma, no husband, no home, no future?
Anne was given a little paper to read about the parents who were going to adopt her baby. (She always thought of it as “her baby,” not as Con’s, because Con was so horrified by the whole thing you would have thought Anne had become an alligator hunter, not a mother.) The parents were over thirty, they were both college graduates, the mother (Mother? thought Anne. That’s what I am. The mother. How impossible!) planned to stop working and stay home with the baby she had been dreaming of for over ten years.
It had not been a dream for Anne.
It had been a nightmare.
But it was over now. She was slim again, which was apparently what mattered most to everybody else, and her parents and her grandmother were practically normal with her, and it was time to get back into the swing. Con was taking her to the Last Dance.
Anne thought it was an absolutely horrid name. Who could have thought of such a thing? Why not Summer Prom or The June Fling? Last Dance sounded all too prophetic.
It was a hot evening. Windows were open to catch any slight breeze. She heard a car two blocks away, and the downshifting of the motor, and the slam of the door.
No, no, I can’t do this, thought Anne Stephens. But nothing showed on her face. It stayed perfectly lovely and calm in the mirror in her hand, as if the face belonged to somebody else.
But it was her grandmother who flung open the screen door and came in the house. In the shadow of the living room, Anne stared at the grandmother who had been so disappointed in her. “Anne, darling, you look so lovely,” said her grandmother, hugging her.
But it wasn’t the same hug as last year’s. They were all slightly afraid of her: because she had become a mother? A woman? Or because she had not been, after all, the child they thought they knew so well?
Con would greet her with the same hug: nervous, quick, moving back before she could take any comfort from it. Anne’s life and body had changed so much in the last months and his not at all. He was still a reckless crazy teenage boy, who had to pay a fortune for car insurance and whose chief pleasure was his sound equipment: the stereo, the compact discs, the videos.
“You look beautiful, Anne,” he would say next, in his husky, sexy voice. It was the one thing that had never come into question: her beauty. But she didn’t care how she looked. She wanted him to say, “…and I love you, Anne.” He was exactly her height, so that their eyes always locked and their lips always met. Con was dark, with an athlete’s build and a perfect smile, with hair as thick as her own, but almost black, as hers was almost gold. His profile should have been on some antique coin, with that long nose and that uplifted chin.
He wanted to take her to the Last Dance.
But he was so distant from her! So nervous with her! Sometimes she thought it was just because (just?) of their baby…but sometimes Anne though he had another girlfriend, one who had not gotten heavy, or presented difficulties, or made him feel guilty. Sometimes Anne pictured this other girlfriend and felt sick, and full of rage, and full of fear. And sometimes she didn’t care, either.
Oh, if Con would only say “I love you.”
But that L word was scary.
And nobody scared quicker or more thoroughly than Conrad Winters.
Anne Stephens moved quickly to the phone. She could not go through with it. Con was not enough support. She dialed his number fast, before he could leave his house and get to his car, and when he answered she said, “Don’t come, Con. I don’t want to go to the dance.”
Beth Rose had chosen a summery dress in soft flowery colors, and the thick infuriating red hair that had been the bane of her life for so many years had finally become a joy, and now it hung in heavy ringlets from a long narrow comb that gave her a mane like a wild horse. She loved the contrast of her strong firm hair with her fragile papery dress. She was in a dancing mood. All week, music had run in her head: music to dance by, music to flirt by, music to laugh by…but mostly…and always…music to adore Gary by.
Oh, what had life been before Gary?
Pallid, dull, repetitive.
And now?
Well, first it was scary. Yes, Beth Rose would have to put scary ahead of romantic. Because you couldn’t count on Gary. He never said you could count on him—in fact he stressed that you couldn’t—and Gary didn’t lie. He wasn’t reliable. And that was scary.
But if he showed up—oh, then it was romantic!
Beth Rose considered herself the most stodgy of personalities. She was the sort of person who would always stay for cleanup, and never skip the middle of boring books, and always, always pay her library fines. She had also been, until Gary, a wallflower. Last year, at another dance, Gary said, smiling, “Well, a flower anyway,” and kissed her. Now when Beth Rose stood by a wall, she felt she was not a wallflower, but truly a rose, because to be with Gary was to be special.
She even got along better with her parents because of Gary. The new pleasure of being popular made it easy to laugh when they nagged, and Beth Rose discovered something astonishing: If she laughed, her mother and father laughed! Life at home had moved from a sour lane to a sweet one.
The only snag was that Gary did
not have what you might call an attentive nature. Sometimes he helped in his father’s restaurant, sometimes he got interested in school, sometimes he worked in the drama production, and sometimes he was fixing his car. And sometimes, with about equal emphasis, he wandered over to Beth Rose’s and took her out. Gary never saw anything wrong with this: He felt life was perfect—a dose of mechanics, a dollop of girlfriend, a smidgen of studying, and a speck of work.
It was Beth Rose who felt the proportions were off. She would have liked to see ninety percent girlfriend and ten percent other. She said that to Gary once. Gary said, “You’re kidding,” and laughed and kissed her and they went on to a movie and shared popcorn. It never crossed Gary’s mind that no, she was not kidding. The L word.
Beth Rose and Anne had discussed that L word at length. Gary was definitely not in love with Beth Rose. He liked her fine, but he also liked everything else under the sun fine. It was useless even to ask Gary if he loved her because he would have said, “Sure,” and then he would have said, “You wanna borrow my Dad’s motorcycle and helmets and we’ll go up to Mount Snow? You wanna ride the ski lift in summer? It’s pretty. I love it.”
Beth Rose did not want to be loved the same amount as a ski lift in summer.
Her mother came into the room, where she was fixing her dark red hair for the second time. “You be nice to Anne, now, Brose.”
A year ago Beth Rose would have tensed and gotten upset. Now she just laughed. “Mother, I’ve been nicer to Anne than anybody, including Con. It’s my Aunt Madge she went to live with, right?”
Mrs. Chapman shook her head. “I still don’t see why she couldn’t stay at home.”
“Because our town sends pregnant unwed teenagers to a special high school in Lynnwood, and Anne didn’t want to go. She was crying twenty-four hours a day, Mother.”
Beth Rose took the comb out of her hair and tossed her head violently, and now the curls sprawled all over her head like a garden of red poppies. Sometimes Beth Rose thought the best thing about this excellent year was not even Gary, but her new friendships with Anne and with Emily, girls in the junior class who never even knew her name before—never spoke to her because they never noticed her—and now each was on the phone with her at least once a day, talking boys, and life, and boys, and parents, and boys. (Emily and Beth Rose liked to start and end all conversations with boys.)
Mrs. Chapman said, “I don’t want you out late, dear.”
“Okay.”
“That means no later than one A.M., dear.”
“Okay.”
“That means leaving the dance shortly after midnight, dear.”
“Mother, I know! My middle name is Cinderella. Gary knows. He’s been taking me out all year! We’ve got the rules down!” Beth Rose laughed, surrendered her wild hair to the elements, hugged her mother, and dashed downstairs to leap into the car with Gary.
She could never wait for him to come inside. She was always ready early, always halfway on the date before Gary was even halfway to her house. She always ran out and jumped into the front and slid over the seat, and Gary would be laughing at her exuberance, and she would kiss him hard and he would just sit there, letting her, and then he would back out of the driveway.
This time she didn’t do any of that.
This was the Last Dance.
And Beth Rose wanted Gary to do it right.
Molly was schizophrenic.
She was half wild with excitement. She adored dancing, and she had the best dress in the world, and she was crazy about Rushing River Inn, and her silver slippers on her small slim feet were the perfect finish for her outfit. Her dress was very short, very purple, with one lightning strip of glitter; her stockings were lace, her belt a silver chain with a dangling silver sun and stars, and her matching earrings reached to her shoulders. When she danced, she rang like tiny bells.
But half of Molly—the invisible half—was seething with rage.
Con was taking Anne.
Talk about blackmail. It wasn’t Con’s fault Anne hadn’t been careful. Anne should have known better. And if Anne was such a dork she had to leave town and go live with somebody until she had the baby, because she wouldn’t have an abortion, well, that was Anne’s problem. Con, perfect Con, should not be subjected to such a thing, and she, Molly, had seen to it that from January to the first of June he wasn’t.
Molly had been laughter and fun, lightness and giggles.
She never asked anything of him; they never talked of anything serious, and gradually Con had stopped calling or visiting Anne. Anne was fat, anyway, and repulsive. And of course every time he had to visit her, Con was reminded of what happened, and Molly felt this was unfair. Somebody as wonderful as Con should not have to feel any guilt because Anne was dumb. Certainly she, Molly, would never be that dumb.
So here they were at the Last Dance, the pay-off socially for the whole long winter and the whole wet dismal spring, and who was Con taking?
Anne.
It was enough to make you spit.
Molly pounded her silver heels on the floor, and it was no dance—it was a tantrum.
But she blamed nothing on Con, and she blamed nothing on herself.
It was Anne Stephens’ fault, and if precious, elegant little Anne thought she could just waltz back to Westerly and take Con and her social position back up as if nothing had happened, well, precious Anne was wrong.
Molly was keeping Con, and that was that.
Molly smiled into the mirror.
The mirror said nothing.
Molly’s smile said it all.
Emily was shaking so hard she could barely find the telephone, let alone dial. Oh, for a phone with memory that would accomplish these tasks for her! What if Matt had already left? What if he was on his way? What would she do then?
“Oh, Matt!” she cried out, when he did answer. “Oh, Matt, don’t come. Forget it. We’re not going.”
“Not going? But Em, I thought you were so excited about this dance. We bought that dress, and—”
“And Mother and Dad are splitting up tonight, Matt. Right now. This minute. They’ve been throwing things at each other for hours and screaming horrible accusations, and Mother is packing a suitcase and shoving her things in her car, and she says I have to go with her, and we’re leaving now.”
Emily did not know why she was weeping so much. Her parents had no more use for her than they did for each other, and it was only since she began dating Matt that they saw anything good in their daughter at all. Matt was so wonderful they figured Emily must have something invisible going for her that they had not yet spotted.
It terrified her to think of moving away with her mother. She could manage a different high school, even if it was her senior year—her precious senior year—that would be lost. She could leave behind the familiar neighbors and rooms and garden and kitchen. But the only thing that had saved the Edmundson family this long was the fact that the rambling multilevel house permitted them to live quite separately. Emily knew she could not live in a three-room apartment in Lynnwood with her mother. They would be at each other’s throats. They could not pull it off. Emily had managed never to fight her parents the way they fought each other, and she could not bear to start now. The thought of the wars to come, once she and her mother were jammed in next to each other and could not be apart, was enough to make her feel ill.
“So let them split,” Matt said. “You and I are going to a dance. I’ve never been to Rushing River Inn, and I plan to throw you in the swimming pool. So be prepared. You’ll know when I’m going to do it because first I’ll unpin your corsage and set it in a safe, dry place. The money I paid for these flowers, I’m not getting them drowned in chlorine.”
His voice was as goofy as his grin, all spread all over the place, silly and sane at the same time. Oh, how Emily loved Matt! She took a deep, shaky breath and tried not to break down. “Matt, you don’t understand. Mother is in the hall screaming at me to get in her car, and Dad is on the landi
ng, screaming at me to stay put.”
Her parents’ voices terrified her. Screaming at each other she had gotten used to. But screaming at her was new, and she wanted to hide from them, under the bed or in the closet, like a baby.
“M&M, I understand perfectly,” said Matt, who had begun calling her for her favorite candy, and also because her name (Em) and his initial (M) were M&M. “And who cares? You’re sixteen, soon to be seventeen. Old. Very, very old and mature. And we’re going to a dance, because kids like us spend all our time doing fun things. I have four new tapes, and my mother bought the neatest new snack—looks kind of like mouse droppings, but it really tastes pretty good. I’m bringing it to eat in the car so we can keep up our strength, and you’ll like it.”
Matt had a mind filled with thoughts. Emily visualized the inside of Matt’s head as a clothes dryer with a glass door: thoughts tumbling like drying jeans and socks, with no relationship to each other except they were all crammed into the dryer together. You had to concentrate to follow Matt, and tonight she could not think.
Emily’s parents appeared in her bedroom door.
The door framed them, like a picture, perhaps a twentieth anniversary picture—not that they planned to have or celebrate one. Her mother said fiercely, “Emily, the car.” It sounded as if she were introducing them.
Her father yelled much louder, “Emily, you’re not going anywhere.”
Matt said in her ear, “I heard that. They sound a little irritable. Listen, M&M, be happy, it’s finally going to happen, this divorce you’ve been worried about for so long. We’ll stay out all night, and when we get back at dawn, they will have split.”