by Leila Sales
“Come here!” she called.
I obey direct orders. That’s why I cleaned up a full lunchroom table, that’s why I gave Jordan my iPod, and that’s why I crossed the street now. Because someone told me to.
The two girls were leaning against a graffitied wall. The one who had shouted was a little taller than me, heavyset, and smoking a cigarette. She wore a black-and-white polka-dot dress with a bright yellow cardigan, and she had feathers in her hair.
“Start’s in there,” she said, cocking her finger at the building behind her.
This was like I’m sending Wrappers to the Gallos all over again. Start’s in there. Why did people always have to speak in code?
“Okay,” I said.
“Have you been here before?” she asked me.
I shrugged in a way that probably meant yes, but could have meant no.
“We haven’t been here since it was over in Pawtucket,” the polka-dot-dress girl went on, gesturing west with her cigarette, even though Pawtucket was roughly nine miles north of where we stood now. Also, how could they not have been somewhere since it was somewhere else? This whole thing was very Alice in Wonderland.
“Do you want a cigarette?” she offered me.
“No, thank you,” I said, then added, “I don’t smoke.”
She nodded. “That’s good. These can kill you.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, as if to prove the point.
Her friend spoke up for the first time. She was petite and had a blond pixie haircut. She reminded me a little of a foal, all gangly legs and round eyes. She spoke with an accent that made her words just a little hard to understand as she said, “Vicks, it sounds like you were offering her a cigarette because you were trying to kill her.”
The first girl’s mouth dropped open in faux horror, her bright red lipstick forming a big O. “I was being generous.”
The friend shrugged her bony shoulders. “Well, she doesn’t know us. For all she knows, you were trying to infect her with cancer.” She adjusted her short, fringed leather jacket over her gold sequined dress.
“You’re from England?” I asked the skinny friend, dissecting her accent.
“Originally,” she said. “I grew up in Manchester.”
“Manchester!” I exclaimed.
“You’ve been there?” She sounded surprised.
“No, but I’ve always wanted to go.”
“Don’t. Manchester is a shithole,” she said decisively. “The whole town looks like this.” She swung her arm out to encompass the blank street of warehouses.
“The Smiths are from Manchester, though,” I said.
“And New Order,” she added, sounding proud. “And Oasis.”
“Okay, blah blah, we get it, all the world’s greatest bands come from your hometown,” the polka-dot-dress girl threw in. “Thanks for rubbing it in.”
“Only because it’s such a shithole,” the British girl said. “People have to create some kind of art so they have something to think about other than their shitty lives.”
“Yeah, but Glendale’s a shithole, too, and how many world-class musicians come from here?” countered her friend.
“You. For example.”
The polka-dot-dress girl snorted and stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. “Yeah, right. Come on, let’s go back in before I smoke another one and give us all cancer.”
They walked a few feet away from me, then turned around when they noticed I wasn’t with them. “Are you coming or what?” demanded the polka-dot-dress girl.
And something about feeling like I was in a dream, or a Lewis Carroll hallucination, made me feel okay about answering, “I’m coming.”
I scampered after them as they turned a corner, down a small alleyway between warehouses. I was probably about to get kidnapped. But, honestly, I would have rather been kidnapped by these girls than remained un-kidnapped among my classmates. If getting kidnapped meant a trip to Manchester, I was all for it.
“What’s your name anyway?” the bigger girl called over her shoulder.
“Elise.”
She turned around to look me up and down. “Like the Cure song?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded her approval. “This skinny bitch here is Pippa. I’m Vicky, short for Victoria, of course.”
“Like the Kinks song?” I blurted out. Then I blushed. That sounded dumb coming out of my mouth. I sounded overeager, juvenile. Uncool.
But she gave me a broad, beaming smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Like the Kinks song.”
At the end of the alleyway stood a large black man with a shaved head and pierced ears, guarding a closed door.
“Hi, Mel,” chirped Vicky.
“Heya, Mel,” said Pippa, standing on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks.
“Who’s this?” he said gruffly. He squinted down at me.
“Elise,” I said. I stuck out my hand to shake his, but he kept his firm arms crossed over his chest.
“You got ID?” he asked.
All I had was my iPod. “Not on me,” I answered. “But I promise my name is Elise.”
“She’s twenty-one today,” Vicky butted in. “Isn’t that exciting? Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Elise—”
“If this girl’s twenty-one, then so am I,” Mel said with an eye roll.
“You mean you’re not twenty-one?” Vicky feigned surprise. “I swear, Mel, you can’t be any older than that. Your skin is baby-soft.”
The corners of Mel’s mouth twitched like he was fighting a smile. “I’m old enough to be your father, Vicks.”
“No way!” Vicky said. “My dad is old. You know that magazine old people get?”
“No,” said Mel.
“Well, there’s a magazine, and my dad has been getting it since I was six years old. Plus he goes to bed every night at nine. Mel, you have never been in bed at nine.”
Mel shrugged his broad shoulders. “Age is more than just a number. It’s a lifestyle.”
“So what you’re telling me here,” Vicky said, “is that Elise really is twenty-one, even if she doesn’t have the ID to prove it.”
Mel groaned and began to reply, but Pippa stepped forward. “Come on, Mel,” she said quietly, and I couldn’t tell what it was, if it was her posture, or the expression on her face, or her voice, or the halting way she touched her tiny fingers to her hair, but I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world saying no to her. “Be a gentleman. Elise is with us.”
And Mel stepped back and opened the door for us.
As we walked past him and into the building, I marveled at this. Not at Vicky’s banter or at Pippa’s feminine wiles, but at their willingness to say, unprompted, Elise is with us.
Why are you being nice to me? I wanted to know. But I didn’t ask. If I asked that, they might realize their mistake. Instead I just lightly pressed the inside of my left wrist, like I was checking for my pulse, and I followed them inside.
4
The door opened to reveal a packed dance floor of sweaty, flailing bodies illuminated by occasional flashing lights in the otherwise dimly lit, high-ceilinged room. “Dancing in the Dark” was blasting from speakers twice my height, and most of the crowd was singing along like their lives depended on it, except for a guy who was taking photos with an expensive-looking camera, a few girls who were waiting in a bathroom line, and two guys who were hard-core making out, complete with ass-grabbing and saliva-drenched French kissing.
“This is a nightclub?” I asked, then repeated, louder, when I realized no one could hear me.
“It’s Start!” Vicky replied. Her normal speaking voice was loud enough that she didn’t even have to try to project over the music. “The greatest underground dance party in the world!”
Pippa shook her head, and I could see her lips moving.
“Pippa says that she once went to a better underground dance party in Sheffield. But she’s full of shit. Start is it, Elise. Start is as good as it gets. You’ve really never bee
n here before?”
I shook my head and admitted, “I’m not really twenty-one.”
Vicky cracked up. Even Pippa almost smiled, and I could tell from the night so far that she wasn’t much of a smiler. Vicky said, “Honey, none of us are really twenty-one. We’re both eighteen.”
“The drinking laws in this country are ridiculous,” Pippa contributed.
“I don’t care about drinking,” Vicky said. “But I don’t see why you have to be twenty-one just to have a good time.”
Even at eighteen, Pippa and Vicky were both at least two years older than me. I’d just turned sixteen in January. They were probably already out of high school. Maybe they were in college. That explained why they could get dressed up in sequined dresses and feathers and go to a dance party at one a.m. on a weeknight. Because they were free.
“Speaking of drinks,” said Pippa, “I’m going to get one.” I watched her stride off across the room, her spindly legs balanced on high-heeled boots.
On her way to the bar, Pippa stopped by the DJ booth. She climbed two steps to the platform, where some guy with headphones around his neck was bopping in front of a computer, two turntables, and some other electronic equipment. The platform was so small that she had to stand right next to him, her elbow practically brushing against his. I could see her talking, but I couldn’t tell if he was listening, since he kept his eyes focused on the equipment before him as he adjusted various dials.
“The DJ’s name is Char.” Vicky spoke directly into my ear. “Pippa loooves him.”
I looked at them differently after Vicky told me that. I tried to see the love in Pippa’s behavior. I tried to figure out if he loved her back.
“They look good together,” I said. “Like a pair.” He was a few inches taller than Pippa was, even in heels, and his dark hair perfectly complemented her platinum blond locks. Even their leather jackets looked like they’d been purchased together, a Barbie and Ken Go to the Discotheque boxed set.
Vicky grinned. “I’m going to tell her you said that. She’ll love it.”
Char held up a wait a minute finger to Pippa, then put his headphones on. Pippa hovered next to him for a moment, but when he didn’t look up from his computer, she climbed down from the DJ booth and continued on to the bar.
The song transitioned into “Girls and Boys,” and the crowd went wild.
“We’re dancing!” Vicky shouted at me, which wasn’t strictly true. She was dancing.
Here are all the dance floor experiences I’ve had so far in my life:
1. Ruining the Tiny Dancers year-end recital at the YMCA when I was six years old because I didn’t know how to skip.
2. Going to a school dance in seventh grade, where they played songs like “Shake Your Ass,” only with the word ass bleeped out, and everybody grinded up on everybody else, except nobody grinded up on me.
So, for what I think are some pretty good reasons, I don’t dance.
The boys near us stopped sucking face for long enough to scream out the chorus with everyone else. I shifted my weight from foot to foot and sang the words and tried to move my arms like Vicky did. Then I realized I looked stupid and put my arms back by my sides, where they belonged.
Pippa ran back onto the dance floor, holding a beer.
“Elise!” Pippa screamed at me, and she thrust her beer into my hands.
“Thank you,” I started to say, because for a moment I thought Pippa was trying, however misguidedly, to give me a gift.
Pippa grabbed Vicky’s hands in her own, and they started jumping up and down together, screaming the words straight into each other’s faces. On one of their jumps, Pippa’s heel landed right on my foot, but nobody seemed to notice.
I realized a beat too late that Pippa wasn’t giving me a gift of a beer can. She was using me as a living, breathing cup holder. That’s all. My legs slowly ground to a halt, like a wind-up toy that had run out of power.
I had this feeling suddenly. I get this feeling a lot, but I don’t know if there’s one word for it. It’s not nervous or sad or even lonely. It’s all of that, and then a bit more.
The feeling is I don’t belong here. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know how long I can stay before everyone else realizes that I am an impostor. I am a fraud.
I’ve gotten this feeling nearly everywhere I have ever been in my life. There’s nothing you can do about it except drink some water and hope that it subsides. Or you can leave.
I set Pippa’s beer down on the floor. She and Vicky were still holding hands and jumping in unison, twirling each other around. A few guys nearby were watching them appreciatively. The man with the big expensive camera elbowed me out of the way to snap a photo of them. No one was looking at me. So I took option B, and I left.
Just before I slipped out the door, I paused for a moment to look at the room one more time, trying to cement this image in my mind. The darkness and the music, the sparkly headbands catching the lights, the brightly colored sneakers sliding across the dance floor.
Across the room, Char glanced up from his DJ equipment. He held one headphone to his ear but left the other side free as he surveyed the crowd. He moved his mouth slightly, as if talking or singing to himself. His eyes scanned the room and rested, briefly, on me.
I held his gaze with mine for a long moment. He didn’t smile, but his expression was friendly, I think, or maybe just curious.
Then he looked back down at his computer, and I walked out.
* * *
When my alarm went off at 6:35 the next morning, I felt discombobulated. Even though I stayed up too late all the time, I didn’t usually feel so groggy. I had trained myself to get through days on minimal sleep. In fact, school felt better when I felt out of it. It’s like getting anesthetized before a surgical procedure.
After turning off the alarm, I stared at my ceiling and tried to figure out what was going on. Had I actually uncovered a secret warehouse dance party? Or had I dreamed up the whole thing as some kind of pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy?
Then Alex came running into my room, screaming, “Mom says I’m supposed to tell you to get up! And she says it’s going to rain! And she says what do you want for breakfast!”
That’s the problem with life. You never get enough time to stare at your ceiling and try to figure out what’s going on.
At breakfast, not one member of the Myers household said anything to me like, “So, did you stumble across any nightclubs at one o’clock in the morning while you were pacing the back roads of Glendale?” Instead, people at breakfast said things like, “I have a five o’clock call with the funder, so can you pick up the kids from afterschool?” (Mom), and “Champ, I promise that is the same sort of Eggo we get every week. It just looks browner, but if you closed your eyes, it would taste exactly the same” (Steve), and “I’m not going to go to school, I’m going to sit on the couch all day, and you can’t stop me, ’cause I’ll be participating in the democratic process” (Alex), and “It looks like it’s whole wheat. You know I don’t eat whole wheat Eggos” (Neil).
So, clearly, nightclubbing was not at the top of anyone else’s mind this Friday morning.
I caught my school bus with seconds to spare and sat in the front row. After the first day of this year, I had given up on trying for the middle of the bus. What, you think that if you sit six rows back from the driver instead of one row back, people will be fooled into thinking you’re cool and join you? I tried that. That did not work. My classmates may be idiots, but even they are not so easily fooled.
I pressed my face to the smudged bus window and watched warehouse after warehouse roll past us as I looked for Start. And what I found was this: in the rain and in the morning, they all looked exactly the same.
I took my face away from the window and leaned back against my seat as the bus rounded the corner. If I hadn’t been there to see where the party had once been, I never would have known it was there at all.
School was normal, which is to say
soul-crushingly depressing. I sat in class and wrote the lyrics to “Dancing in the Dark” in my best cursive handwriting in the margins of my notebook. I imagined Vicky sweeping into the room, with Pippa stalking in behind her on four-inch heels, and announcing to the class, “Elise is with us! None of you appreciate her, and you don’t even deserve her. Elise, it’s time. We are here to take you to your real life. You have suffered long enough through this one, but this was only a test, and the test is over now.” And then I would rise to my feet and join hands with them, and together we would run off into the sunset.
I drew a picture of all of this in my notebook. But that was as close as it was going to come to reality. Not least because it was only eleven thirty, so the sun wasn’t setting, and, even if it were, I wouldn’t have been able to tell, because it was raining.
Eventually it was time for lunch. Sophomores are not allowed off campus, and they are not allowed to wander the halls. Therefore, here were my options for how to spend my lunch period:
Option one: Sit in the library and read a book and listen to my iPod, which is basically the perfect way to spend thirty-five minutes of a school day, except that you are not allowed to eat in the library—nor are you allowed to eat in the halls or classrooms—so when I go this route, I am ready to faint from hunger by the time school lets out for the day.
Option two: Sit in Ms. Wu’s classroom and discuss math with her. This is actually a great bargain, since she doesn’t seem to know or care that we are not allowed to eat in classrooms. When I’m with Ms. Wu I get to eat my sandwich without running into any of the popular kids, because a defining characteristic of popular kids is that they do not like to hang out with math teachers. Furthermore, Ms. Wu tells me interesting math stuff, some of which might even prove useful when I take the SATs next year, and good SAT scores are my best hope for getting into a good college and therefore escaping this hellhole.
Unfortunately, Ms. Wu teaches during my Friday lunch period. Ms. Wu’s classroom is a good option on Tuesdays. But not on Fridays.
Option three: Sit in the cafeteria, at a table with my friends.
