by Chris Lynch
And I wanted exactly the same thing. Nothing but to lay the tips of my fingers on that soft pretty skin.
And true enough, the startled wide pale eyes were staring right at me. Her eyelashes were long and spiky, top and bottom, like a Venus’s-flytrap.
I smiled. I didn’t want to, because that was not part of my cool plan.
She smiled back, the rise of her cheek nearly obscuring the lower half of those eyes.
I knew her. Never met her. But I knew her. She knew me. Do you know how that is? How it can be?
What’s-his-name didn’t have to pull me or push me or talk me into it. Mikie didn’t have to convince me, and Frankie didn’t have to teach me. I started walking right over to her, even though I couldn’t feel my legs and even though this girl in the gaggle was not the plan. I felt my face pulling me across the room, to her face, which was hanging there in my sky. I was the tide to the moon of her face.
And my heart felt something. Really, right there in the place where the heart is in cartoons, where Pepe LePew would have this valentine-shaped protrusion punching its way out of his chest. I couldn’t believe this stuff actually happened to people in real—
“Not,” Frankie barked in my ear as he hit me from the side and moved me like a tackling sled off my route.
“What, what?” I asked, still looking at her.
“No way, Elvin. We didn’t come here for that. What has all our work been for? New clothes, new attitude, new Elvin, remember? You”—he poked me in the chest with his finger—“don’t belong there”—he pointed at the gaggle, where I could see her peeking out from the black ringlets. She looked confused.
“Why? What? Maybe I... maybe. Where would I belong, Frank?”
He spun himself around like a human spin-the-bottle, took in all the action everywhere, then zeroed in on another group.
And a mighty fine group they appeared to be. Not all fashion models and cheerleaders, exactly, but not a bare-knuckle boxing team either.
Now I’m good at being scared. Been scared by pretty much everything that most people would consider scary and plenty of things most people wouldn’t. But this was new. These ladies—pretty and fun-looking and all—scared me cold. That shouldn’t have been. Should that have been? Was I doing this wrong?
“They’re out of my league, Frank,” I said, and nobody would have disagreed.
“Hey listen to me. You make your own league in this game. Boy this is your first dance of your first year of high school. You go over there and start grazing with that herd, you might as well just chew your cud for the next four years. For the rest of your life, even, is probably what’ll happen ’cause this stuff starts right now and goes on forever.” By now Frank had me by the shoulders and was trying to shake wisdom into me.
I was paralyzed. This was a lot. On top of a lot. I didn’t want to be doomed. Even if I didn’t exactly feel the stuff he was saying—I kept picturing the curlicue girl, not the high-style girls—I understood it well enough. He was trying to help me to know what he had always known, but it was kind of like the science guy trying to explain things to the fingerpainting guy.
I was paralyzed, right there in the throbbing gym.
So I did what I do. I turned around to check with Mikie.
But no Mikie.
Like an asthmatic who’s lost his inhaler, I started breathing heavily, and pushed off. “Franko, I’ll be back. Gotta find... I’ll be back.”
“Don’t miss this train, El,” he called at my back. I could imagine the kind of body language he was adding, but I couldn’t turn back to see it.
I found him, after weaving in and out of every pod of periphery dwellers. The big brains in the sweater vests, the way-tall guys and way-short guys, the fashion victims and fashion perpetrators, the cross-country track team and the razor-thin air guitar corps.
Mikie was sitting on an overturned milk crate next to the snack table.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Watching,” he said evenly.
I looked around, then back at him. “Watching what?”
“Watching the world turn. Watching you.”
“You’re not.” Suddenly, knowing that somebody—this somebody—might have been paying attention to my movements, made me feel embarrassed, like I had done something hideously wrong. I played my actions and nonactions back in my head. What, what?
“Relax,” Mikie said with a laugh. “You’re doing fine.”
It was like I’d opened a great report card. “I am? Am I? What am I doing? I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. Don’t sit here. I need you back there.” I pointed out over the dance floor with one hand and gave Mikie the come-with-me wave with the other as I mimed walking toward Frankie and the girls.
“Nah,” he said. “I like what I’m doing.”
“Which is... nothing,” I said.
“You know better than that,” he said.
And I did. Mikie was never doing nothing. There was always something going on in there, whether I was completely sure what it was or not. Still, I wished...
“Come on, Mike. Frankie’s zeroing in on a bunch of really pretty girls. You’ll like them. There are plenty to talk to. I’m sure there will be one you’ll like.”
“Ya?” he asked. “Did you pick one?”
I paused. Wait now. Right. Why was I here again? Right. “No,” I said, half question. “Or yes. See, I saw a girl, and she’s not in the group... and then Frank pulled me... and I suppose it shouldn’t matter, right, since I haven’t talked to any of them yet, so it doesn’t matter who I talk to...”
Mikie stared up at me from his milk crate. “You’re trying to say something, El.”
“Yes, I am.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need you...” I did the pointing, waving, come-with-me dance again.
He shook his head. “That’s stupid. You don’t need me. Go take care of business. I’m going to stay right here and do my thing.”
Hmm. “What’s your thing again? It looks like hiding.”
“Come on, Elvin. What am I doing?”
I thought. I knew. “You’re figuring it all out. You’re gonna sit there and stare and think and then you’re going to stand up and know how the whole thing works, right? Then you’re gonna dance and tell jokes and have, like, a steady girlfriend before we leave.”
“Ya, that’s it,” Mike said. “That’s what I’ll be doing. You caught me. Now will you not worry about how I’m going to do and get yourself out there and meet your girl before somebody else does?”
Confidence.
“You sure you don’t want to come?” I sort of pleaded.
He pointed off into the distance. “Somebody’s gonna get your girl.”
I charged off.
Aimed once again at the girl among the chubby girls. Somehow I felt like that’s what Mike had told me to do.
I was derailed once again by Frankie.
“I was just going to say hello,” I said.
“Say hello? Say hello? Say good-bye, goofus, if you’re seen with them. Once you get mad cow disease, the foxes won’t come anywhere near you.”
My nameless friend stepped in. “Do you really have to keep referring to people in animal terms? It degrades us all, men and women.”
Frank brushed by him. “Outta my way, Porky.”
Frank hauled me right on over to that bright and brilliant and bumpy group.
They were prettier as we got closer.
Louder too.
What were they laughing at?
Shut up. They were laughing before they saw me coming.
“That’s how you pick ’em, Elvin,” Frankie instructed. “There are plenty of cuties out there, but most of them are about as much fun as tight underwear. What you look for, and what we have here, is the classic laughing group. Fun girls. Good times.”
We stopped just outside their loose circle, which opened to a fun and friendly semicircle upon our arrival. Frank took an
extra step closer, thankfully taking the lead. He glanced up at the cage-enclosed gym clock, realized the shortness of our time here in this sister-school world, and sprang into action.
“Wanna dance? Wanna dance? Wanna dance? Wanna dance?” he asked each one, pointing a threatening, inviting (a perfect description of his charm, by the way) finger at each as he spoke. No introductions. “Wanna dance? Wanna dance? Wanna dance?”
That about covered it. I would feel like I had to give each girl a box of chocolates just for the privilege of asking for a dance. Frank stared at them like he had already paid them something and was waiting for his change.
“With you?” the leader, the girl Franko, asked.
“Nah... well, maybe,” he reconsidered after looking at her harder. “Okay. With me.”
“Hey,” I said quietly, knocking on his back like a door.
“And him,” he added.
“No twosies,” she said.
“No, no,” Frank said, “we’re good Catholic boys, none of that...”
Well, they thought that was pretty rich. Anyway, it worked, earned me a girl.
“Sure,” the boss girl said. “I’m with you”—she poked Frank’s flat belly—“and... hmmm...”
“Mel” one girl called, way too enthusiastically. “I’ll dance with the stocky one.”
She was something, something special, I had already noticed, because she stood, with the group but not. While the rest were all shoulder to shoulder and pulling on each other’s arms to make—I’m assuming—quiet, vicious remarks about fat guys, this one remained untouched, a couple of feet of space around her on all sides, like she was too good for contact.
Not for me, though. She walked right up and grabbed me by the hand.
I must say this thing—first contact, I believe it’s called—had a profound, earthshaking effect on me. Cleaned all the old information right off my hard disk. I had a vague notion of another girl I was interested in, of having a home and a mother someplace, but...
Franko was so stunned—and jealous, since mine was clearly prettier than his—that at first he didn’t even head out on the floor. He just stood there staring at us.
“Should have shopped at the B and T,” I said when he finally got out there near me. He continued staring too, while my girl gripped both of my mitts and whirled me all over the gym.
I believe I was doing a bit of staring myself, to tell you the truth. Moving my feet as little as I could, my hips just doing a minor hula thing, and my upper body succumbing to rigor mortis. Meanwhile, inside, I was gyrating unspeakably.
We mingled and muddled about outside while most of the guys reboarded the bus. Me and Frankie and our new gang of sisters (who would, next month, be coming on over to our place for a dance). Getting mighty free and easy and chummy.
“We can’t wait now,” said Frank’s dance partner, June. “We’ll have a real ball at your dance. Maybe we’ll even get started more than ten minutes before the thing’s over.”
“Ar-ar,” Franko laughed, stiff and foreign sounding. Cool, I suppose.
But he was still staring. At my girl Sally. At me. Back to Sally. Up to the sky.
The group of them huddled again, all those girls, and laughed and laughed. It was wild, like one of those 1930s musicals where all the women dress in, like, red sequins and gold glitter and people rip into a song or dive into any handy pool whenever they feel like it. I was expecting to be lifted on a gigantic soap bubble to sing down at the crowd.
Mikie had come over by then, to do what guys do in a situation like this: Glom. He was a ghost all throughout the actual dance, which I knew meant he was decoding everything. This, then, would be the payoff. I was praying he wouldn’t decide to like Sally.
“Hi there,” he said.
Hi there? Mikie said Hi there? Did he spend an hour on a milk crate drinking soda and getting his feet stepped on by frosh geeks so he could distill all his wisdom into Hi there?
“Hi there,” we all said together.
No girls went rushing to him. He didn’t follow up with something clever and winning. He just stood, flat-footed and normal. Just another freshman. He was cool, apparently in a way so ingenious that I couldn’t even see it yet.
I may have been focusing too keenly on Mike, because he had to nudge me to look back at Sally, who was looking at me. Right. Back to work.
We were the last, so we did finally have to mount the yellow tube. But not before an almost teary good-bye to the gals we’d leave behind.
“Now, I may not make it back alive,” I said grimly to Sally. She played well, squeezing my hands bravely. “But I promise to write faithfully. And to forsake all other girls while we’re apart.”
“Won’t break your back keeping that promise, eh, El,” my onetime friend Frankie quipped as he stepped onto the bus.
Sally squeezed my hands even tighter. It would have been hurting me by now if she wasn’t, you know, a girl and everything. Then she took one of my hands into a sandwich between hers, and rubbed like she was trying to start a fire.
Which she did.
All her friends went, “Ooooooo,” then laughed nuttily.
Frankie and I were too cool, the last ones slowly heading up the bus stairs. “I still can’t believe it,” he said, and we both knew what he was talking about.
“I hear ya,” I agreed. “She’s not a movie star or anything but... she’s prettier than me by a long way, that’s for sure.”
“Prettier than you?” He was determined that I get the big picture. “Prettier than you? Sure. But man, she’s almost as pretty as me...” He let it drift off, since that really said it all, don’t you think?
When we were sitting in our seats, waving out the window at the girls who were—quite giddily, I must say—waving back, I tried to clue him in. My confidence was pretty high now that I’d successfully completed the day and was safely on the bus where I couldn’t fumble it all away. Mike and Frank gave me all the confidence in the first place, so it was only fair I give something back.
“It’s the three Cs of success, Frank,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder with my nonwaving hand.
You know how weirdly slick and powerful you feel when you are waving and smiling and talking about people who are looking right at you but can’t hear? Ya, like that.
“The three Cs. Clothes, charisma, and... ah...”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought that through before opening up.
Then, there was the other one. Walking slowly, gliding almost, across the parking lot. The round-faced curlicue girl who knew me already. She turned slightly my way, gave a sweet half smile, which was a sweet half smile more than I deserved.
The false bottom dropped right out from my stomach. My. Oh my my. That’s a girl, right there, and Sally was a girl, and they had both paid some attention to me. But that felt so different, what just happened to me. Ouch, it felt different. She walked on.
I turned, a reflex, to Mikie. Like he and she were connected, in my brain. He gave me a fuzzy half smile, and that wasn’t right either.
Why, with everything going so right, was everything now feeling so not right?
The bus started moving, creeping. I went back to working on that third C when I noticed the girls, the fancy girls, were doing it to us. You know, the smiling, waving, talking-about-us thing right in front of us but we couldn’t hear. I didn’t like it one bit.
Then June started waving frantically at Frankie to come out. It was a bit of a mixed message, the way she was flagging the bus down like it was an emergency while she could barely speak, winded from laughter.
Frank booted to the front. The bus driver groaned. “Every time, with these dances, there’s always one of ya can’t get enough. No public displays, man, or I gotta report ya. You got one minute.” And he threw the door open.
I watched—everybody on the bus watched, in fact—as Frank had a brief, intense powwow with June. The chiefs of our respective tribes. Conferring. Consulting.
Cracki
ng up.
They broke, and Franko came bounding back onto the bus. We were rolling again. I had a bad feeling—ah, welcome home, old bad feeling—as Frank came my way staring and grinning. I looked back out the window where Sally was waving broadly and bravely, just like in a war movie.
I turned as Frank deliberately took the seat across the aisle from me.
“What?” I asked when he refused to say anything.
“Come on, Frank,” Mikie said. “Cough it up. Don’t torture the poor guy.”
“Okay, Elvin. I think you need to add an extra C.”
“Huh?”
“To your list. Clothes, charisma, and creeping crud. Man, all this time you been holding hands with a girl who’s got scabies.”
Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
That’s what I said inside.
This is what I said outside.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
Everybody shoved to the back and the front of the bus, sitting five to a bench to stay away from me.
Except my Mike.
See Me, Feel Me Infect Me, Heal Me
I KIND OF THOUGHT her hands were too rough and scaly. Damn. Damn. Shoulda listened to myself.
But who knew? How should I know anyway? I mean where’s my frame of reference? I just figured girls’ hands were supposed to be scaly.
“Yes, Mother, I had a swell time at the dance, despite your sabotage.”
“Don’t say swell to me, Mr. Bishop.”
“Okay, I had a... smutty time.”
“Well, that’s a start anyway. Meet any nice girls?”
I shifted in my seat. That hurt. I shifted back the other way.
“So, we’re back to that again,” she said, pointing at the seat of my chair.
The last thing I wanted at this moment, sitting at the kitchen table in the bosom of my family...
“Why do you do that, Elvin? There are only the two of us here, and you’re always calling it the bosom of your family. Like it’s some kind of misty philosophical dream family you have, and not me.”
“Well I tried telling people how much I like coming home to the bosom of my mother, but the guys at school started to make... remarks.”
She thought about that. “I could see where they would, yes.”
