That said, slow dances tend to be hard in, shall we say, another area. It’s no secret that girls usually find it weird or even gross when they feel this activity in a boy’s body while dancing with him. And as a teenaged guy, this is frustrating. Because it’s not as if we have a choice in the matter. But there are things you can do. Like math. While we spun in our slow, tight circle, I did multiplication tables in my head. Six times seven is forty-two. Six times eight is forty-eight. Six times nine… anything to keep my mind off the fact that my body was in very, very close proximity to that of a female.
When you see teenaged couples slow dancing, usually you’ll notice that the boy is holding the girl at arm’s length, keeping an awkward distance between them. Girls often assume this is because the boy feels uncomfortable or self-conscious about dancing. Maybe. But I would suggest that if you look more closely, you may discover it’s not the dancing he feels self-conscious about.
Anyway, eventually the song ended and people clapped as they always weirdly do at the end of slow-dance songs, as if applauding their own ability to stand in one place and spin around for three minutes without getting dizzy. The music veered to hip-hop, which meant fast dancing. Evelyn and I took a step back from each other, and then I took another one, so we were starting to blend into the circle of acquaintances that occupied this region of the dance floor. Then I started to dance. I transferred my weight back and forth between real and fake leg, simultaneously making a motion with my arms like I was pedaling a hand-powered bicycle. Pretty hip. Soon enough the group became an actual circle, like we were playing a standing version of ring-around-the-rosy. Except we weren’t. Instead, we were just making awkward eye contact with each other while pretending we were having a good time pretending we felt comfortable dancing.
That’s normal fast dancing for you. Everyone stands around and tries to let the music infect them like a virus, one whose primary symptom is rhythmic convulsions and muscle spasms. There’s another kind of fast dancing, though—what I refer to as Close Fast Dancing, or CFD.
CFD, unlike its more lustful and notorious cousin grinding, is more fun than sexual. It’s basically where a couple assumes a slow-dance position but sways and spins at the speed of a fast dance. It’s like ballroom dancing minus the skill, elegance, and rhythm. Sometimes people say grinding when they mean CFD, because said people have not seen what grinding really looks like. How can you tell the difference? It’s in the name, people. When you see a couple grinding, there is simply no other word to describe it. They are grinding. When you see a couple holding each other and bouncing back and forth, probably smiling, they are engaging in CFD. The other way to tell the difference is in the axis or plane of motion. When grinding, a couple is moving their hips toward and away from each other, a forward-and-backward squeezing motion on the y-axis. When CFDing, by contrast, a couple is moving their hips left and right, a side-to-side swinging motion on the x-axis. Got it?
Anyway, CFDing still requires a degree of confidence, because you must intentionally put your arms around her waist. There is no question about whether she reciprocates. She either starts dancing with you, or shrinks away and slips into a protective enclave of her girlfriends, who will then form an impenetrable circular fortress around her and give you mean looks until you back off. So the risk of public rejection is very high.
Evelyn and I danced in the open circle for a few songs, me thinking the whole time how I should try to CFD with her. Suddenly she started walking across the circle toward me. Had she been having the same thought? Was she coming to CFD with me?
She grabbed my shoulders and pulled me toward her. This is it, I thought. We are going to do it. “I need to rest,” she said in my ear.
Oh yeah. Arthritis. I nodded my understanding. Then I wondered: Am I supposed to accompany her? Is that what a prom date does? I wasn’t sure. So I asked.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, Rachel is coming.”
Was I still supposed to go with her? I wasn’t sure. But having a disability of my own, I knew there was nothing more cringe-inducing than the feeling that someone else is giving up an activity you can’t do just so you don’t feel left out. A disability is already such a burden on you personally. It only gets worse when it’s a burden on other people, too.
“All right, I’ll just keep dancing. Come back out when you’re ready,” I said.
Truthfully, I was looking for an excuse to stop dancing. I didn’t much enjoy it. But I had talked myself out of following Evelyn for fear she was trying to get away from me.
She made a face I couldn’t read.
She nodded at her friend and the two of them peeled off from the circle and headed for the snack area, where there were cafeteria tables covered with red paper tablecloths. The tables were overflowing with shiny confetti that was getting tracked back to the dance floor on the smooth leather soles of dress shoes.
I danced, then, by myself in the circle of acquaintances. I felt uncoordinated and self-conscious, like everyone was looking at me and laughing inside. Since my prosthesis was attached at the hip, I was essentially sitting on it with the bones of my pelvis, the socket synched around my waist like a plaster corset. The leg itself, with its three stiff titanium and aluminum joints, was engineered for stability, not for getting down. I felt like I was trying to dance while tied in a seated position to a cement block.
I wondered if perhaps prom could still be salvaged. Maybe I could summon some dormant courage and become a fun dancer, the kind of guy who CFDs with his gorgeous prom date. The kind of guy who ignores his recent electoral defeat, who ignores his peers who did not vote for him and instead focuses on Evelyn. And if I could do that, maybe later we would sit at one of those confetti-sprinkled tables and I would hold her hand and wonder aloud if maybe there wasn’t something more than friendship between us.
The circle collapsed on itself as a few couples paired off to CFD. A few songs later the DJ brought it back to the old school (his words, not mine) with some early-nineties hip-hop. A much larger circle opened up in the center of the room as a guy named Jerome spun around on the floor, pivoting over his hands, swinging his lower body in gymnast-like ways. I felt a poke in my side. It was Evelyn. She smiled at me. People started chanting Jerome’s name, Jaa-ROME, Jaa-ROME, Jaa-ROME, and he brought the spectacle to a climactic finale, freezing in a handstand and then scissoring his legs into a brief spin on his head.
Jerome bowed and people applauded like the best slow dance ever had just concluded. There was an expectant pause. The empty circle held its space while everyone hoped that someone else, that is, another person besides themselves, would jump into the middle and provide additional entertainment.
Eventually someone did.
Me.
Chapter 23
My artificial leg had three joints: ankle, knee, and hip. That’s one reason why it’s tough to walk with a hip-disarticulation prosthesis, and why so few amputees who lose their leg at that level (that is, amputees who have no residual limb, or stump) choose to wear a fake leg. Let me break it down for you: My ankle didn’t move the way a normal ankle would. It was only capable of rotation, not flexion. Like the motion you would need for a golf swing. My knee moved more like a real one in the sense that it could swing on the plane of motion you would expect from a human knee. To take a step, I would place the fake leg in front of me and then roll across the foot, the knee being designed to bend when my weight hit the toes. This weight-induced bend in the knee would store energy in a pressurized hydraulic piston, which would then push back like a spring, propelling the knee back to a straight position and swinging the prosthesis into a forward step. That’s how I walked.
There was also my hip joint, which I typically engaged only to move into a sitting position. But the hip joint also provided my favorite feature of the prosthesis, which was its ability to extend far beyond the range of a normal human hip. Translation: I could easily do a split. Even better, I could do a split while standing up.
I would balance on my real leg, lifting my artificial one with my hand and pulling it straight up until the foot pointed backward behind my head.
It was this particular party trick I employed in the dance cipher.8 I jumped into the middle, picking my prosthesis up by the ankle and hopping in a tight spin, waving the fake foot in between two positions, one where I held the straight leg out in front of me, the foot at eye level, and one where it was fully extended in an unnatural standing split with the heel touching my ear. It was no secret that I was an amputee, which I suppose was fortunate because otherwise this would have looked supercreepy, like I was some kind of manic yogi-ballerina. As it was, everyone was in on the joke, and as I hopped around the circle, they cheered and, yes, even chanted my name. For the record, they had not chanted Joseph Chuk’s name when he was crowned prom king. Take that, popularity contests.
Obviously, there could not have been a better moment to try to CFD with Evelyn.
The circle closed and I danced my way over to Evelyn. I got really close to her, but I stood so our bodies were facing each other at a ninety-degree angle. I figured this would feel less threatening to her than approaching her from straight on. Oh, she would think, Josh is standing really close to me, but our bodies are facing perpendicular directions, so I guess I am comfortable with this.
She glanced at my face and I smiled at her. She smiled back. I kept hand-cycling. Then she rotated her body away from me and took a small but discernible step to create space between us. Classic fast-dancing conundrum: Was she trying to get away from me, or had her attention been drawn to the sparkly disco ball?
So I danced the rest of that song wondering about this.
“Are you having fun?” she asked.
“Yeah!” I said, which was sort of a lie. I mean, I wasn’t not having fun. So maybe there was some fun here that I was having without noticing, and I would look back later and think how fun it was, in retrospect. The past has a way of turning up the fun volume in your memories.
“Great.” She put a hand on my shoulder, and for the briefest instant I thought we were about to CFD. “I gotta tell Rachel something.”
This was twice now that she had put me off. Was she doing it on purpose? I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to just give up, to quit trying to CFD with her, and spend the rest of the night floating around, not caring. But that was the problem: I did care. I cared a lot. About her. About us. And we were both going to college in just a few months, and after that I wouldn’t be seeing much of her. So what did I have to lose (I mean, besides my pride and dignity)? Tonight was probably my last chance with Evelyn. Who knew when she would get back together with Mason, when she would disappear completely from my life? Yes, tonight. Tonight was the night.
So I followed her over to her gossip session with Rachel, and when she leaned away and smiled at me, I leaned in and—yes, must reach out, almost there, just a little farther—put a hand ever so gently on her hip. “Hey,” I said.
She smiled and made a quick glance down at my hand. It was very brief, and I supposed she hoped I didn’t see it. But I did. What I couldn’t see, unfortunately, was how she felt about it.
“Hey,” she answered.
I started to sort of bop back and forth like people do when they are dancing. She smiled a tight, toothless smile.
She held up a finger. “Hold on. Just a second. I’ll be right back.”
My hand was left holding air as her body rotated away from me so she could return her mouth to Rachel’s ear. I saw Rachel steal a brief look at me and nod. Were they talking about me? Was Evelyn telling her she wanted to get away from me, that she was uncomfortable with my advances? Yes, probably. This was a mistake. All of it. Prom. Dancing. Evelyn. All a giant, soul-crushing mistake.
This guy Alberto who I knew, and who I guess knew Evelyn somehow, came up from behind her and started grinding on her. She took a quick look over her shoulder to see who it was. Upon seeing Alberto, she burst out laughing, like he was the funniest guy she’d ever seen, and what a hilarious joke this was that he was dancing with her like this. She pumped her hands in the air, raising the roof, smiling. He put a hand on her hip. She laughed again.
If Evelyn had been my girlfriend, I would’ve said something witty and manly to Alberto, you know, like, Get your own date, and then clocked him in the jaw. But Evelyn wasn’t my girlfriend, so her heart was not mine to defend. The song ended, and Alberto hugged her and then walked away, in search of some other guy whose night he could ruin by dancing with his date.
I didn’t recover after that. In terms of trying to CFD with Evelyn, I mean. I had tried three times, which was more than enough.
She didn’t care about me. Our friendship? What a joke. We weren’t friends. She was just a hot girl I had a crush on. Would I have been friends with her if I didn’t have that crush? Probably not. Would she have been friends with me? Again, probably not. She was just using me for the attention. She had that female intuition or whatever that told her I liked her, and she was keeping me around because it felt good to have a boy pining for her, bringing her to his prom and listening to her talk about her boy problems. What a mistake all this had been. What a joke.
After the dance, we went to After Prom, which was held in the recreation center at James Madison University. Everyone brought duffel bags with normal clothes and changed out of their formal wear in the locker rooms. Evelyn was tired, and her knees hurt. She mostly sat with Rachel, both of them in their sweats, both of them encouraging their dates to go have fun, don’t worry about us. So that’s what I did. I had fun. Or at least I tried to. I sang karaoke and I played poker with Monopoly money. I jumped in a big inflatable thing. I drank tons of soda.
The After Prom party went till nearly sunrise. Then we all went over to this guy Jon’s house. His mom had a breakfast spread for us. We ate and went to the basement to watch a movie. Evelyn found a guest room and went to sleep. When people started leaving, I woke her up and drove her home.
“I had fun,” she said when I was dropping her off.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
I did not say I had fun. Because I hadn’t, not really.
I didn’t call Evelyn much after that. I graduated. Summer came. It got hot. Then it was fall, and we both went off to be college students. She ended up not going to the same school as Mason. But she was dating him again. Or so I had heard.
HYPOTHESIS
Based on subject’s lack of interest in enacting the cultural mating ritual of Close Fast Dancing, I assume she did not have romantic interest in me. Further investigation is required to determine why subject demonstrated perplexing emotional distance at prom despite deep platonic friendship.
INVESTIGATION
Chapter 24
Evelyn looked exactly the same as she did in high school. We were having lunch at a sandwich place in Harrisonburg a few days after Christmas. Lunch, because it is the most decidedly unromantic, non-date-like social encounter two people can have. And all this because, well, Evelyn was now married. To that on-again, off-again boyfriend she’d had during high school, Mason. I guess they’d worked everything out and decided to stay on-again forever. Anyway, I had not seen her in years. But as I said, she looked the same.
Which is not to say things felt the same. When you have a crush on someone who has a boyfriend, it’s a little weird; you convince yourself she may come to her senses and start dating you instead. Even engaged people have been known (in movies) to make a game-time decision to leave the altar and run away with the Person They Were Supposed to Be With.
But once that girl you had a crush on is married, it’s time to admit defeat. She chose. Forever. Without you.
So the dynamic was different between Evelyn and me. There was a palpable gap between us, a gravity that kept pulling us back toward the emotional safe ground of small talk. But I knew I had to push through. I had come to this lunch to figure out why it didn’t work out between us, and why after we had been best friends for so long she was
so disappointingly distant at prom, and I was not going to let the sanctity of marriage stop me from getting my answers. I saw my opportunity at one point while we were reminiscing about old times.
“Remember when we went to prom together?” I tried to say it like, Ha-ha, wasn’t that funny like these other funny things we’ve been talking about, but there was still a shift in my tone. Her face said she noticed it.
“Yeah. Senior year?”
I nodded. “That was fun.”
“A lot of fun.”
I bit my lip. “But…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just felt like things were kind of awkward that night.” I paused, choosing my words carefully. “Like you were sort of… like it just felt weird.”
“Yeah, you’re right. That was because I had such a big crush on you,” she said, taking a casual sip of her water.
If I had been taking a sip of my own water in that moment, I’m sure I would’ve spit it all over the table, phhhhhing it out at high pressure in all directions.
“Um, what?” I had heard her the first time. But there was no way. I must have misunderstood.
“I said, that was because I had such a big crush on you.”
“You did?” I was still in disbelief.
“Um, yeah,” she said, like she was saying duh.
“You had a crush on me?”
“Of course.”
“No, not of course. You always had a boyfriend.”
“Not always,” she said. “Anyway, you really didn’t know I liked you?”
“Um, no.”
She shrugged. “I always thought you knew.”
“Nope.”
“Well… surprise!” She shrugged again. She was married. She had found her Prince Charming. This was old news to her.
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 10
