Saint dances in a way that doesn’t figure with her ambitiously devout name. And Dan’s looking at her. Can’t stop staring.
The dance floor is suffocating. The energy of it moves us tidally toward our destined outcomes. It lifts Dan and pulls him toward Saint in her cashmere mock turtleneck. Her flocked miniskirt clings to hips that churn through the crowd like fresh cream and soon Dan will be there, boogieing down knee-to-knee, brushing her lace tights with his jeans.
And the tide of dancers is pulling me too. Away.
Andrea’s slowly backing into me—the heels of her white Chelseas clipping my toes at every chance, saying “back, back… can’t you see we’re dancing here?” And I already have my arms wrapped around me in my little tweed dress. I’m so sweaty I feel ready to faint and I don’t know how Saint does it, how she jumps and gyrates for hours in cashmere, in the hot, heavy steam of everyone’s movement.
I’m out of Andrea’s way now and I feel the lip of the dance floor beneath my heel. I’m about to be rejected by a night that never belonged to me. It belongs firmly to girls like them. Girls who know when to bite their lip and girls who smile big even if it makes their chins double up. Girls who don’t let a blemish spoil a good night—spoil their whole youth.
Someday I will regret this. I will know that I’ve squandered something. But I don’t know how to be another way.
I can’t even see them now.
The crowd closes in front of me, the entire room, taller than me. And I’m off the floor.
The stickiness of my fingers reminds me of the neat whiskey in my clenched hand. I take a burning sip and step back, and back, and back. Until I step on something…
On someone else’s toes.
Hands grab my shoulders before I can step back again, but I’m already up against a warm body. I turn and it’s him—the one with the denim jacket who was in line at the burger joint before we came in here. I can’t think of anything to say because he replaces his hands on my shoulders after I face him. I can’t speak because this is the most any boy’s ever touched me in my whole life. All I can think of his how slubby my dress is and how his hands feel twice as hot as the whole hot room.
“Easy there,” he says, but not meanly. He smiles before letting me go. Before disappearing into the grind of bodies on that almighty dance floor—that place where dreams happen.