I nod, even though I disagree with my roommate’s if-this-then-that: If somebody as evil as Greta gets what’s coming to her, then the corollaries must be true as well. All her victims must deserve what they get, and how is that right? And likewise, all innocent people must have good things come to them—and how do you square that with the fact that I was born the way I am? I’m not bad. I don’t enjoy the suffering of others, as Greta does. And yet I’m stuck with my messed-up mind. Meanwhile, that girl across the hall is fucking with people’s lives, and she has a suntan and backup singers.
Still, it would be nice to think Greta will get her reckoning, if only because it gives Strots and me something else in common.
When my roommate smiles at me, I smile back.
That’s when I realize that we’re a kind of kin now.
Which is so much deeper than friends.
chapter SEVENTEEN
It’s Saturday night. I’m in the old gymnasium at the Fall Fling, a school dance for which we get gym credit if we attend. Given that I have been excused from the year’s physical education requirement, I’m not sure why I’m here.
No, that’s not true.
My internal life has quieted, thanks to me being back on the lithium, and because cognition is like nature and abhors a vacuum, I find myself more outwardly directed and curious about my peers—and also more lonely at the prospect of everyone on campus being at a party without me. I don’t really enjoy my oddball version of extroversion as I don’t like the feelings of sadness and sense of separation that come with it. But it’s better than boiler rooms, I suppose.
I am standing off to the side, leaning against a concrete wall that’s been painted so many times, it’s as smooth as icing on a carrot cake. The lights are dim and music is playing and the bleachers that funnel down to the honey-colored playing floor are largely empty. Girls from Ambrose are dancing with each other as blue-blazered boys who have been imported from St. Michael’s Prep stand in tight groups of shifting eyes. From what I understand from Strots, dances like this happen two times per year, fall and spring.
As Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch are piped in from overhead, I look at the strict separation of the sexes and decide that all these “Good Vibrations” are a waste of a bassline if the desired result is any kind of commingling. But maybe as the night progresses things will change, although no doubt the administration is hoping they stay like this. Separate is better, even if you’re heterosexual.
The DJ who’s in charge of the music is stationed behind a folding table in the opposite corner from me, and he alternates between CDs that go in and out of a player, and vinyl records that go round and round on a turntable. He’s a robot, unaffected by the beat, although I don’t think it’s because he’s being professional. He appears to be bored out of his mind as he keeps the succession of tracks going, queueing up pop music for rich kids. There’s no Nirvana. No Guns N’ Roses. It’s Color Me Badd, Vanilla Ice, Madonna, C+C Music Factory, Mariah Carey. Every song is something that you’ve heard on the radio in the last twelve months, although evidently not on the stations the DJ likes to tune to.
There’s no theme to this dance. No streamers. No banners. No one being crowned, no court of scepter-holding princesses accepting the steady arms of their princes and forming a promenade of teenage beauty. For this, I am grateful. Although I’m even less integrated into this happening than the landlocked groups of boys and girls, I’d feel totally alien if there were formal dresses and a stage and some kind of value judgment being applied to the pretty girls, another standard I will fail to meet.
As I observe the two separate camps, I note the behavior of both and find the posturing a colossal waste of energy. The girls, as they dance in front of the boys, seem wholly disdainful of the very thing they appear to be trying to get the attention of. Moving their bodies in time to the music, they wear haughty expressions, turning down offers they are not being presented with. The boys, on the other hand, in their clutches of lanky frames, act as though they are completely unaware that there’s anything going on outside of the conversations they’re having with each other and the push-and-shoves they become entangled in from time to time. And yet the girls keep dancing and the boys keep sneaking glances.
I wonder where the night will end for them. Still apart? Or locked in desperate, fleeting grabs under the bleachers where the chaperones won’t see them? I know where my night will end, and it is not going to be anywhere near a warm body other than my own. As this prescient knowledge sinks in, I find myself worrying about my lack of response to Strots’s impromptu kiss. I felt nothing. No spark. No interest. Considering it was my first kiss, I become concerned that I will never respond to anybody, male or female.
As this prospect fills me with I’m-a-freak dread, I remind myself I should be encouraged by my introspection. It’s normal to wonder and worry about your sexuality when you are fifteen. I was told this in sex ed class last year. Plus anything that isn’t me going back to the beginning of the universe or growing hair that takes over a small Massachusetts town or being inside a coffin at a Kleenex-deficient funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, should be rejoiced.
The lithium is definitely working.
I try to locate Greta in the crowd. It’s difficult to isolate her among all the other blondes, and I wonder to what extent the admissions committee favors those with Anglo-Saxon coloring. Judging by this crowd before me? I would say that that particular gene pool and look are nearly a requirement. No doubt my mother failed to disclose what I do to my brown hair or I would never have gotten one foot through the door. Even with the perfect SAT score I got on that test I took last year just to see if I could beat it.
Oh, there she is. Greta’s with her two best friends, and I’m initially surprised she’s not dancing. But then I see why she isn’t on the floor. There are boys with her. Three very tall, very handsome ones. The conversation in the group appears to be flowing easily, as if they all know each other well, and I remember what Greta said about not importing Todd to this event. I thought she wasn’t bringing him here because he wasn’t worth the probation? But maybe these are other boys, boys who she knows from somewhere else like an exclusive camp, a ski resort in Colorado, or summer houses in Maine or upstate New York… places that it may be harder for her to get to as often as her family did before the bankruptcy.
I wonder if she feels lesser than the rest of them, having to hitch rides to destinations she used to be able to arrive at on her own. And they must all know about the financial reversal. How can they not? The rich and powerful community can’t be any different from the small town I grew up in, where everyone knows everybody’s business.
And yet, if she does feel inferior, she isn’t showing it. Greta is smiling. She’s petting her own hair, as if trying to subdue the strands that are not, in fact, out of order in any way. And then she touches the forearm of one of the boys, the tallest one. Other boys come over and kibitz on the periphery, probably because she is so beautiful, definitely because the ice has been broken. The purpose of the dance is finally being served.
As my eyes track her movements, I picture her running out of our dorm and throwing herself into the arms of her hometown honey. I see Strots standing in the center of their room, staring out through the windows, breaking on the inside as spring sunlight falls like a blessing on the golden couple out on the lawn.