Thargor15
Joined: 03 May 2010
Posts: 129
Location: Passed out in an alley
Wed Sep 15, 2010 1:03 pm |
 Post subject: A Slow Song |
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When the song starts and those patient, flowing guitar riffs force a hush across the room, the butterflies attack your stomach. You spot her staring at you from the other end of the gymnasium, her tiny eyes dropping to the floor every time you look in her direction. She stands under that Milton Middle School Winter Dance banner like it’s dangling mistletoe with a look that you swear you’ve seen from her in the hallways before, but you hang back. You’ve never even danced with a girl let alone kiss one. First things first.
Her dainty feet shuffle toward you. As she slaloms between the couples pairing up, you see how nervous she is. Her hands grip and tug at the sides of her dress, pulling the fabric in strange ways and making the pink and red lily prints look wrinkled and arid. Her eyes, those tiny button eyes, are training on the parquet in front of her. She moves closer still. You can hear the shuffling of her feet now, orange flats sliding across dusty wood, and as you watch her pendulum legs, you wonder exactly how long this song will be.
“Care to dance?” she asks in a voice that could have come from an animated mouse. Her tiny button eyes freeze, delicate like cracked glass. Standing there, she shrinks.
“Alright,” you say, making sure not to say her name for fear that you have it wrong.
As the singer finally breaks in, ending the too-long instrumental intro, she moves in closer, shuffling her feet once more. She unclenches her clammy hands and wipes them on her dress before reaching cautiously for your arms. The music seems to fade into the background at this point and your movements slow. The girl draws your arms near her, guiding you to wrap them around her waist. She is showing you how it’s done, expecting you to continue by yourself, but your arms are dead weight and she has to lead you until your hands connect behind her. You panic and your eyes flash wide. You didn’t anticipate how close you two would be and you’re tempted to let your hands retreat and slide to her hips or even back into your pockets but you resist. She wants to be close to you, you think. And she smells nice, like melon and cucumber and something you can’t quite put your finger on. Once your hands are secured, she gives you a gentle smile, the corners of her mouth barely curling up but her lips burst with excited redness.
Her body radiates heat and you can feel a dampness along the faint crease in the middle of her back. The music fades in and you can hear it clearly now. You hear the pain in the singer’s voice, the lyrics about a lost love and longing and smoldering, unsatisfied desire and it all makes you think that you’re not where you should be or who you should be with. This girl, you think, is lovely, but she’s not for you. None of the girls here are for you. None of them make it impossible for you to deny a smile or make giddy sparks shoot from your fingertips, the kind of sparks that surge through your body like when someone tickles your forearm, your eyes closed but fluttering, to see if you can guess where the crick in your arm is. The girl you’re holding isn’t that person; she’s a velveteen rabbit, a lovingly worn one that folds over adorably and just can’t sit upright if left on her own. For now, you’ll dance with her; you’ll keep the girl from folding over adorably and you’ll learn how to be this close to someone.
“Is this okay?” she asks.
Your wide eyes soften and you nod your head, but only once.
She takes a short step to the left and gives you a look that says like this and you follow suit. Soon, you’re moving clockwise together. Your bodies shift left, sway back to the right a bit and then move left once more and so on and so on like how the second hand on a clock dips backward for a brief moment before its jump to the next tick. The movement is calming, hypnotic. Your tense body relaxes but just slightly. She’s a good dancer, you think. A good instructor. Her arms are draped around your neck, tenderly, as if they were filled with cotton, and you look down at her, her head resting on your chest, tenderly as her arms. She seems so peaceful there. Were it not for her sliding feet and swaying hips you’d swear she was asleep.
You’re thankful that the girl is so petite, thankful that you’re not standing eye to eye, looking all around the room, anywhere but at her because you’re not ready for the kind of intimacy that looking into someone’s eyes that close demands. You’re exposed enough for now with someone so near you, and every time your abdomens and hips brush with each step, you curl your toes and dig them into the soles of your shoes, hardening your body to fight how vulnerable you feel like during vaccinations or in locker rooms. Though this girl’s body is up against yours, you’ve made sure she’s miles away from you.
You close your eyes for a beat, the music and the movements doing their best to lull you to a peaceful sleep, but as soon as you close them you feel yourself losing balance and realize how awkward it is to have someone hang on you like that. So you keep your eyes open and see the other couples with their clock-tick dancing. Most of them are not as close as you are to the girl in your arms. Most dance as cousins would dance at a wedding, at a distance, with hands on hips or on shoulders, avoiding any chance of bodies rubbing against one another. Catholic school dancing if Catholic schools even have dances. Some couples move clockwise, others counterclockwise and you wonder how they choose. You wonder if the dancer being led secretly resents his or her partner for that decision because you know that once the song starts, you’re committed. In a corner of the room, a girl teetering on crutches dances from her shoulders up with a boy. He holds her waist with one hand and one of her crutches with the other. They’re talking and laughing and smiling and doing everything that leads up to kissing but they stop short.
A few couples over, you see your friend, the boy from chorus who greets you every day with a new knock-knock joke. You remember the one he told you that morning: Knock-knock. Who’s there? Ithme. Ithme who? Ith me, I juth bit my tongue. You shake your head at it, not because it’s a lame joke but because that lame joke had you in stitches. The boy makes you laugh and you love that about him. You love that he knows all the words to Sweet Caroline and that he always asks how you are, but it’s never just so you’ll ask him how he is. You always do ask him, though, because you want to know. You love that he wears yellow shirts because you think it’s impossible to be sad when you sport such a sunny color. You keep looking at him and eventually he catches your gaze. The boy rolls his eyes and flops his tongue out as if to say look who I’m stuck with and you suppress the urge to giggle. You wonder what it would be like to dance with him. You wonder if the two of you would go the same direction, where your hands would be and if your eyes would have flashed wide at the closeness. You wonder if you would talk and what you would say or if you would simply rest your head on his chest and let the music and the movements lull you to sleep. You wonder what you would dream about then. You wonder what you’ll dream about tonight.
You look down at the girl in your arms again to make sure she’s still awake. The room is filled with purple lighting and the girl’s freckles darken and pop beneath those bulbs. Her arms look like they’re covered in polka dots, you think, and it makes you laugh in your head. Her chestnut hair looks silken and it’s drawn back into a ponytail, which rocks from side to side with the swaying of her body. She has ears like butterfly wings and they twitch every so often. If it were even possible, the girl’s skin has gotten warmer, hot even, and her linen dress would do little to stifle the fire when she inevitably bursts into flames. You wonder if she’s sick and if you’ll catch what she has because of how close you are. You wonder if you’ll have a sore throat, strep maybe, and what that will do to your singing voice in chorus. And you wonder what kind of person dances so close to someone when they’re sick.
As the two of you dance and as you think about those things, your clockwise movements drift off center and you bump into another couple.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” you say, breaking your grip on the girl, nearly letting her fall to the ground, and holding your hands up in defense of your actions.
The couple exhale with a huff and look the other way. Their intimate moment was interrupted, and when the girl with tiny button eyes looks up at you in confusion, you realize that yours was too.
“What happened?” she asks. “What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing. I just bumped into those two. Clumsy me, I guess,” you say.
Without a word, she closes her eyes again, her hands feeling their way back to your neck and she returns to her napping spot. The brief break from dancing gave your neck a chance to cool, but her sizzling arms are knotted around you like a necktie and you feel hot and constricted. Beads of sweat collect along the top of your forehead and you hope that those beads don’t grow and gain momentum and become droplets because your hands are locked into place and the odds of being able to free one of them in time to catch a droplet, all while leaving your dozing partner undisturbed, are slim. So you gently, quietly, curl your bottom lip up and blow air upward, doing your best to fan your warm skin.
Overhead are styrofoam globes—pretend snowballs—hanging on fishing line. On the far side of the gymnasium, above where the DJ had set up his equipment, hangs a navy blue banner with “Winter Wonderland” painted in white, bloated bubble letters. Craft stuffing forms cottony snow mounds on the floor and periodically you see one of them fly across the room and bounce off of a dancing couple. There is white everywhere: drawings of igloos on construction paper along the walls, the teachers dressed in white sweaters and jackets, the white plastic cups filled with punch, and those snowballs and mounds above and below. If not for the dim lighting and the purple filters, the room would be blinding. You wish the snow was ever that pure white in real life.
The room smells warm and stale—a smell like moist skin beneath a winter coat, like steam trapped under a layer of plastic wrap. The heater is working tirelessly to keep the gymnasium comfortable but most everyone is dressed in sweaters and shirts with long sleeves and some are in thick, pillowy boots. But somehow, the girl in the floral print dress is the warmest one. You notice that the two of you are suddenly moving much faster and you’re both racing around in circles, nearly sanding a doughnut shape into the wooden floor. The music has picked up its pace, quickening the melody and you wonder if this is the song’s climax and if it is nearly over. You had hoped that your first slow dance wouldn’t end up like this. You had hoped that whomever you danced with would make you laugh and that you’d feel safe and excited and desired and tingly with excitement from head to toe. You had hoped that you would know the person better and that they would know you. That when the song played, everything else would melt into the scenery and when you danced you would sense that moment in time pause and feel like that one moment could last forever but then it’s over far too quickly. That you would know the song and it would be your favorite slow song and both of you would belt out the same excited lyric as the music would swell and reach its peak. You had hoped your first slow dance would have been perfect.
At the very least, you had hoped that you would feel more comfortable. Your green and auburn argyle sweater shrunk in the dryer and it fits snugly around your stomach. The sleeves shrunk too and the left one doesn’t quite reach your wristwatch. You can roll your sleeves up and no one will know the difference, you think, but not until after the song. You wish that you could have worn cargo shorts, even in this winter weather, because each divot in the flesh around your knees and ankles collects sweat. Dress shoes might be nice, you heard your mother mention as you were planning your outfit, which at the time seemed like a great idea but now you’re regretting it. She has such expectations of you, in your appearance, your behavior and attitude, and you hate to disrupt her perfect image of you, but you know that you will someday. The back of the shoe cuts into your heel with each step and the sole is without a proper arch, tenderizing the pads of your feet. You couldn’t have felt less comfortable if you were naked, you think.
The girl nuzzles her head in your chest and turns to the other side. Her hand slips for a moment and then she recovers, placing her palm on the back of your neck and running her fingers through your hair. You shiver, startled—an involuntary spasm among dozens of voluntary ones. You’re still dancing, you two, but it’s all muscle memory at this point. She feels heavier in your arms and that is bothering you more than her warmth. You try to think of some way to perk her up, something more than a nudge but less than a slap. You brush her ponytail with your hand, foolishly, like she did to you, in the hopes that the girl will snap awake but she only sinks deeper into your arms. You step on her foot, expecting to be able to blame the gaffe on your recognized clumsiness, but she moves unaffected. It pains you to do it, but you open your mouth to speak.
“So, any big plans for the weekend?” you say. A harmless line, no doubt, but you failed to consider the subtext, the perceived inflection, especially after you brushed her ponytail.
She looks up at you. “Why? Do you want to do something?”
“Oh, uh, no. I was just making chit chat,” you say, flustered.
“Chit chat.” She starts to return her head to your chest but she stops herself. She looks off to the side, to the space beyond your arms and chest, and she sees the things you see—the couples dancing at a distance, the potentially blinding white, clumps of stuffing surrounding their feet. “I’ve got a lot to do this weekend now that I think of it.” Her head stays in place, refusing to drop to your chest. “Lots of homework.” Her body feels less heavy in your arms. “Might do some shopping for spring clothes.” Her shoulders straighten. “It’s early, I know, but there might be some cute dresses already.” Her feet shuffle less and step with purpose. “And Brendan asked me to go ice skating so I might do that, too.” Her cotton-filled arms tighten.
And as the song finally begins to fade out, she says to you, “Boy, I thought that song would never end,” laughing awkwardly. “I’m gonna get some punch. Work on your dance moves. You’ll get better.”
She breaks away and walks in the opposite direction. You readjust your argyle sweater, pulling it back after being dragged too far forward. The boy from chorus spots you as he ends his dance and he rolls his eyes and flops his tongue out, the same as before, and you let yourself giggle.
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Grumbled by Thargor, typed by rats |
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