watched as Eli relaxed and began enjoying himself.
It was even his idea, after our regular dance pictures, to have one more taken, together, the four of us. Of course I see now the significance of this moment, not just for Eli, but for Dana and me and even Susan – for whom this was the penultimate indignity, the next-to-last straw, having to be photographed with the likes of Eli Boyle while our classmates stood in a queue. In the photo, Eli and I are standing behind our dates in the photographer's sea-foam grotto, lost in our tuxes, at the last minute our arms thrown over each other's shoulders and our heads dipped in, like war buddies about to ship, our dates standing at an angle in front of us, a cool distance between them, Dana smiling politely, Susan chewing glass. If you saw the picture, you would notice first this wide range of smiles: Dana polite and quite nearly believable, Susan snarling, me wary, and Eli positively buoyant standing next to me. I have a theory about pictures like that; they actually reveal more as time passes, and as the colors fade and the styles die, other things emerge, connections and motivations, and maybe even futures.
When the pictures were finished, Susan and I sneaked up to the room Tommy Kane's parents had rented for him on the ninth floor, where we guzzled TJ. Swan wine
I apologized all the way down in the elevator, but Susan was fixing herself in the mirror, as angry with me as I'd ever seen her. When we got back to the dance I couldn't see Eli and Dana right away, but then I spotted them over by the grotto. I immediately got nervous. Tommy Kane and his date, Amanda Rankin, were standing across from Eli and Dana; Tommy was too close, and I thought he must've gotten in Eli's face over something. I began to hurry across the room, ready to rescue Eli from trouble, but when I arrived I saw that everything was okay. Better than okay. Tommy was asking about the various stains on Eli's tux, and he was giving them a good-natured tour. They were all laughing. It was as if they were all friends. Eli beamed. Amanda Rankin, who had apparently gotten quite a bit of bottle courage before the prom, steadied herself on Dana's arm. And Dana didn't look unhappy either.
'There you are,' said Tommy when he saw me. 'Gimme the key. Eli and I are gonna take our sweet dates up to the suite and have a little sweet wine.'
'Yeah boy! Fuggin' juice me!' said Amanda Rankin through eyes as uneven as my own. 'I need more wine.' This was a statement as untrue as any I have ever heard.
Eli looked nervously from Tommy to me and from me to Dana, whose face remained perfectly inscrutable, as if she were miles away.
'Whatever you want to do,' Dana said to Eli.
'Great,' said Tommy. 'Let's go.'
'Okay,' said Eli, but the look he gave me was one of terror. We hadn't gone over this possibility in our preparation. Drinking? A hotel room? In our wildest dreams, we hadn't come up with this scenario.
'We'll come with you,' I said. This was the last straw for Susan, who yanked on my arm.
'I'd like to dance once at my prom,' she said through gritted teeth.
'Go dance,' said Tommy. 'You can't hog the room all night, Mason. Give the rest of us a chance.'
So Susan and I danced, a Led Zeppelin slow-fast-slow dance, then a Steve Miller Band guitar shake, followed by some disco instrumental that neither of us managed to catch on the beat. I kept watching the doorway of the ballroom, imagining all the trouble Eli could get into with a bottle of wine and a first-rate fuckball like Tommy Kane.
'Who are you looking for?' Susan asked me.
'Nothing. I'm just… thirsty.'
We danced again, to 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' a song I thought might not end until sophomore year of college. After each song, I turned to leave the dance floor but Susan wouldn't budge, would just begin dancing again. So I'd stay for one more.
'Ready to go upstairs now?' I asked after Cheap Trick's 'Surrender.'
'No!' Susan said. 'I am not.'
'Come on. Let's go have a little wine.'
'Fuck you, Clark!' Susan said. Then she burst into tears and ran out of the ballroom. A hundred pairs of eyes watched her go and then swung slowly to me, standing alone in this world I had created, this green, underwater Boogie Wonderland.
'Susan!' I ran after her and found her in the lobby, crying on the shoulder of one of the two girls who'd come in jeans and without dates.
'Asshole,' said one of the jeans sisters.
'Susan. I'm sorry.'
'Why don't you just go back in there?' said the other jeans sister. 'Or go see your fucking girlfriend.'
'Dana, please. Can I just talk to you?'
Susan's head turned slowly.
'I mean… Susan.'
The two girls in jeans stepped back, as if Susan were a radiator about to blow. 'I can't believe you just called her Dana,' one of them said.
'Come on. I just messed up,' I said. 'Come on. Can't we talk?'
'You asshole. You fucking asshole.'
'Susan…'
'You have been staring at her all night.'
'No I haven't.'
'Yes you have.'
'It's not what you think,' I said. 'I'm trying to help Eli.'
At the same time, all three girls' heads fell to the right, as if I'd just told them a terrible lie.
I could feel the desperation boiling inside, and that and the wine I'd drunk convinced me that I could make these dubious girls understand. 'See, when I was a kid we both got picked on, but I grew out of it. Eli never did. I'm trying to help him.'
Susan scoffed and turned to walk away.
My desperation bubbled to the surface. 'See, our neighborhood was tough and there was this accident…' And I don't know what made me do this, the wine probably, but I reached up and pushed on my eyelid until my prosthetic eye slid from its socket and I held it up to demonstrate… What? How he'd saved my life, maybe. Twenty years later, I can't really say what I hoped to achieve, but it certainly wasn't the result I got.
One of the jeans sisters – who, I later learned, had wolfed a half bottle of peach schnapps – vomited on the faded carpet of the lobby of the Davenport Hotel. The sound of her retching caused Susan to pause in the doorway and look back, at which point she saw: one of the girls in jeans covering her mouth, the other bent over, dumping a sour mixture of peach liqueur and stomach acid on the floor, while her boyfriend stood above them in a tuxedo, waving good-bye with his glass eye. And for just a second, I had the sensation that I could see with the fake eye that I waved around, the whole sad scene – me, the girls in jeans, a crying Susan, a few people lingering in the lobby, and the desk clerk, whose face betrayed nothing, as if such sights were so common here as to be dull.
I realized I could chase Susan and try to repair my own life, or I could go help Eli. It almost seems as if those two choices have been in front of me like this since elementary school, when Pete Decker first forced Eli and me to fight, when I first had the chance to rise above my own smallness and help my friend.
The door closed behind Susan. I put my magic seeing eye into my pocket and turned for the elevator. I'm coming, Eli, I said to myself, and the feel of that collapsed left eyelid reminded me of that day alongside the river, when Eli had rescued me, and I could hear the gurgle of that water and smell the smoking of my eyelashes. I can't say what I felt as I rushed to help Eli, some redemption perhaps, the emerging angels of my better nature.
The elevator stopped on every floor. My classmates got on or off and smacked me on the shoulder, asked why I was winking and said they'd heard that Susan was really mad at me. I ignored them all and got off on the ninth floor. I ran down the hallway. The door to room 916 was closed, and I couldn't hear anything inside. I took a breath, gathered myself, flattened my lapels, and patted down my hair, and then realized that with my left eye in my pocket I wasn't likely to pull off 'gathered.' I gave up and knocked on the door. I sensed someone looking through the eyehole and then the door opened and there was Eli, his tie removed, his hair a mess, his face ringed in
