The dance: People were learning to inch closer to each other, and some girls didn’t mind the short guys’ heads bobbing below theirs, and some guys didn’t mind the girls with braces. The teachers on chaperone duty patrolled the bathrooms, where kids who were not my crowd might engage in “nonsense,” as my mother put it, nonsense that was inaccessible to me at the time.
As with any other event at Okefenokee High School, the room was semi-segregated. A handful of white kids mosh-pitted in the middle of the party; others made their way to those nonsense-filled bathrooms or the parking lot. The good-looking Indian and Asian girls hung by the long banquet table. The debate, math Olympiad, robotics, etc., Indians and Asians were the likeliest ones to be bopping around, because though none of us could really move, the dancing offered a prescribed activity for the evening, a script. I depended on scripts in those days, before anyone asked me to invent my own life.
I followed Anita onto the floor, expecting to join the circle dancing around Hari Chopra, who was attempting to prove his B-boy abilities to the Kanye song that was ubiquitous that year, flicking a finger across an imaginary flat-brimmed hat in the warm-up. But Anita veered toward a cluster of girls that included my sister and Melanie. I stopped at the edge of the squeaky gym floor in my dress shoes, which were vast, boatlike, slippery, and made me sweat.
“Anita,” I whispered frantically, but she mouthed, Just a second, and darted into the girl cluster—as though she was crossing the finish line in a race I hadn’t known she was running. She’d grown spritely and uncatchable lately, always squinting at a secretly looming horizon line.
I didn’t see my date again until the end of the evening, let alone dance with her. The ghost of her touch on me—the inside of her elbow against the inside of mine—lingered on my skin. I felt insubstantial.
I spent the party with Kartik Jain and Manu Padmanaban and Aleem Khan and Jack Kim and Abel Mengesha (who was Ethiopian but clocked most of his time with the Asians), avoiding Shruti Patel, with whom Manu had agreed to come, and whose electrified bristly hair and eager gopher teeth discomfited us. Jack was counting the girls he’d made out with at computer camp the year before, in an effort to overcome the fact that he was here tonight alone. I had been at that camp and knew the single kiss he’d received was dumb luck, the result of a double dog dare.
I was supposed to return home with Anita and her mother at ten—their house sat catty-corner from ours in the Hammond Creek cul-de-sac. Ten; I only had to last till ten. I watched the egg-shaped clock on the wall above the banquet table tick. I drank the sugary punch; it stained my tongue Coke-can red.
Just before nine thirty, people began to gather for the announcement of Spring Fling royalty. At the swell of a tantalizingly sex-infused slow song—Crash into me, and I come into you—I went looking for Anita. I wound through the gym, all elbows and too-long hair that curtained the top of my vision. No Anita. No Prachi. I sidestepped out of the gym and down the hallway carpeted in green and gray—the swampy colors of Okefenokee High School. It occurred to me that I might find the girls in the parking lot. The parking lot, full of nonsense.
I pushed open the first door I encountered, missing, in my annoyance, the sign that read emergency exit. The alarm wailed. People’s hands flew to their ears, and heads turned toward me. A white guy gripped a handle of some clear verboten substance. Someone cursed. Someone shrieked. Someone laughed. I stood mute as they scattered. When Coach Jameson came striding outside to bust up the party, he noted my presence, held up a large, meaty finger, and said, “Wait there.” I froze, darkened by the shadows behind the gym.
Girls were crying. Not Anita, I don’t think. It took a lot to make her cry. From somewhere came my sister’s voice, in the buttery lilt that never failed her: “Coach, I just came out here to find my necklace, it fell off, it’s my grandmother’s, you know I don’t drink—”
“I’ll ask, missy,” he said. “What were you doing to cause you to, ahem, lose a necklace?”
I shuddered and didn’t catch Prachi’s reply because Anita stood behind me, propping open the door whose alarm had at last been killed.
“Neil, get inside, you’ll get in trouble,” she whispered. Her glossed lips quivered and for a moment I was suffused with a premonition that something phantom wished to be spoken aloud but that no one—not me, not the people around me—could find the language. Anita clamped her mouth shut and blinked very fast, as though beating back that ghost, and there we remained, still rooted to our finite asphalt selves.
I said Prachi was out there and it didn’t sound good. “The coach already saw me,” I added. “I’m not supposed to move.”
“Are you kidding me, Neil?” Anita was framed in the doorway as the hallway light streamed out around her. “My mom’s waiting, like, right now.”
“I wasn’t drinking.”
“I know you weren’t drinking,” she said. No, more like—“I know you weren’t drinking.” I wondered how she had come by all her new wisdom, how she had grown so fast, so far ahead of me. “Did you set off the alarm?”
I nodded miserably.
“Dude,” Anita said. “People go out the food delivery door.” She pointed. She spoke rapidly, percussively, with a bravado that might have masked her nerves at being so near trouble.
“C’mon, kid.” Coach Jameson led his small troupe of prisoners inside, beckoning me with that meaty finger, holding the alcohol pinched in his other hand like a used rag. The
