Page 48 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Four

We

N ormally, school dances felt like parties thrown by the TSA.

Normally we had to file past security stations posted at the entrance to the gym, emptying out every pocket and turning out our bags.

Afterward we were barred from leaving except to use the bathroom—and even then we were likely to be aggressed by yet more chaperones who militantly made sure there was no more than one person in each stall.

Dozens of teachers prowled the dance floor like bomb-sniffing dogs, scanning for even the faintest whiff of alcohol or twitch of pelvic thrusting.

But not that year. That year, the Winters Dance took on an almost medieval significance.

Even though we were still slaughtering the competition statewide, the recent infiltration of the Market Catch website and the continued assaults on Coach Vernon’s mailbox had transformed Woodward and its swimmers into a beleaguered minority.

Ours was the besieged citadel, the mythical fortress; we recognized that the moat of deputy cars and the heavy delegation of security had been assembled to protect us from external attack.

We’d all come prepared, at least mentally, for a showdown.

We’d heard rumors that the dance would be emptied by another fake bomb threat, or possibly a real one.

We’d dreamed of what might happen if one of our enemies tried to disrupt the Balladeers’ Auction.

We’d heard that the Sharks were keeping baseball bats in their cars now—at least the ones who drove.

We were hailed as arriving heroes by the chaperones steaming breath into the cold, using glowsticks like air traffic control personnel to run us safely into the gym. Marauding packs of seniors sucked on vapes tucked behind their palms.

Most of the upperclassmen were at least a little drunk. So many people stashed alcohol in the locker room in the days before the Winters that fights broke out about space in the empty lockers.

We had to admit: Student Leadership had outdone themselves that year.

String lights snaked up the walls to the scoreboards, and beachball-size plastic lanterns were rolling around, throbbing dully with color.

Mrs. Steeler-Cox was planted next to the DJ stand almost as firmly as the bust of Coach Steeler next to her—now scrubbed of graffiti, crowned with a wreath of lights, and temporarily wheeled into the gymnasium to judge us for our dance moves.

The Student Council Mafia was distributing glowstick necklaces and cheesy light-up bracelets, and we all agreed they were cringe.

We took a bunch anyway and wore them ironically.

Lucy came late. From all over the gymnasium, we watched her shimmying off her coat next to the bleachers, smoothing her hair, tugging at her skirt.

Her bare shoulders picked up the gloss of revolving lights and winked them back at us.

The Sharks in tops and tails passed among us like dazzling members of an alien species, taller, handsomer, and more confident than the rest of us.

We imagined the comforting astringent whiff of chlorine in their hair and clothing.

We watched them touching and being touched.

There was Alec Nye in pale-blue sateen, hemmed close to the bleachers by adoring cheerleaders; Aiden Teller in vintage tails, surrounded by eddies of beautiful Echelon girls; Jeremiah Greene wearing double-breasted red plaid, tailed through the room by admiring freshmen.

We couldn’t fucking believe it when JJ Hammill showed up with Kennedy Myers.

Kennedy fucking Myers.

First of all, she wasn’t a student.

Second of all, no one ever showed up to the Winters with a date. It wasn’t that kind of dance.

Third of all, Kennedy and Bailey were competitors on the pageant circuit and sworn mortal enemies for life.

Their earliest tension dated back to a missing pair of ballet slippers and had escalated during the Miss Junior Indiana pageant when one of Bailey’s pageant dresses was sullied with what appeared to be either dog or human feces just before the competition walk.

It was an explosive controversy in eighth grade and had consumed us with horror for many weeks.

We saw Lucy pull Bailey to her and whisper something, her mouth briefly entangled in Bailey’s hair. We’ll never know what she said. But we knew somehow what it meant . We felt it.

An unthinkable suspicion ripened quickly into full-blown rumor: Bailey Lawrence was actually crying.

Bailey Lawrence was crying at the Winters.

We spotted Bailey fleeing into the locker room, her hand locked tight around Lucy’s, with Savannah Savage and a small pack of friends trailing after her like fish surfing a wake. We could hardly believe it.

We held tight to our phones, as if we could squint through them for a glimpse of whatever might be happening in the bathroom. Some of us edged close to the girls’ locker room door and debated finding an excuse to venture inside.

Instead we bridged the distance in our imaginations.

She doesn’t look like she was crying, we pointed out when Bailey and her friends finally emerged from the locker room. She doesn’t even look upset.

She looks . . .

Amazing.

Pissed off.

Over it.

Drunk.

We agreed that Bailey Lawrence was ten times hotter than Kennedy Myers, that JJ Hammill was an idiot, and that he and Bailey would be back together before Christmas.

There was no one on the dance floor when Lucy and Bailey stepped in front of the DJ stand, the lights briefly rotating colors through their hair. For a second, we saw angels haloed in blinding white; the next second, we saw demons silhouetted by a smoky red light.

On the dance floor, Bailey kicked off her heels and did a perfect pirouette in bare feet. She landed soundlessly on the beat of a new song, falling through the final repetition of a chorus we had tired of already. Mia Thompson was teasing Jeremiah Greene and Aiden Teller into attempting to twerk.

Suddenly JJ seized hold of Kennedy’s hand. He trotted her to a spot on the dance floor directly next to Bailey and Lucy, even though there was a basketball court of unclaimed space.

We made jokes about end-times and hell freezing over. We felt a little drunk, even if most of us weren’t drinking. We felt a little dizzy, a little sugar-high, a little delirious.

In all our accumulated years of school dances, we’d never seen JJ Hammill so much as nod his head to a beat.

Now he swept Kennedy into a dip and then twirled her. The incredible was happening. The impossible. The unheard of.

Something was changing, and it was us .

We poured onto the dance floor. We lost our shit.

We discovered that we really could feel the beat, even those of us who obviously couldn’t.

We felt like we were part of a single throbbing heartbeat, a shuddering rhythm that soared up through the floor and trembled us all the way to the tips of our fingers.

The next song was our favorite. Until the song after that. That song was really our favorite, holy shit.

This is my song, we shouted at each other until we were hoarse from shouting how much we loved it and the lyrics, which we shouted even louder. This is my shit.

But no. No, no. Compared to the next song? Forget it.

The next song was our blood, our heartbeat, our whole life turned into a chorus and a bass line and a beat.

It jacked all our nerve cells, exploded our hearts, burst us out of our bodies.

It was a fist, and a fuck-you, thrown up at the walls, at the sky, at our parents, at our feelings.

For almost forty-five minutes, we did transform.

We did become something more beautiful. We became a single song, a single rhythm, nameless and wordless, without memory or fear.

We would be ourselves again as soon as we stopped dancing. The raffle was coming up, and we would all go back to our places, and then we would go home.

But for a little while, we belonged to the music, and the night belonged to us.

We saw Akash and Lucy dancing together. Lucy was laughing. Akash was skimming her waist with his hands as she twirled. Then they were standing close, and he had a hand in her hair.

We didn’t see him try and kiss her.