Last Dance (21 page)

“Good point,” Beth Rose said. “Let’s—uh—let’s all go into the women’s room and wash her face and stuff and then we’ll just go back to the dance—and uh—dance!”

“All?” Lee repeated. “All go into the girls’ room? I’m not the right gender, in case you haven’t noticed.”

In Lee’s case, it was very easy to notice. A wrestler like Gary? You didn’t overlook that kind of thing, not if, like Beth Rose, you found boys the most interesting scenery on earth. She said, “Oh, I’ve been hanging out there for hours, and so have Matt and Gary. You’ll feel right at home.”

“Uh. I don’t think so.” Lee looked as though he might cut and run, which was definitely not what the girls had in mind for him. Hastily Beth Rose said, “Okay, okay. You wait here. We’ll take exactly two minutes. Don’t go anywhere.”

Lee used his two minutes to find a sheet. It was white and it had lace trim; it was used in one of the suites upstairs. But it would make a great toga for Kip. When the girls came out again, the soot was gone from Kip’s face and her hair no longer had half-burned leaves in it, and her hands were clean. Her dress was still the complete shambles it had been. Lee said, “I have a toga for you. Here.” He held up the lovely white sheet.

Beth Rose and Kip exchanged glances and grinned behind the protection of the sheet. Beth Rose nodded and Kip nodded back at her. Beth Rose and Lee wrapped Kip in the sheet draping it tightly. Beth Rose said, “We don’t need this old sleeve; it’s torn to shreds anyway,” and she ripped it off the rest of the way, so that now, in her white sheet, Kip had one bare shoulder and one bare arm.

Lee grinned from ear to ear.

Beth Rose looked at the other two and thought, Togas are pretty sexy.

Then she thought,
Lee
is pretty sexy!

And then, because every girl loves a romance, whether its hers or not, Beth Rose thought, This is a perfect dance.

Con just kept right on running. It made him feel terrific and incredibly strong, like a race horse going for the jump. Molly was in the perfect position, about a foot from the pool’s edge. He stuck out a hand, palm first, like stopping traffic, and as Molly cooed hello, Con pushed her into the pool. He kept running, taking an enormous leap over the corner of the pool and landing safely on the tiles. Behind him the water rose in a huge splash and Molly’s scream turned into a gurgle as she went under. Con plowed to a stop in front of the thick bushes. He turned around to make sure Molly could swim, and she could, so he squatted down and said to her, “Molly, old girl. So far tonight you’ve shoved Anne in the water and you’ve started a forest fire. I think it’s time to cut your losses and drive on home.”

T
HE FIRST FIRE TRUCK
to arrive was the first to leave.

Gary and Beth Rose were dancing as it swung slowly down the mountain road and back toward town. Beth Rose’s eyes were closed, and she was barely even swaying. Gary simply shifted his weight from left to right and stared over her red hair and into the black night beyond the windows.

He kept reliving the falling sensation he had had inside back during those horrible moments when he really thought Beth had fallen off the cliff. It seemed silly now. Why, like Kip, had he not known right away that Beth had just joined the dance? He would have preferred to sit and let the falling feeling go away, instead of standing here halfway imitating it.

But Beth Rose wanted to dance, and he wanted her to have her way for a change, so he danced.

He thought about the following day, and what he was doing then. A bunch of his friends who would never come to a dance, not if they were paid a salary to do it, were going to a car race. Gary loved races of any kind: men, horses, cars, dogs—he didn’t care. He would never consider taking Beth Rose, or even telling her about it. It was not her kind of thing, and he just wanted to be with the guys there, anyhow. He wished he could give Beth Rose a slot: say, Tuesdays and Saturdays, leaving the rest for himself and his buddies. But girls didn’t do that, not happily, anyway, so Gary accepted the compromise. It was not in him to waste time arguing either with himself or with Beth Rose.

Con opened the door to the ballroom.

More than one girl looked up to admire him.

He had a slouching sort of arrogance, like a rock star who couldn’t be bothered with his fans, who knows they will come back to him no matter how rude he is.

“Con’s back,” Gary murmured to Beth, because she had been terribly worried. She said that if Con abandoned Anne one more time, Anne would lose it. Gary didn’t think for one minute that Anne would lose it. Con might. From guilt. But not Anne. Anne was much stronger. That was why Con needed her, in Gary’s opinion: Con was the kind of boy who was only half there without his girlfriend.

Beth opened her eyes and followed Con’s progress. The dance floor was crowded now, and Con threaded between couples. It was slow going. Or perhaps Con had to go slowly to get his courage up to face Anne, with whom he had not spent one minute so far this evening.

Either Matt and Emily had adopted Anne, or else Anne had adopted them.

Beth Rose was finding it difficult to tell the strong ones from the fading ones. “Do you ever think you have something completely psyched out,” she asked Gary, “only to find you don’t understand anything at all?”

Gary laughed. “All the time.” He followed Beth Rose’s eyes. “But if you’re thinking of Con, that’s pretty easy to understand.”

“Oh, good. Tell me.”

“He just didn’t want to deal with it. He had a choice and Anne didn’t.”

“But he’s going to deal with it now,” Beth Rose said. She wondered why she was standing up for Con. In many ways she despised Con. Yet in the end she always wanted him to be okay.

“No,” Gary said firmly. “
It,
meaning a pregnant girlfriend,
it
no longer exists. He’ll never have to deal with
it.
He just has to deal with tonight.”

Beth Rose wanted terribly to join the others. She wanted to hear how Con dealt with tonight, and whether he mentioned
it
and whether Anne forgave him. But she didn’t want to admit to Gary that parts of her heart were dying out here away from the real action.

Gary began laughing. “You can’t even wrench your eyes off them,” he teased.

“I can so. I’m not paying the least bit of attention.”

Beth Rose had to laugh at herself even as she pretended.

Gary said, “Hey, I’m gallant. I’ll escort you back to the scene.”

“Oh, goodie. Do it quickly; we’re going to miss the opening act.”

Mr. Martin said, “Lee, I realize this is a very stressful evening. I realize you are saving the girl who saved the Inn. However, I really must request you to get to work.”

Kip said, “He’s working quite hard right now, Mr. Martin. I’m having a hard time keeping my toga up.”

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Martin said dryly. “Lee, the task at hand, please, is once more to replenish the food supply for these starving animals, otherwise known as teenagers.”

Lee sighed.

Kip said, “Saturday night, then, Lee.”

He could hardly bear to let go of her hand. And next Saturday night seemed a hundred years away. But her eyes were fixed on him, bright piercing eyes, as excited about next Saturday as he was, and Lee thought: Mike is out. I’m in. That’s that.

He went to work.

Mr. Martin asked Kip if she knew how the fire started. Of course she didn’t, and they talked of the fire a little, but Kip was bored talking to Mr. Martin. She began sliding away from him and back to the dance, so she could show off her toga and hear more compliments and maybe flirt with Mike again.

Two boys, Kip thought. This is me. I know this is me because I looked in the mirror. Furthermore, it’s me in a mess. Me totally bedraggled.

And I have two boys.

There’s a message in that, but I don’t know what it is.

Touching Lee excited Kip, but knowing Mike was interested again excited her more. She wanted to tell the world that two boys were fascinated by her, but she wanted to keep it in her heart, all private and cozy and perfect.

She was also starving.

Holding her toga around her, Kip went to the food table to figure out how to eat while holding her clothes up.

Mike was there before she had even found the kind of roll she liked. He put mayonnaise on the roll for her and mustard on the other side. He remembers I hate butter, Kip thought. Mike put roast beef and ham in the same sandwich. “No,” Kip said firmly, “you were doing great till you mixed meats. Back up. Dump the ham.”

Mike dumped the ham. He said, “Coke?”

She nodded.

He got her a glass of Coke.

She could not hold the Coke, eat the sandwich, and still keep her toga up. Mike alternated holding the Coke and the sandwich for her. He said, “I’d hold the sheet instead, but you seem to have a pretty steady grip on that.”

Kip could think of nothing to say, so she just drank more Coke.

“That guy Lee asked you out?” Mike asked after she finished the glass of soda.

“Yes.”

“What’d you say?”

Kip pulled her toga a little tighter around her shoulders. “Does it matter to you, Mike? You said you were just coming to this dance as a favor to me. You said we were just coming as friends.”

Mike hated this kind of thing.

He
hated
having to let go of any part of himself and admit anything. But with Kip you never had a choice. He drew in a deep breath. “It matters to me.”

Kip nodded for a while. Mike didn’t know what the nodding meant. He was surprised how much he cared. He didn’t know if it felt good to care that much again, or bad. He just wanted her to say—

She can’t say yes to me, Mike thought. I haven’t asked her anything. That guy Lee is the one who asked her out. Mike said, “Uh. Next Saturday night. Uh. You want to go to a movie?”

“Next Saturday I’m going to the country fair with Lee. We’re taking my little brothers for the day, and then we’re going to send them on home and spend the evening at the fair on our own.”

Mike swallowed. “Sounds like a nice day,” he said. He thought, Great. Now I have to bid, like an auction. He said, “How about tomorrow? Sunday afternoon.” He couldn’t think of anything they could do. He said, “We could go swimming. First swim of the summer.” Where? he thought. Great. Now I have to get up early tomorrow morning and figure out who has a pool.

But Kip didn’t answer him. She just kept looking at nothing in particular.

“How about it?” Mike asked. His stomach hurt. And not because he needed food. He wanted her to say yes.

He realized suddenly that one reason he had broken off with Kip was because it had been terrific. Mike didn’t want to want a girl so much. He wanted to want a girl
occasionally.

“Why?” Kip said bluntly. She was always blunt.

It was easier to be “just friends” than to be head over heels in love.

He almost walked away.

He almost abandoned her instead of admitting how he felt.

He said, “Because I love you.”

“This was a great dance,” sighed one of the boys, happily examining his completely ruined clothes and sniffing the acrid smell of smoke in them.

“That’s because you never danced,” his girlfriend said, who was not nearly as pleased with the dance as he was.

“Think of the cost of this dance,” Pammy said, shaking her head. “We’re talking millions here. Add up the ruined dresses, the ruined shoes and stockings, and hairdos and all.”

“That’s true,” Jimmy agreed. “We’re probably a disaster. We should apply to the federal government for special funds to get new clothes and hairdos again.”

The boys teased him. “Oh,
you
need a new
hairdo,
Jimmy?”

Nothing ever bothered Jimmy. He just laughed.

Roxanne, whose beautiful gown had been torn when she slipped in the muddy croquet court and fell on her own water bucket, said, “You know what my mother is going to say about this?”

“What?” Although they could well imagine what
their
mothers were going to say!

“She’ll say, Roxanne, that is the
last
Last Dance you’ll ever attend!”

Emily was at peace.

She knew it was a temporary peace.

She knew that out there, beyond the dance, were two angry parents. No home. A place for a night or a week at Anne’s, but not a lifetime. She knew that she would have to go home to get her clothes, if nothing more. She did not know if her parents would offer her a truce, or if she would accept.

But she knew she had friends, and that Matt loved her, and that Anne had come through for her, the way other people had come through for Anne. I can make it, Emily thought. I’m strong, like Anne. This isn’t what I wanted, in fact, this is exactly what I did
not
want out of life. But it’s here, and I’m going to deal with it, and I’m going to be okay.

“We’ve got every answer except who skied in six countries,” Anne said. “I think whoever has been abroad so much didn’t come to the dance after all.” You would have thought Anne had nothing on her mind but the VCR questionnaire. Emily stared out into the ballroom, wondering who else out there was knee-deep in pain, or possibly deeper than that: maybe drowning in it. But having a good time in spite of that, Emily thought.

Or faking it.

Emily was not faking it.

She turned to Matt, and kissed him lightly, to reassure herself that he was there. And he was.

Beth Rose was relieved. She hadn’t missed a thing. They were killing time talking about dumb stuff, like the questionnaire, instead of real stuff, like whether Anne and Con would go together again. There was a bench against the wall, a rather long one, on which three or four could easily fit. Gary plopped down in the middle and sprawled on it. The band was playing a hard, fast rock piece. Beth Rose moved in front of Gary and kept on dancing from the waist down.

Con just stood awkwardly opposite Anne, as if he had come with somebody else and didn’t know Anne particularly well.

Gary said, “Well, Annie, old girl, actually, I just happen to know who skied in six countries.”

“You do!” Pammy cried, whose ears picked up anything at all to do with winning the VCR.