Instead, almost the whole school showed up.
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think anyone besides my closest friends even cared, much less agreed with me, but those speeches I’d been making had paid off. The photos in the news reports that day showed hundreds of my classmates waving homemade posters and burning old school uniforms with the gleaming glass Martha Jefferson Academy sign in the background. You could hear the chants on the video clips.
“What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want them? Now!”
“Gay rights are everybody’s rights!”
And, embarrassingly, “We stand with Toni! We stand with Toni!”
The news coverage woke the school administration up. So did the letter my newly acquired ACLU lawyer sent over. She called me last night with the news. I could hear the glee in my lawyer’s voice as she told me they’d caved.
Starting immediately, I was allowed to wear pants to school.
It was like being let out of prison. Except my prison was the entire world. I would never, ever have to wear that stupid blue-plaid uniform skirt again for the rest of my life.
The Washington Post called to ask me a bunch of questions. My lawyer drove me to two different TV stations to do incredibly scary on-camera interviews, and a profile of me went up on a website that was so big even my grandparents read it.
And now I was at the Homecoming dance, and everyone was looking at me.
I’d been buzzing and giddy for hours, but as I stared around at the crowd, another feeling climbed in. The one that comes when you know people are talking about you but you don’t know what they’re saying. It’s like bugs crawling over your skin. It was nearly as bad as it was before, with my mother, when she... No. I wasn’t going to think about my mother right now.
It was all too much. My mind was skittery, unsteady, unfocused. I couldn’t deal with this rapidly growing ache.
I needed to get out.
The idea bloomed fast inside me. I’d feel so much better if I’d just turn around and walk off the polished wooden dance floor. Go hide in the parking lot until everyone found someone else to stare at.
Then I saw her.
She was dancing. Her head was thrown back with laughter. Her eyes sparkled. Her smile radiated light.
Everything else that had been spinning through my head floated away like air.
GRETCHEN
The last thing I wanted to do was go to the Homecoming dance.
We’d only moved down to Maryland the day before. I hadn’t even unpacked. I wouldn’t start my new school until Monday, and going to a dance where I didn’t know a single person was guaranteed to be the most awkward experience of my life, basically.
But my parents thought it was the best idea ever. They even found me a date. My dad knew someone who knew someone who had a nephew who went to the University of Maryland who wasn’t doing anything that night. A recipe for true love if ever there was one.
So I opened my suitcases and tore through my boxes until I found the green-and-silver lace dress I’d worn to my brother’s wedding last year. It was a little tight, but I could dance in it. Mom lent me a pair of heels that pinched my toes so much I wound up leaving them in the car and going into the dance barefoot. At least my toenails were still polished from when my friends and I gave each other mani-pedis at my goodbye party back in Brooklyn.
The nephew, whose name was Mark or Mike or one of those, turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He told jokes that made me laugh. He poured my punch for me, which was cute. And since neither of us knew anyone else and we didn’t have anything to talk about, after just a couple of minutes of us standing around self-consciously he asked if I wanted to dance. I said sure, because I will pretty much never turn down an opportunity to dance.
Mike/Matt/whatever wasn’t a half-bad dancer, and soon we were in the middle of the floor, shaking our booties to the Top 40 the DJ was playing. (Were all DJs in Maryland this boring, I wondered?)
No one else was dancing that early, and before long a bunch of people had gathered in a circle to watch Matt/Marc/etc. and me. So I hammed it up, because what else was I going to do? I started doing this Charleston-type thing I’d seen on TV once, where you bend at the waist and move your knees in and out. It was a blast. Mike/Matt tried to do it, too, but we could barely keep up with each other. He started laughing, then I started laughing, then he started going faster, then I started going faster, and then he grabbed me and swung me around into a dip. I was laughing so hard I nearly fell over.
I was upside-down when I saw the girl in the top hat and suspenders smiling at me.
The blood was rushing to my head. When Mark set me back on my feet, I could barely stay upright.
I smiled back anyway.
TONI
I couldn’t believe I’d never seen her before.