Slow Dance in Purgatory

The first day back to school after the vacation, Maggie woke up extra early and pedaled to the school. She needed to dance. Rehearsals with the team kept the crazies at bay, but she needed to move and sweat and feel without an audience. A few days prior, her key had magically reappeared, right where she had left it, sitting innocently on the desk in her room. Had she just overlooked it? She didn’t think so. Maybe Gus was extending some trust, silently entreating her not to blow it.

It was only 5:30 a.m. when she flipped on the sound system, peeled off her coat, and slipped off her shoes. She always danced with bare feet. She set her ipod on random and began to warm-up, jumping and stretching, limbering herself up. She loved the challenge of dancing to a song that a choreographer would never pick, simply because it didn’t have the right kind of sound or rhythm. Those were the best songs, because they forced her to really interpret the song through her movements, and she loved getting lost in the fusion of sound and soul. She danced until the halls started filling up with students, and she was forced to quit.

Every morning that week she arrived just as early and danced just as hard. She had been dancing for about an hour when an old favorite seeped through the speakers and into her battered heart. It was beautifully, hauntingly done. And for a minute she stopped and just listened.



I’ve lost my mind

Your love’s made me blind

I can’t even speak

Your love’s made me weak



But if you watch me I’ll show you

And if you let me I’ll hold you

So the words that I can’t say

You’ll hear anyway

You’ll know how much I long for you

How every note’s a song for you

You’ll know

How I just want to breathe you in

And lose myself inside your skin

I’ll hold you and you’ll know




She tried to let the music in, inspiring her, telling her how she should move. But it hurt too much. She was hanging on by a thread, and this song would sever it. She clicked off the music and stood, breathing hard, unwilling to accept the sheer futility of a love story that had only one possible ending. All week long she had danced for him, hoping he was watching and missing her like she missed him. She turned the music back on. She wouldn’t call, she wouldn’t beg, but she would dance. She would make him come back to her.

***

Her emotion pulled at him like silken tentacles, and he knew he couldn’t resist her much longer. He tried to lose himself in the haze of nothingness that he called floating, but he had felt her calling to him, and he slid back to Earth. He had watched her, day after day, trying to create distance by turning away, only to find himself staring helplessly at her once more. Her dancing called to him, but it was also the thing that reminded him she didn’t belong with him. She had a gift and that gift would take her far away, and he would have to let her go. He wanted her to go. He just wished, with everything he still was, that he could go with her.

She cried out for him now, and as hard as it was to turn his back on her love, it would be worse to trap her with it. He flashed himself to the farthest corner of the school, putting as much physical distance between them as possible and clenched his hands to his head, filling his mind with radio waves and static. His mind’s eye kept trying to tune her in, as if her signal was stronger than all the others. He fought it desperately, and breathed his relief when he felt her stop dancing.

It wasn’t until later on that he felt her loneliness and her longing for him well up again like a black cloud. She was so unhappy. Her misery clung to him, suffocating him. With a tortured groan, he clung to his self-imposed exile, but it was a losing battle. He told himself he would just check on her, just allow himself one small glimpse.

She was in the cafeteria. Rows of tables filled with laughing, talking, eating teenagers surrounded her like a human maze. Shad sat beside her, and he was clearly angry. He was looking at a nearby table filled with students, a few of whom Johnny recognized. The guy named Derek was standing on the bench and waving his hands, calling attention to himself. The cafeteria noise dimmed to a dull roar, and the guy on the bench commenced speaking.

“It seems a certain, attractive female – OUCH, damn it – stop it, Dara!” Derek was getting slapped by the girl sitting next to him. Johnny recognized her as the girl on Maggie’s dance team. The one he’d taught a small lesson to a while back. She didn’t seem to like her boyfriend referring to another female as attractive.

“Anyway, it seems as if a certain, uh….female came alone to the Winter Ball a few weeks ago. This female looked oh-so-fine.” He shot a warning look down at Dara, “But interestingly enough, halfway through the dance she was nowhere to be found. Her friends thought for sure she had left the dance and gone home. But to our surprise her car was still in the school parking lot when the dance was over!” The kids around him hooted appreciatively, and some sent up a few cat-calls.

“In fact,” the kid continued, soaking up the attention like a TV game show host, “Maggie’s car was still in the lot early the next morning!” The noise rose even further, and people were pointing and laughing, eyebrows raised and hands covering O-shaped mouths.