—Don’t you fucking do that, I said.
She cradled her hand and said to it, Whoa Nelly, calm down, Miss Thang.
—I don’t even know that guy. And why do you – you smell like shit.
She stood up straight and grinned—said, I. Vomited. And now? More dancing!—then she darted back into the music before I could say anything.
A minute later I surveyed the perimeter of the massive room—the ceiling high and crisscrossed with wooden beams, the windows twelve feet tall and swathed in poured-looking curtains. Hundreds of people pulsed on the dance floor, and a DJ and his equipment stood far off on a platform in front of it. I finally found Jaquelin near that platform, right up against a speaker. She hugged me—her arms damp and cold from her sweat—then yelled, Look! and pointed to the DJ, a muscular guy wearing a red bandana over his hair, a pair of mirrored sunglasses shielding his eyes. It’s a miracle! Jaquelin yelled, and we immediately started dancing together, immediately fell in sync. When we’d lift our hands in the air, the girls around us did it too, a few seconds later. When we went from a slow grind to shaking our asses as fast as we could, the girls around us tried to match us. Eventually the DJ threw on a song with a beat enough like a merengue, so then we danced as a couple, deploying every turn and spin we knew, and a circle started to grow around us. I was happier than I’d been in weeks, just moving like that, but Jaquelin kept pulling people into the circle with us, trying to show them a turn we’d just done. I heard her yell, Like this! to one girl, then she put her hands on the girl’s hips and pushed them from side to side. Even though the girl was half a beat off, Jaquelin said, You got it! You’re doing it! She came back to dance with me for another thirty seconds before spinning out and pulling another shitty dancer back in with her. When enough of them were around us that the circle had collapsed, she told me she was going to the bathroom, not to move from that spot. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the chill of some guy’s sweat-soaked shirt as he edged behind me, pressing against me to dance, and I felt closer to home in that moment than when I’d been back there for Thanksgiving.
The DJ, a guy they’d brought from the closest big city, had been watching over the top of his sunglasses as me and Jaquelin danced, and now that it was just me grinding on some faceless stranger, he leaned down from his kingdom and yelled an invite up to the platform in my direction. I didn’t need to answer: he grabbed my whole forearm and yanked me the three feet up to his side. A silver ring circled each finger he’d wrapped around my elbow. He wore a white tank top—a wife-beater, is what Omar would’ve called it—and what I’d first thought was a Mexican flag tattooed on his shoulder was actually an Italian one. He slid a headphone back from his ear, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled the side of my head to his mouth.
—I’m not supposed to let people up here, he said. But you’re not people.
He asked me what I was doing at a party like this, and when I said I was a Rawlings student, he said, No fucking way! When I said, But I’m from Miami, he kissed the top of my head.
He set up the next song—another intense favorite, this one by a morbidly obese Puerto Rican rapper who, at 698 pounds, would be dead of a heart attack in less than two months—and as I danced with him, I slid his sunglasses off his face. From so close I saw he was older than I’d thought. I hid my own eyes behind the mirrored lenses. The heads in the crowd, hundreds of them, bobbed and swayed and jerked, their bodies packed together. Jaquelin was edging closer to the speaker again, standing in a new circle, the only nonwhite girl in it, her back to me. I spotted Jillian near one side, up next to one of those colossal windows, doing what looked like a very drunk impression of someone who couldn’t dance. The farther out she stuck her ass, the more obvious it was that she didn’t have one, and I laughed, hard.
Behind me, the DJ put his thick hand on my waist. I shifted so we stood side by side, bodies churning in front of us. He leaned over and said, Baby, tell me what you want me to play for you. I pulled my hair off my back—it was hotter up there, a few feet closer to the ceiling—and tied it into a loose knot on top of my head.
—What songs you got, I said out to the crowd, with the word ass in them?
He lowered the hand to my hip, and I pretended not to notice. I slipped the headphones from around his neck, avoiding the film of sweat clinging to him, and put them over my own ears.