“Why don’t you just come?” Pa asked over the phone. He was serving as a school dance chaperone, and behind him you could hear the crowd noise, the bass line of some familiar but unplaceable pop hit. “You only get two homecomings.”
“As if it’s not pathetic enough,” you told him, in an imitation of his own defeated voice, “that I have no date, now you want me to show up alone.”
The fact of your datelessness had been on full display that day at Bliss Township School, a result of the miserable statewide homecoming tradition in which your school proudly took part. On the night before the dance, your school’s juniors and seniors had met in living rooms across Presidio County for the well-photographed exchange of mums and garters. Mums for the girls, garters for the boys. Both were bouquets of gaudy ribbons and silk flowers—lighting or sound effects often included—handmade by a special someone, to be worn at school the next day. And so, on November fifteenth, the divisions had become clear: the beloved strolling the halls, their dates’ names spelled in sparkling stickers, their toy cowbells ringing. The dateless made to wander undecorated and bereft.
You were a little disgusted by yourself, wallowing in these teeny dramas. But a week had passed since the night at Mr. Avalon’s window, and the fact of what you’d witnessed was too big for you to know what to do with it. The monster wasn’t her father or some other boy. But was Rebekkah right, that your telling would only make it worse for her? And what did you know of romance, sex, love? It was not as if Mr. Avalon had pinned her down; she had lifted her head to meet his. But then why that bruise on her leg? Your muscles were too weak to make a fist around these combustive facts. The only action you had taken was to resume your pathetic stalker routine, stopping by the theater classroom after school to watch Mr. Avalon play the piano as Rebekkah and the other students sang their familiar tunes, “Besame Mucho,” “Amigo,” “Oye Como Va,” “Mambo No. 5.” Through the window, it all had looked so like an ordinary rehearsal, you could almost convince yourself you’d made up that night outside the teacher’s house. You were always a consternated boy, but even Ma had noticed this new register of your worry. “Can we just try to have an actual conversation?” she had asked you a couple of nights before, finding you alone on the porch. “It’s time.”
“Time?”
“I’m worried about you.”
You shrugged.
“All this moping of yours. The way you’ve been slumping around. I can’t just act like I don’t know who is the cause of it. Your new study friend.”
“Ma—”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you the third degree. All I want to tell you is that—just that obviously you are suffering, and I just want to say that you really shouldn’t let a girl like that make you so blue.”
“Okay,” you said.
“I, for one, took one look at her the night she came over,” Ma told you, “and I knew she was trouble.” You couldn’t fail to notice that your mother used only pronouns, she and her, as if Ma wasn’t even willing to grant Rebekkah a name.
“Trouble?” you said.
“Just something in her eyes. That certain broody way she carries herself. Maybe not trouble, but troubled, at least.”
“Troubled.” You felt for your neck, where the possibility of admitting the whole story to your mother broke coolly over your skin. “Rebekkah,” you said. “She just seems, I don’t know. Ma? I don’t even know where to begin to tell you about her.”
“Then maybe don’t,” she said. “Believe me. With certain people in this world, it’s better if you don’t even try to understand.”
“But—” The firmness in Ma’s face warned you off telling her more. This conversation, you knew, was not really about Rebekkah, or even about you. It was about the untenable faith in which she had tried to raise you: that all you had ever needed was right there, in the very cramped but infinitely loving planet she could enfold in her arms, and that the world beyond could only corrupt that simple, beautiful vision.
“I guess you’re right,” you had told her, because that was the easier resolution to that conversation. It had been easier not to say anything. It was still easier tonight. Easier to pity yourself, easier to hide out in your room, behind your tattered copy of Childhood’s End, when Pa had left for the Homecoming Dance.
“I think there are lots of people here without dates,” Pa now told you over the phone. “Take, for example, that Rebekkah Sterling of yours. Didn’t see her wearing any mum today. But here she is, looking quite good in a little red number, I might add. Rebekkah was asking me about you, actually. If you were coming.”
“No. Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.” You could nearly hear your father’s grin.
*
“What’s all this?” your mother said, an hour later, when she came into the house to find you buttoning yourself into one of your father’s ill-fitting suits.
“I just thought I’d like to be there,” you said.
“Really?” she asked. “Is that really a good idea? Going to a dance without a date? Maybe times have changed, but in my day that was a recipe for a truly bad night.”
You shrugged. “I don’t know about that,” you said. “I think I could still have fun.” You didn’t mention your father’s phone call; you knew how angry your mother would be with him if she knew that it was he who had spurred you to this potential humiliation. Ma shook her head, and she made her protest known by remaining silent the whole drive, clicking her tongue at the windshield.
A half hour later, there was Bliss Township School, the hundred-year-old, redbrick behemoth on its last night of life, its heart still beating, that season’s popular Beyoncé song thumping into the warm night. You grasped the car door handle, pushed it open, and stood.
“Oliver?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ma said in the driver’s seat, her eyes still begging you to spare yourself from embarrassment, her body shifting around awkwardly as if her motherly obligation to let you make your own mistakes was a kind of internal jujitsu move she was presently performing, to outmuscle what she really wanted to tell you. And then your mother said the last thing she would ever say to you on that side of Bed Four. “Try to have some fun, I guess?”
The school’s gymnasium was nearly unrecognizable, festooned in ribbons and velvet curtains, lit by the whirling sparkles thrown off by the disco ball. As Sarah McLachlan sang her weepy song about the angel and his beautiful arms, teenage bodies in cheap satins and silks swayed softly—white teenage bodies; a school dance, like a football game, was a decidedly white activity. The room’s few Latino kids, a tiny sampling of the boys and girls you recognized from your honors classes, made a small cluster near the snack table, watching on like children at a lake’s edge, looking diffident as they considered a jump in. For a long while, you just stood there near the doors, terrifically uncomfortable in your stained sack of a business suit.
“You made it.” Pa tossed a jolly arm over your shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”