MY DAD HAS THIS EXPRESSION: IF YOU’RE GONNA BE A BEAR, be a grizzly bear. So I blew out my hair and borrowed an outfit from Dawn, and now I’m a grizzly bear in a short, tight red bandage dress that rides obscenely up my thighs when I get in the back of Ashley’s car. I’d never admit it, but this dress makes me feel weirdly powerful and Kardashian-esque. It figures that I’d have to channel a totally different person in order to work up the nerve to go to this dance.
We pull into the class parking lot, and Ave and I both sort of take a second to regroup. Ashley reapplies her lipstick in the rearview mirror, visibly impatient to get inside already. Avery shakes her head in awe.
“I can’t believe your boobs right now,” she says.
“It’s Dawn’s bra.”
In the interior rearview mirror, Ashley’s green eyes creep predatorily over to me, a spider crawling toward a fly.
“I didn’t know Victoria’s Secret had good clearance prices!”
She shuts off the car.
A touching amount of time and effort has been spent making the gym look Halloween-y. Big black crepe paper covers the walls, and the backboards and basketball hoops are draped with cobwebs. I immediately zero in on Gideon—and so does Ashley, darting over in her tight black dress to back him (with him quite willing) into a corner. I watch them and hate myself for feeling like I’m at that first free fall on a roller coaster and my stomach has just dropped out of my body. He glances at me once, then again in a flickering up-and-down glance. Actually, I am either insane or I feel a lot of eyes on me.
“Oh my God, Scarlett, people are staring at you,” says Avery.
I focus on the floor, yanking the bottom of my dress down.
Jason Tous saunters by with his little dude-cadre, reeking of Abercrombie Fierce. We glare at each other. I wonder whether he was even a little bit affected by what I said to him outside Ruth’s house. It’s hard to tell, since his expression is consistently at some unreadable early point on the Darwinian evolution chart.
Mike Neckekis appears from the refreshments table with two Solo cups of punch. He’s wearing a nice gingham shirt and looks higher on the human-evolution chart than usual. He smiles at Avery and hands her a glass.
“Hey! You look really nice.”
“You too,” she says, seeming to relax a little, then lowers her voice: “Tell me this is alcoholic.”
“Maybe a little,” he says, and she makes a “score!” sign with her fist. He turns apologetically to me. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get one for you. Wait a second.” He disappears again to get a punch for me and returns with one. I sip and say thanks.
“So, like, you want to dance or something?” he asks Avery. She nods hesitantly and looks at me.
“Yeah, go! I mean, if nobody dances to the Black Eyed Peas, do they even exist? Just food for thought.”
She laughs. “Okay. But listen, please don’t feel weird that you came; you’ll have fun. And you seriously look amazing. Everybody’s staring at you.”
I roll my eyes.
“I’ll be back in a little bit.”
The bleachers are reminiscent of Diane Arbus, smattered with a handful of homely Girl Geniuses and a couple of weird guys with pube-y facial hair who haven’t had a growth spurt yet. As soon as I sit down way up on the highest bench, I feel a lot more like myself, in my natural habitat, but in keeping with today’s little forum trauma, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Down below, my classmates are dancing or awkwardly milling around in same-sex groups. The guys seem aimless and doofy, trying to love-tap one another in the balls. The girls move with more of a purpose. Natalie Wetta and Liz Lanteri jokingly slow dance together. We’re all going to graduate soon, and go to college, and grow up, and get married, I think, and realize with a start I’ve said we instead of they. Usually the only we is me and Avery, or me and the Were-heads. Or me and Gideon, before he outed himself as Lord of the Douche. I was so delusional to think he was above this popularity stuff.
I’ve tried to look everywhere except at Gideon and Ashley, but I’m a masochist, so I glance around for them. Ashley’s nowhere to be found, and hearing a few thuds of dress shoes on the bleachers, I realize Gideon’s climbing up toward me. I am still mad at him, no matter how cute he looks.
This is the part where I am supposed to be a sparkling, vindictive angel of revenge whose cutting remarks make him feel like shit.
“I like your shoes,” I blurt.
He glances down at them. “Oh. Thanks.” Then he sits next to me, leaning a little bit forward with his hands on his knees, staring straight out at the dance floor like he’s intentionally trying not to look at me.
“So did you get to the Sam Kieth illustrated editions?”