I feel so relieved that Dad relented—Hunter’s really only missed about a half hour of the dance so far, the half hour when nobody was even dancing yet—that I almost follow Cameron and Hunter back outside to help drag in the rest of the drums. Maybe there would be some romantic moment when I’d go to pick up an especially heavy one and Cameron would say, Let me do it. Maybe one drum would be too heavy for either one of us to carry alone, so the two of us would hoist it together, and our fingers might touch accidentally on purpose.
Instead I just stay with Kylee and eat another piece of coconut cake. I know this makes it sound like I have food issues, when I really don’t. Except, apparently, at dances. Especially dances where my grounded brother has miraculously been ungrounded, and the boy I’m in love with has finally shown up. I try to catch Hunter’s eye, but he’s busy tinkering with the drums. For a moment I think maybe he sees me, but if he does, he looks away so fast I wonder if he somehow wants me not to know he’s there, as if I could possibly miss seeing him.
I make it a point not to look at the band anymore. In fact, I make it a point to leave the gym altogether and go to the restroom to comb my hair in the mirror very, very slowly. And remove three pieces of pineapple from the braces on my front teeth.
By the time I get back, the band is playing a fast, throbbing eighties song, with Hunter’s drums adding a pounding beat. This is really a dance now. I can see Kylee dancing, not with Henry Dubin, but with Tyler from journalism, who said my review of the band was hilarious.
I approve.
I don’t see Cameron among the dancers, for which I’m glad. I don’t want him dancing with anyone but me. But then I worry I don’t see him anywhere. Please, please, please don’t make it that he came to help the band set up and left already!
I return to my post by the coconut cake, where I do not have a fourth slice, because that would cross the line from understandable stress eating to flat-out-disgusting piggery, plus I do not want any other food morsels stuck in my braces. I take a paper cup half full of punch and pretend to sip from it, to have something to do with my hands.
As I take another fake sip, Cameron appears beside me. I didn’t see him approaching. His ability to materialize out of nowhere only adds to his mystique and awesomeness.
I wait for him to speak first.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say in reply.
We both stand watching the dancers. Now I’m glad the music is so loud. It’s pleasant to have a ready-made excuse not to try to talk.
Too soon, the song ends. Most of the dancers leap apart, as if terrified by the possibility that they might be stuck together twice in a row. Not Kylee and Tyler, though. He says something to her, and Kylee laughs. Cameron is still standing next to me, gazing out at the dance floor with a vacant kind of stare. Maybe he’s writing a haiku in his head. Maybe he’s thinking of another rock formation he wants to create.
Mr. Cupertino comes to the mike again.
“Gentlemen, you’ve had your turn. Ladies, go to it!”
If only Mr. Cupertino had announced the girls’ choice first, while I was in the bathroom! It would have been perfect to have a boys’ choice happen now, with Cameron standing two feet away from me.
Should I ask him to dance?
I could.
No, I couldn’t.
The band starts to play, and it’s a slow dance. At first I don’t recognize the song—after all, I only did hear it once before in my life—but then Cameron’s brother begins to sing the first lines: “‘I tell myself that I don’t care … But I do. I tell myself that it’s just me. But it’s you.’”
Cameron’s song. My song. Our song.
My fantasy is coming true in every single detail. Except for one. Oh, Mr. Cupertino, why couldn’t you have had this be the boys’ choice? Why? Why? Why?
Then—OMG—yes, yes, yes, YES—Cameron looks over at me and jerks his head toward the dance floor. The head jerk has to mean that he’s asking me to dance. I must have some kind of psychic power I never realized, to will into being whatever I want most in the world.
Cameron doesn’t even care that this is a girls’ choice. Of course he doesn’t care. He’s Cameron. He doesn’t follow rules, especially trivial rules about who should be doing the inviting for the next dance.
Miraculously, I have the presence of mind to reach behind me and drop my empty punch cup in the overflowing trash can.
Cameron leads the way to the dance floor.
I tell myself that it’s just me. But it’s you …
I wait for him to put his arms around me. Not the boy’s-left-hand-around-the-girl’s-waist and the girl’s-right-hand-on-the-boy’s-left-shoulder thing we learned in a doomed ballroom dancing unit in elementary school P.E. At real dances—and this dance is feeling realer by the minute—the boy puts both of his hands around her waist, holding her close to him, and she puts both of her arms around his shoulders. That’s what all the couples around us are doing, swaying in time to the music.
Instead, in the middle of the dance floor, Cameron starts to do a totally bizarre set of motions that look sort of like tai chi, or some new kind of Asian martial art never before seen in the West.
Am I supposed to imitate him? Is that what a dance partner should do?
I try bending my left arm and raising my right arm to copy Cameron’s pose, but no sooner do I accomplish that than he strikes a new one, with both hands clasped over his head like a genie coming in or out of a bottle.
There is no way I’m willing to do Uncorked Genie in front of half of the Southern Peaks middle school student body. People are definitely looking over at us. The couple next to us, wrapped around each other in the normal kid way, have cracked up laughing. Besides, maybe Cameron doesn’t even want me to copy him. Cameron himself never copies anyone, though right this moment I desperately wish he would. He might even be irritated if I turned this into an extremely awkward version of Cameron Says. Cameron says: Move your left hand in a long, floaty way in front of your eyes. Cameron says: Twirl around slowly with your eyes closed. If he’s even conscious of my existence at this moment, which seems increasingly doubtful, he probably expects me to come up with my own thing.
But my thing would have been slow-dancing with him the way every other couple except us is doing.
I have no choice but to think of something to do as the song continues to play. I try sort of swaying in place, shifting my weight from one foot to another and leaning first to one side, then to the other. I make myself attempt a couple of swirling motions with my arms, as if I’m waving a veil from side to side or doing a very slow version of the “Peace Like a River” and “Love Like an Ocean” motions from Vacation Bible School. Finally, after what feels like an hour but has probably only been three hideous minutes, the music ends.
I can’t bring myself to thank Cameron for the “dance.” But I have to say something about his song, the song that’s so beautiful, the song that sums up everything I think—I thought?—is so amazing about him as a writer and as a person.
“I love that song,” I say. And I did use to love it. “How long did it take you to write?”
And did you write it about me?
He stares at me, utterly mystified.
“Your song,” I say again. “I love your song.”
Comprehension dawns on his face. “That’s not my song,” he says. “Hunter wrote that one.”
Hunter wrote that?
“Oh,” I say.
Just when I think my Cameron fantasies can’t be any more thoroughly doused, I see Olivia slowly pulling apart from the arms of hunky Ryan. She’s looking right at us, and trying not to laugh. Well, maybe I’m being overly charitable to assume she’s trying not to laugh, because if that’s what she’s trying to do, she’s failing. I can’t say that she’s mean to laugh, because I would have totally laughed if our positions had been reversed and she had been the one out there doing Vacation Bible School moves while Cameron was blissed out in his private Cameron world. I mean, who wouldn’t?
Now that his dance trance is over, Cameron apparently notices Olivia’s fit of giggles and the wide-eyed stares of half a dozen other couples who are still gazing at us. He gives a strange smile and the same slow wave he gave to Kylee and me when he saw us watching him make the rock sculpture, a wave that manages to convey total indifference to his audience, total disregard for the mirror. And yet—suddenly I see something I never saw before—it’s a wave that also says, See how cool I am that I don’t even care what you think?
So it’s not that Cameron really doesn’t care what other people think. He cares that other people think he doesn’t care what they think. Seeming not to care about what other people think can be the biggest act of all, in its own way. And totally un-fun for the person who happens to be cast as his partner.
Which tonight would be me.
I flee from the dance floor so fast that I collide with Kylee and Tyler, who are exiting the dance floor, too, hand in hand.
Kylee takes one look at me.
Here’s what a good friend she is.
“I have to go to the restroom,” she tells Tyler as Mr. Cupertino heads back to the microphone. She gives Tyler a big, regretful smile, lets go of his hand, and half pulls, half drags me into the hall.
“What happened?”
I can’t believe she doesn’t know. “You didn’t see?”
“No. The last I saw, you were heading off to dance with Cameron, and I was so excited and happy for you.”
At least if Kylee didn’t see, most likely Hunter didn’t see either. Only Olivia and twenty—or thirty or forty—other people saw. But that look on Olivia’s face, the look she gave me when she finally managed to stop laughing, is going to haunt me for the rest of my days: Olivia felt sorry for me. I felt sorry for myself.
How many dreams can one person lose?
Before we even get to the non-privacy of the overcrowded girls’ room, I bury my head in Kylee’s shoulder and start to cry.