Chapter 22

The night was already over. It was a nonstarter, a failure to launch. I might as well drive home right now, I thought. But I couldn’t abandon Evelyn. She held on to me when we walked down those stairs. I could stick with her for one night of shame and humiliation.

We walked into the open section of the cafeteria that had been converted into a dance floor for prom. There were a lot of decorations, and it was clear that substantial thought and time had gone into making sure they fit together as part of some overall theme. It was hard to say what the theme was, exactly, but it apparently had something to do with fairy tales, castles, and large cardboard stars with glitter on them. The room was already packed with several hundred people, and on one side the DJ had set up shop with several towers of speakers, blinking lights, and, yes, a disco ball.

I was pleased to find the DJ had just started a slow dance. Fast dances are hard. There is a lot of moving, and all this moving requires either skill, the ability to fake skill, or the ability to not care what people think about your lack of skill. I lacked all these traits. Slow dances, on the other hand, were simple. You just put your hands on the girl’s waist and then spun around in circles until the music stopped. No skill required.

That said, slow dances tend to be hard in, shall we say, another area. It’s no secret that girls usually find it weird or even gross when they feel this activity in a boy’s body while dancing with him. And as a teenaged guy, this is frustrating. Because it’s not as if we have a choice in the matter. But there are things you can do. Like math. While we spun in our slow, tight circle, I did multiplication tables in my head. Six times seven is forty-two. Six times eight is forty-eight. Six times nine… anything to keep my mind off the fact that my body was in very, very close proximity to that of a female.

When you see teenaged couples slow dancing, usually you’ll notice that the boy is holding the girl at arm’s length, keeping an awkward distance between them. Girls often assume this is because the boy feels uncomfortable or self-conscious about dancing. Maybe. But I would suggest that if you look more closely, you may discover it’s not the dancing he feels self-conscious about.

Anyway, eventually the song ended and people clapped as they always weirdly do at the end of slow-dance songs, as if applauding their own ability to stand in one place and spin around for three minutes without getting dizzy. The music veered to hip-hop, which meant fast dancing. Evelyn and I took a step back from each other, and then I took another one, so we were starting to blend into the circle of acquaintances that occupied this region of the dance floor. Then I started to dance. I transferred my weight back and forth between real and fake leg, simultaneously making a motion with my arms like I was pedaling a hand-powered bicycle. Pretty hip. Soon enough the group became an actual circle, like we were playing a standing version of ring-around-the-rosy. Except we weren’t. Instead, we were just making awkward eye contact with each other while pretending we were having a good time pretending we felt comfortable dancing.

That’s normal fast dancing for you. Everyone stands around and tries to let the music infect them like a virus, one whose primary symptom is rhythmic convulsions and muscle spasms. There’s another kind of fast dancing, though—what I refer to as Close Fast Dancing, or CFD.

CFD, unlike its more lustful and notorious cousin grinding, is more fun than sexual. It’s basically where a couple assumes a slow-dance position but sways and spins at the speed of a fast dance. It’s like ballroom dancing minus the skill, elegance, and rhythm. Sometimes people say grinding when they mean CFD, because said people have not seen what grinding really looks like. How can you tell the difference? It’s in the name, people. When you see a couple grinding, there is simply no other word to describe it. They are grinding. When you see a couple holding each other and bouncing back and forth, probably smiling, they are engaging in CFD. The other way to tell the difference is in the axis or plane of motion. When grinding, a couple is moving their hips toward and away from each other, a forward-and-backward squeezing motion on the y-axis. When CFDing, by contrast, a couple is moving their hips left and right, a side-to-side swinging motion on the x-axis. Got it?

Anyway, CFDing still requires a degree of confidence, because you must intentionally put your arms around her waist. There is no question about whether she reciprocates. She either starts dancing with you, or shrinks away and slips into a protective enclave of her girlfriends, who will then form an impenetrable circular fortress around her and give you mean looks until you back off. So the risk of public rejection is very high.

Evelyn and I danced in the open circle for a few songs, me thinking the whole time how I should try to CFD with her. Suddenly she started walking across the circle toward me. Had she been having the same thought? Was she coming to CFD with me?

She grabbed my shoulders and pulled me toward her. This is it, I thought. We are going to do it. “I need to rest,” she said in my ear.

Oh yeah. Arthritis. I nodded my understanding. Then I wondered: Am I supposed to accompany her? Is that what a prom date does? I wasn’t sure. So I asked.

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, Rachel is coming.”

Was I still supposed to go with her? I wasn’t sure. But having a disability of my own, I knew there was nothing more cringe-inducing than the feeling that someone else is giving up an activity you can’t do just so you don’t feel left out. A disability is already such a burden on you personally. It only gets worse when it’s a burden on other people, too.

“All right, I’ll just keep dancing. Come back out when you’re ready,” I said.

Truthfully, I was looking for an excuse to stop dancing. I didn’t much enjoy it. But I had talked myself out of following Evelyn for fear she was trying to get away from me.

She made a face I couldn’t read.

She nodded at her friend and the two of them peeled off from the circle and headed for the snack area, where there were cafeteria tables covered with red paper tablecloths. The tables were overflowing with shiny confetti that was getting tracked back to the dance floor on the smooth leather soles of dress shoes.

I danced, then, by myself in the circle of acquaintances. I felt uncoordinated and self-conscious, like everyone was looking at me and laughing inside. Since my prosthesis was attached at the hip, I was essentially sitting on it with the bones of my pelvis, the socket synched around my waist like a plaster corset. The leg itself, with its three stiff titanium and aluminum joints, was engineered for stability, not for getting down. I felt like I was trying to dance while tied in a seated position to a cement block.

I wondered if perhaps prom could still be salvaged. Maybe I could summon some dormant courage and become a fun dancer, the kind of guy who CFDs with his gorgeous prom date. The kind of guy who ignores his recent electoral defeat, who ignores his peers who did not vote for him and instead focuses on Evelyn. And if I could do that, maybe later we would sit at one of those confetti-sprinkled tables and I would hold her hand and wonder aloud if maybe there wasn’t something more than friendship between us.

The circle collapsed on itself as a few couples paired off to CFD. A few songs later the DJ brought it back to the old school (his words, not mine) with some early-nineties hip-hop. A much larger circle opened up in the center of the room as a guy named Jerome spun around on the floor, pivoting over his hands, swinging his lower body in gymnast-like ways. I felt a poke in my side. It was Evelyn. She smiled at me. People started chanting Jerome’s name, Jaa-ROME, Jaa-ROME, Jaa-ROME, and he brought the spectacle to a climactic finale, freezing in a handstand and then scissoring his legs into a brief spin on his head.

Jerome bowed and people applauded like the best slow dance ever had just concluded. There was an expectant pause. The empty circle held its space while everyone hoped that someone else, that is, another person besides themselves, would jump into the middle and provide additional entertainment.

Eventually someone did.

Me.