Lone Star

“No, I’m fine.” She patted Chloe. “It’s all good.”

“You look beautiful.”

“You too. Very va-va-voom.” Hannah sighed. “He’s threatened suicide, you know.”

“Who?”

“Martyn, of course. Says he can’t handle it. What am I going to do? How am I going to go to UMaine, knowing I’ll run into him?”

“I don’t know,” Chloe replied, a little too loudly and brightly, as if delighted by the possibility that Hannah might consider not going to UMaine.

“Maybe I should just join the Peace Corps.”

“What?”

“Why not? I’m an idealistic young person. I’d like to visit Ecuador. They travel all the time. I’d meet new people. Experience different cultures.”

“Um, are you selfless and unobtrusive?”

“Yes.”

“You know they don’t get paid, right? They’re volunteers. It’s not like joining the army.”

“I won’t need any money. I’ll be in Ecuador.” Hannah’s long arms draped over Chloe’s neck. She smelled of Dior Poison. It drowned out Chloe’s gentle musky scent. Chloe patted Hannah’s bare back. She could feel the blades of her shoulders, like wooden fence boards.

“The Peace Corps has been in the news lately,” Chloe said. “And not in a positive light. They may have forgotten their initial objectives.”

Hannah chuckled, pulled Chloe closer, ran her hand over Chloe’s hair. “Silly girl,” she said. “I love how you’re always trying to talk me out of bad choices. Don’t worry, cutie. I’m not serious about the Peace Corps. Besides, I can’t not go to UMaine. I’d never leave you there by your lonesome. So don’t worry. You want to go find our boys?”

A pasted-on smile greeted Hannah when the girls disengaged. “Cheer up,” Hannah said as the girls made their way through the taffeta and satin jungle, searching for their dates. “Like you said, we’re not Darlene Duranceau. Everything’s still ahead of us.”

They got separated. Chloe remained at the edge of the pulsing, strobe-lighting floor. Somewhere on the other side of the ballroom, near white walls and glass doors, reflected in black windows and royal mirrors, Chloe glimpsed Mason, his spiky hair, smiling mouth, delight, bow tie, surrounded by a flurry of shiny silk snowflakes, a lake of reflected satin and soft flesh. In other words, encircled by the cheer squad, blonde hair and soprano giggles all. They were trying to ensnare him in their ribald karaoke routine. In the strobes Mason was being girl-handled, teased, laughed at, pawed. It all throbbed across in fractions of real time, two seconds of black followed by a neon explosion. Chloe couldn’t even be sure it was him. It could have been nothing more than a flash of athletic-field memory. After school, she sits in the bleachers and does her homework, while on the field Mason pitches and flirts with the flirty girls. But mostly he pitches, and mostly Chloe reads, and it’s only for a fraction of an image between blinks and pages that Chloe thinks, is there something there or is it just adolescent fun? She barely even thinks it. She feels it, and in only two or three beats out of a whole minute of her heart.

“Chloe,” a voice says. She blinks and comes to.

Blake was in front of her, smiling, appraising her with his familiar eyes, soaking up her shiny baubles, glittering beads, perhaps other luscious things.

“Have you seen Hannah?”

“She’s looking for you. Seen Mason?”

“He was over there.” Blake waved to the glassy parquet. David Bowie started up. Almost involuntarily their bodies moved up and down and sideways to the pulsing one-TWO, one-TWO of “Let’s Dance.”

As they were already gyrating, they gyrated toward each other, looking around for Hannah, for Mason, Chloe trying to make her breasts bob less (not easy) and make her tacked-on smile less uncomfortable. Her ears ringing like the bells of Notre Dame, Chloe wished she could check her watch. David Bowie was so loud. Oh my God, she thought, am I really that old? Is David Bowie too loud for me at seventeen? Let’s dance.

Maroon 5 came on, kinder, softer, better, lights flashing, bodies inching closer, and she and Blake inched reluctantly closer with apologetic smiles. Sorry there’s no one else to dance with to Adam Levine, their awkward expressions read. Then he opened his arms. She raised hers and stepped up to the Blakeplate. Placing one hand into his, she rested the other on his large tuxy shoulder. She felt the pressure of his palm low around her waist, felt his open fingers not just resting against the back of her flapper dress, but holding her.

“Look, I shaved,” he said into her ear. “Do you see?”

She saw.

“Do you like it better like this, or normal?”

What was the thing to say here? “Either way’s fine.”

“Do you know this song?”

“What?”

He leaned down, toward her, close. “This song, Chloe,” he screamed into her perforated eardrum. “‘She Will Be Loved.’ Do you remember it?”

She knew it well. Everybody knew it. The boys and girls sang it as they played volleyball in gym, as they ran up and down the stairs, as they spring-cleaned the front lawn for field day, as they devoured their sandwiches at lunch. They sang it, they knew it. “She Will Be Loved.” She pretended she didn’t hear him or that it was too loud to reply that of course she remembered it. She nodded in the general direction of his shaggy curly head.

“Are you excited!?”

“About what?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been as psyched about anything in my whole life. Riga! Vilnius! Warsaw!”

And Barcelona, she wanted to add to his litany of paradise, but there was no point—he wouldn’t hear her. She tried to catch the floating threads of his voice. He was repeating his avid approval of her idea last week that they should each keep a journal in Europe and at the end of the trip share them with one another. At least, that’s what she thought he was saying. The music was so relentless. Where was the prom queen who didn’t belong to him? He searched for the eighteen-year-old every day for miles. Your dress is pretty, Blake might have said. Very sparkly. You and Mason light up the floor.

“What did you say?” she yelled. Her heart was full.

“You smell so good,” he said, his head near her perfumed earlobes. “What is that?”

“Jovan Musk,” she yelled back. “And Love’s Baby Soft!”

Where was Mason? She flew across the bodies, searching for this mysterious Mason, and found him entombed in a bevy of loathsome beauties dazzling him with their best cheer moves. Come hither, said the spiders to the fly.

“He’s not happy,” Blake yelled, warm breath in her face, his eyes merry. “No boy likes that kind of attention. Makes him feel like a hog at a fair.”

In a moment of swoony weakness, Chloe leaned her cheek against Blake’s black lapel. His big hand tightened around hers. His palm opened wider against her back.

She caught herself, and blessedly “She Will Be Loved” ended.

In silence the four of them chased dreams with time to lose in the empty ballroom. They were the last to leave. The overhead lights had been switched on. “A Hundred Years to Live” turned off in sync with the honk of Mackenzie’s dad’s rickety Buick. The waitresses were clearing the last of the teacups and the janitors were dragging black trash cans around. Most of the white balloons had run out of helium and floated down to the floor in tired gasps.

Chloe watched a red balloon twitching under a table. She and Mason didn’t win. Was he disappointed? He didn’t say. But he also didn’t say something corny like, don’t worry, you’re still my queen. He wasn’t a corny guy. Chloe appreciated that. Mackenzie had invited them all to her house for an after-prom sleepover. They didn’t go. Chloe wasn’t allowed, and Hannah didn’t want to. Go if you want, Chloe had said to Mason. I won’t mind. Are you sure? he asked. The briefest of glares from Blake interrupted him. Mason’s just kidding, Blake said. Yes, I am, said Mason. And now here they all were.

“They’re going to throw us out.”

Hannah, wrapped around Blake, her head thrown back, looked up at the lights. “Let them try.”

Mason was next to Chloe. He was perspiring, and his bow tie had come undone. His tux jacket off, his hair wet from dancing, still slightly out of breath, he sat glazed, staring across the deserted dance floor, squeezing and unsqueezing Chloe’s hand. He was staring into the space by the wall where a short while ago he had been flanked and fondled by smiling shining soon-to-be-extinct nimble-bodied cheer queens.

Only Blake remained fully animated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he sang, yeah, yeah, yeah.

“I don’t know what you’re so happy about,” Mason said to him. “Once high school’s over, our life as we know it is over. Everything familiar slides across the floor, out those double doors, and vanishes.”