sitting too close. No public displays of affection, go dance, but respectably. Are you finished with your dinner? You haven’t touched your steak, your mother and father will be pleased to see their hard-earned money going into the garbage. Fix the straps on your dress, young lady, Miss Divine, your dress is riding inappropriately low. Miss Divine, I’ll thank you to keep your hands on the table, not on your boyfriend’s lap. Mr. Haul, please remove your paws from your date’s bare back. Miss Gramm, do you have a shawl you can throw on? You look cold. Miss Divine, do you have a shawl you can throw on? Mason, honey, you look wonderful tonight. As you were, dear boy. As you were.
Although the occasion was jolly, Hannah seemed less jolly than usual. When they had a minute to themselves on the dance floor, Chloe pulled Hannah close. Keith Urban’s “You’ll Think of Me” was playing.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said to her friend.
“Nothing. Why? Do I seem off?”
“Little bit.”
“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
