Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“It’s cry,” she said now. She raised her cheek so it grazed his neck.

“Cry?”

“It’s where eagles cry. Not fly. No one even notices. The grad committee decided the real words were too sad for the theme, so they changed them. Cry. She plagiarized half the song in her speech.”

“She did?”

“The road is long, there are mountains in our way, but we climb steps every day.” Blah blah blah. You didn’t notice that?” Gracie said this as if being slightly stupid were a lovable trait in Wayne. She touched his jawline and moved her hand across it; he felt the pad of flesh between his testicle and anus tighten and loosen. He remembered she had told him, during spin the bottle in grade seven, how she had been kissing lots of boys since she was four. The peaks at the top of her lips were still sharp, and the scoop between them still had three little freckles, stars behind the mountains.

“You have aftershave on.” She took a hungry little sniff. “Let’s go out behind the school and drink the brandy.”

Parents and some teachers had volunteered as chaperones, but they weren’t in gear yet. They were still talking to each other, eating date squares, and fixing balloons that had come unmoored from their Scotch tape. Some male teachers were dancing with bolder girls who were on the volleyball team or the grad committee and who had been teasing the teachers about this dance for months.

“How did she get her hair like that?” Wayne asked, as Donna Palliser twirled past in the arms of Mr. Ollerhead, who looked flattered and dazed. Donna’s hair had new platinum curls, lifted above a sheen of combed hair that followed her head like the pelt of a seal. “How do the curls stay there, and what makes them so fat?”

“It’s a hairpiece. She got it done at Details and Designs in Goose Bay. She had to sleep in it last night.”

“How?”

“You use two pillows and an empty Javex bottle. You have to make a kind of mould and sleep in it, and you can’t move all night.”

Wayne looked at Gracie’s home-styled curls, pulled on top of her head too, but without the mould, the lacquer, or the Sun-In spray.

“Do you like hers better?”

“It’s pretty artificial looking.”

“But do you like it?”

Wayne admired it because it was the pinnacle of what all the girls in the room were trying to achieve, but his admiration held no affection, no desire, no longing. “It looks a bit like something out of a fifties movie.”

“She’d love to hear you say that. Which one? Elvis, Gidget, or the Beach Boys… what?”

Wally Michelin had entered the gym with Tim McPhail, in her satin gown. Wayne saw now that it was longer than the short dresses, but shorter than the lemon meringue confection of Donna Palliser. Wally’s dress came just past her knees, and on its sleeveless shoulder she wore one white rose. Tim McPhail had not ordered his tux from Eunice, Wayne saw that right away. His had thin satin lapels, and his cummerbund matched Wally’s rose.

“Oh.” Gracie stood deflated, looking at Wayne watching the couple, who appeared to float though they were not yet dancing. Joe Cocker ended and Rodney Montague segued into Kenny Loggins and Stevie Wonder. Gracie danced half-heartedly, then told Wayne she had to go to the washroom. When she came back out, she looked fiercer. She led him out the fire exit, which was propped open with a chair. They stood among thistles. She swigged the brandy and handed it to him. What was Rodney playing now? The bass thumped under the muffled melody and a voice wailed out. Bowie. Wayne sat in the thistles. The air was fresh out here, the stars familiar yet distant.

“What’s so interesting about Wally Michelin anyway? She never so much as opens her mouth. Are you going to put your jacket down for me?”

“My jacket?”

“So I can sit too. Why would you want her?”

He took the jacket off and she arranged her dress so it fell inside the jacket’s lining and not on the ground. He leaned against the wall. He had not realized how rough bricks are. They snagged his shirt every time he lifted the flask. What he wanted, though he did not say this to Gracie, was to talk to Wally, for ever and ever.

“I don’t want her.”

“You sure looked like you wanted her. You looked like you wanted to run over there like a little dog and sit in her lap and lick her hand.”

“I didn’t want that.”

“Do you want to slow dance with her?”

Maybe that would be the thing. Not to feel Wally Michelin’s body heat the way he’d felt with Gracie. Not that. But if he could have one slow dance with Wally Michelin, it would break the silence. He knew now, from dancing with Gracie, you could say anything you wanted when you were that close. The normal restraint that made you keep things private was gone for the few minutes of the song; that’s what music did, with the darkness and the closeness. If he could get that close to Wally Michelin, for one dance: that’s what a dance was, he saw. It was to get the two of you in your own world. You could make that world anything you wanted. You could make it as far from here as possible, yet to the rest of the room you would look as if you were still here. They would have no idea where the two of you had gone.

He could hear Black River now, closer than the sound of Bowie or Billy Ocean or Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Black River flowed behind the school and along the base of the Mealy Mountains. It went miles through birches and black spruce, and stayed small the whole way. He had often seen a leaf float down Black River without breaking the surface tension, and his mind had floated with it until the leaf went out of sight. Now the river’s sound was enticing: moving away from here on a journey, small and intimate, never-ending. That’s what the dance with Wally Michelin would be like, only shorter, unfortunately. A feeling of mystery and going forward with more than just your body. Underground streams feeding your mind. You’d ask questions and get lost together.

“What are you hoping to get with her? That you couldn’t have with me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know something or you wouldn’t be thinking it. I can feel you thinking it.” She undid his top buttons and laid her hand on that place over his heart that calmed everything. It was amazing how her hand knew the spot. She gave him more brandy. He swallowed a mouthful and its heat flowed to where her hand stayed, so he was warmed from inside and out.

He tried to explain. “Remember the last poem we did in English?”

“The one nobody had a clue what it meant?”

“By John Donne.” Brent Shiwack had complained that the word sublunary wasn’t even in the dictionary. But it had been. Wayne had looked it up. “Dull, sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense…”

“Wayne?”

“Yeah?”

“Those are words, right? A poem.”

“Yeah?”

“By some dead guy. Can’t you feel my hand?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you feel this?” She touched his jaw, his hipbone. She didn’t go for the centre of him right away but found places she knew would call to that centre and wake it. He resisted and she said, “I don’t want to go all the way, you know. If that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not stupid.”

It was June and there was still snow on the Mealy Mountains. The wind blew over the snow before it came down here, and his shirt was thin. The alcohol had got to him too. This whole thing wasn’t what he wanted. The cold, the thistles. His teeth started to chatter.

“I have to pee.”

“Here.” She took something out of her dress and he was terrified it was a condom, but it was a pack of Sen-Sens. “Don’t let Mr. Ollerhead smell your breath. I’m going to use the bathroom too.”