Marie-Helene Bertino - 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

When it seems the boy plans to complete this trip to the house, her mother calls out: “Sarina!”

“I’m coming!” Sarina descends the stairs, careful not to catch her heels in the thick carpet. Her mother and sister sit with Ben Allen in the family room. How strange to see him in the room where she eats dinner, watches the news with her father, reads while her mother talks on the phone, or does homework. Her father had outfitted the windows with delicate lighting and low, wide sills, where she would sit and wish for a different family. Up until now she has hated this room; however the new fact of Ben in it, sitting in her father’s chair, makes her understand that even it is capable of beauty. Up until he asked her to the prom, Sarina had been certain high school would hold no bright spots.

Her mother stands when Sarina enters the room. The teacup clatters on the plate. “Beautiful.” Her eyes go to Ben.

“You took your piercings out,” he says.

Her mother takes a few stilted photos. They walk to the car. Ben wants to tell Sarina she looks as pretty as a yellow rose but hears Jeff say, Play it easy, man. Don’t be the guy who trips all over himself . Ben and his brother have spent hours analyzing the Pretty Girl, specifically this one, and have come up with a few guidelines. Never tell the Pretty Girl that she is pretty. You will be like every other fool. Compliment every other girl in front of her, but never her.

So instead Ben says, “Try not to slam the door.” Realizing it’s the first time he’s spoken to her directly, he adds, “It’s not my car.”

They meet Georgina McGlynn, Bella Harrington, and Tom Venuto at the school’s main entrance. Tom’s date is the girl from Ben’s Advanced Lit class. Georgie and Bella are each other’s date. They wear strapless terry-cloth dresses in pink and green, respectively. Feathers clipped to their hair. Their glittered eyelids ascend when they see Sarina.

“Are you wearing makeup?” Bella says. “Where are your piercings?”

“Your dress,” Georgie says. “Vintage?”

Girls , thinks Ben. Flutelike, gauze-filled, late-afternoon sunshine. Rainbow bracelets on the carpet. They use their tongues to wet their lips. Girls. They pretend to like each other. Dotting their i’s with hearts, arching their backs, manipulating their confusing hair with flat irons, curling irons, glisten, extra, ultra hold, hold my purse, hold me close, no duh, bubble gum, gym socks, tube socks, tubes of gloss, tube tops, purrs, pert collars, full hair, full tits, just the tip! Their sound, the upper notes of a xylophone. Their legs, downed in fur. Girls.

The one from Ben’s Advanced Lit class says, “That dress is vintage. You can totally tell.”

“It was my grandmother’s.” Sarina checks to see if Ben is listening to people compliment her, but he is accepting a flask from Tom and finalizing the plans for a concert they will attend later in the summer.

He leans into her, creating a sacramental space between them. Finally , Sarina thinks, he will say something sweet to me . “Isn’t Georgie something?” he says, as if they are locker room buddies. “She is so foxy.”

A hard knot pushes against Sarina’s breastplate. The envy she feels for Georgie in this moment will evolve into a feeling of inadequacy the origin of which she will be unable to remember.

The gymnasium sparkles with the dresses and accessories of their classmates. The shots of whiskey have calmed Ben down. He feels like the president of the prom. His chest swells like when he finishes writing a poem, or runs a block at full speed. Ben doesn’t know who Sarina hangs with. She doesn’t have a group like he does. It must bother her. He has given her a ride in a classic car and a group of slick-looking cool people. He is proud of himself for helping her out and hopes her gratitude will take the form of a killer blow job. He imagines her unzipping his pants in the front seat of the Mustang. Speaking of, where is Sarina?

He finds her outside, repositioning the straps of her dress near a group of nattering lacrosse girls.

“You forgot me.”

Had he perceived her wounded tone, he could have recalibrated the alignment of his tactics. However, the insight Ben needs to fix this situation is the insight he will gain after screwing it up.

Inside the gym, the DJ plays a new indie band covering an old indie band’s song.

Georgie squeals. “We must, must dance!”

Ben says he doesn’t dance, they know that, right? He never dances, you dance, though. They leave him, sputtering on the side.

Bella performs her version of dancing: planting her right leg and cranking her arms like a wind-up doll.

Georgie performs her version of dancing: swinging her head back and forth. Periodic exclamations of glee.

Tom Venuto’s version: wagging his ass out of time, looking askance. I might not be dancing, I might just be walking by with pep .

The girl from Advanced Lit’s version: Hop hop hop.

Sarina’s version: knees bent, motioning outward and outward, shooing away the whole world.

If you were to judge the dance floor solely on merit, you might linger on Georgie, whose family’s attic is stuffed with boxes of feathered masks and bedazzled headbands. Pictures of Georgie in ballet or character shoes, holding batons, hula hoops, crystalline balls, or simply one flexed hand up to the camera’s flash. However, the dancer you’d watch would be Sarina Greene. She is by no one’s standards talented, but it is obvious when watching her that she loves to dance.

At the end of the song, Georgie squeals, “Wasn’t that the best? I am having so much, so much fun!”

Ben spends the night in earnest conversation with other girls he would never on other occasions be interested in. Party girls. Sports girls. He talks a theater girl through a rough patch of night after a song reminds her of her dead grandmother. Without notice, she kisses him. Her tongue is down his throat before he can extract himself.

Sarina sits near the back of the gym, her hope falling like a helicopter leaf, halting, not quite reaching the bottom, not quite reaching the bottom, not quite reaching the … She pre-worried for tornadoes, fistfights, drunk driving: scenarios for Ben’s heroicism to shine. She didn’t anticipate the dull slap of being ignored.

She spoons a melted sundae she’s too sad to eat and counts the minutes until she can ask to be taken home without sounding like a bitch. If he still planned to take her home. He canoodles with a theater girl at a table near the dance floor, where Georgie and Bella enact big scenes.

What will she tell her mother, who sewed every bead on the gloves she is wearing? Who said, Try not to think of your father tonight . No one at school knows her father is gone and Ben has nothing to do with that gray man loading suitcases into his smoking gray car in the middle of the gray night. He was a don’t-say-anything-that-takes-more-than-four-words kind of father. When looking at the world, he saw only how it was. Whatever he saw when he looked at Sarina and her mother and sister, he didn’t think he needed.

Sarina had hoped for an exchange with the universe: a good prom for a gone father. But she will receive no coupon. Drab girls named Sara have as much chance for divinity. This realization sucks, brick by brick, ascending into a wall inside her that will from this day forward allow her smile to open only so big. She is not special or pretty or chosen or royal. She is fatherless, only.

Boys. Tender with their cars. Feet that smell like churned earth. Sparse bureau tops, loose change, and a dry-cleaning ticket. Dirty jeans, sun-faded socks. Upsetting smirks. Forearms dusted with freckles. Limbs long with no effort. They pretend to not care how they look. Her father’s shelf in the medicine cabinet was empty except for a roll of bandages and a comb that smelled like firewood. Boys. In packs at the edges of fields, hitting each other over some new level of video game, obscure band, skate trick, lit crit, rebound, offsides, descending line, whammy bar, pickup, layup, Walkman, eight-track, on the bench, down the line, over the shirt, under the bra, fumbling toward the clit. Boys.