“Yes, I remember, dear, but the excitement lingers. Or it should,” he said. “Let’s have something linger. I’m not going to be the one to say on whom youth is wasted.”
“My parents have got the same thing, Mr. Barnes. You’re not getting through to us. Not to worry. Nobody’s getting through to us. We’re kids.” Stephanie’s mother lined the teenagers up every way she could and took a dozen flash photographs.
“Where are you going for dinner?” she asked.
“Probably the Tropical,” Wade said. “It’s a big night.”
The homecoming dance was held in the Oakpine gymnasium, and the senior boosters, twenty juniors and seniors who wore their sweater vests every Thursday, had titled it Flames of Fall and colored leaves were the theme. In the eight thousand shadows of the two thousand leaves hung in the nylon netting over the room, Larry danced with Stephanie Barnes, stepping through the spotted pools of rolling lights, blue and green and red and yellow. They were fairly comfortable—that is, they moved without touching and mostly in time with the music—and they did not stick out from the crowd of dancing teenagers, all dressed up in the high middle of the evening. Immediately after they’d started dancing, Stephanie did a funny thing. She took his hand and pulled him out to the rear stairway and put her fingers on his cheek and made it clear he should kiss her, and he bent and they kissed. “I wanted that out of the way, Larry. Many thanks. I missed your mouth out there on the field. We’ve never kissed, have we?”
“Just this once,” he said. “And now twice.” He put his arms delicately around her bare shoulders and kissed her again. “It’s surprising to be so good at it.” She took his arm in both of hers, and they walked back into the dark dappled gym.
“Where’d you go?” Wade asked them.
“We had some housekeeping,” Larry said, and they began again to dance. Couples and clusters of friends drifted by and put their hands on Larry’s arm and shoulders and said things about the game and greeted Stephanie. She was number one in their class, having always been number one, and president of the Student Tutor Society. She was the only girl in AP physics and AP chemistry. Tonight she had her bright brown hair pinned back, and she wore a green satin dress. She smiled as she danced, catching Larry’s eye from time to time, her old friend from every single grade in school. It was the night of the year when the boys at Oakpine High School saw more cleavage than any other night, and Stephanie Barnes, who’d had famous breasts since seventh grade, was a big part of that viewing.
Wendy and Wade danced nearby, Wendy in a conservative black dress with spaghetti straps but a high front. Wade danced as if he were hearing sudden noises from afar, but Wendy was the smoothest dancer in the room.
Stephanie’s face was bright, and her look made him ask, “What is it, Miss Barnes?”
She put her mouth against his ear and said, “Perhaps you could help me with something else.”
“Perhaps,” he said. Larry’s head was empty; he was thoughtless in the bottom of this speckled pool, his arm on Stephanie and then away and then her arms on him turning or meeting or touching as they danced. An hour into the affair, when the disk jockey changed tunes, Wade stepped across Larry and took Stephanie Barnes’s hand for the next dance.
The charge had been up ever since Larry squeezed in the front seat of the double cab pickup with Wade and Wendy, but now Larry was in new territory. Something had been at him all day. He had never thought before about how people had different motives for things, different from his. He saw the way Wade treated Wendy now as different than he’d seen it before. He knew their public side, and the three of them did a lot of things together, like kids, but something in Larry now allowed him to see further, and this disturbed him in a way that he’d been expecting. These new ideas made Larry feel slow and obvious, and now with his body buzzing after the game and his ribs glowing, and knowing how Stephanie felt in his arms, he held Wendy and felt powerfully, oddly jealous. I’m too late to be having so many thoughts for the first time. Was he like Wade and just waking to it? He knew in the quiet center of his heart that he wanted Wendy too, and now he was dancing with her. He’d known her for six years, and they were easy together. The song was something half slow, and half of the kids in the dark, gleaming gym elected to dance fast, but Larry took Wendy in his arms, and with her right hand in his left, he stepped with the spaced beat of the music.