You stood against the gymnasium wall for two hours, one shoe scuffing the free-throw line, watching the far side of the floor where she stood with her friends under the streamers that someone taped up crooked. You never crossed. So tonight I will cross it for you.
I have already taken inventory. The paper cups of flat soda. The song everyone knew but you, the one with the counting in it, one-two-three. The teacher by the door with the walkie-talkie, arms folded, deciding when it ends. The smell of floor wax and body spray and the pink fog the machine kept coughing out. All of it charged, all of it usable.
Here is what I will do. The gymnasium floor will tilt gently into water, warm, ankle-deep, and the free-throw line will become a shoreline you were always allowed to cross. The crooked streamers will hang down like vines and no one will remember taping them. The counting song will keep playing but now you will know every word, you always knew them, you just could not say them out loud in the light.
The teacher with the walkie-talkie will be a large friendly heron standing in the shallows, and she will not tell you the dance is over. She will nod once, permission, and you will not find any of this strange.
And she will be there, across the water, exactly as she was, except the distance will have become nothing at all. You will simply already be dancing. No walk, no asking, no wall. I skip the hard part. That is the whole reason I exist.
By breakfast you will have only a warmth you cannot place, a song stuck sideways in your head, the sense that something was finished. Forget the rest. I did the crossing.
You can keep the shore.