She has been standing against the gymnasium wall for forty minutes now, this girl in the green dress, one sneaker turned inward, arms crossed like she is holding her own ribs in place. She thinks tonight is a disaster. I know the exact weight of that thinking, the way it sits behind the sternum like a swallowed stone.
If I could, I would tell her what I see. I see a room strung with paper streamers that someone taped up crooked and nobody fixed, and the crookedness is perfect. I see the boys clustered on the far side laughing too hard at nothing, sweating through their good shirts, terrified. I see a slow song start and forty children pretend at once to be very interested in the snack table.
Oh, the snack table. Warm off-brand soda in paper cups. A bowl of pretzels going soft in the humidity of two hundred nervous bodies. She will not remember the pretzels. She does not know yet that this is a thing you can lose, the taste of a bad pretzel in a hot gym, the sugar buzzing on your tongue.
Then it happens. Someone she barely knows grabs her wrist and pulls her into the crowd, and she goes, protesting, and for one song she is jumping and shrieking and out of breath, her whole body loud and hers and here.
That. That right there. The sticky floor, the ache in the arches of her feet, the way her laugh cracks. She would give it back if she could, trade it for being cooler, being elsewhere.
Stay, little one. Stay in the noise and the bad music and the borrowed courage. Let your feet hurt.
Let them hurt a long, long time.