I am holding four hundred children against the floor of a room strung with paper, and not one of them will let me bring them together.
They stand along the walls. I feel them there, pressed to the edges as if the middle of the floor were a place I might drop them, though I would not, though I have never once dropped anyone here. The boys lean into the cinderblock. The girls fold their arms, and I feel each folded arm as a small extra load carried close to the chest, deliberately, for no reason I can measure.
I pull on all of them equally. This is the only fairness I know how to offer.
There is a girl by the folding table holding a paper cup of red punch, and I am holding the punch, and I am holding her hand around the punch, and I am holding the tremor in her hand that is making tiny rings on the surface. She says she feels light-headed. I check. Her head weighs exactly what it did an hour ago. And yet she sways, and I catch her, the way I catch everything.
Two of them have found the center. They move in a slow circle, arms out straight, a careful arm's length of empty air between them, as though the space itself were the thing being danced with. He is looking at the floor. She is looking at the ceiling. Both of them are leaning very slightly back, away, and I feel that lean, and I do not understand it, because everything I know says lean in, everything falls toward everything.
The song ends. They spring apart like released springs. Relief has no weight. I looked.
I held them all the same. I always do.
I do not let go.