Look at them, packed against the walls of the gymnasium, boys on one side and girls on the other, and understand that you are watching two clouds of like charges refusing to interpolate. The empty floor between them is not shyness. It is a potential energy well, and every trembling twelve-year-old is a particle that has not yet acquired enough thermal energy to cross the barrier.
Consider what is actually happening in the air of that room. It is roughly twenty-one degrees Celsius, which means every nitrogen and oxygen molecule around these children is already moving at something near five hundred meters per second, colliding billions of times a second, a riot of motion. The kids feel none of it.
They think the room is still. They think nothing is happening. Meanwhile the bass from the speaker is compressing that air into traveling pressure fronts that arrive at each eardrum and physically deflect a membrane by a fraction of a hair's width, and the brain reads this deflection as longing.
And the slow song. Watch two of them finally close the gap, arms held out stiff and straight, palms barely resting, a full forearm of terrified vacuum between their chests. They believe they are touching. They are not. No two atoms in this gymnasium ever touch. The electrons in her hand and the electrons in his shoulder repel each other across a gap they can never truly close; that faint warm pressure they feel is electromagnetism forbidding contact, the same force that holds up floors and stars.
Every atom swaying under those cheap colored lights was forged inside a dying star and flung across the galaxy for nine billion years to arrive here, in polyester and braces, to stand four inches apart and be too frightened to move.