I came in the propped door with the smell of cut grass still on me and hit a wall of body spray so thick I nearly turned solid. They have folded the room in on itself, this place that echoes with sneakers most days, and dimmed it, and strung little lights that spin colors across four hundred faces trying very hard to hold still.
Nobody is dancing. That is the part I keep circling back to, and I do circle, I have to, I cannot stand at the edge the way they do, boys clumped against one wall like coats on a hook, girls in a knot near the other, both sides guarding a floor of empty gymnasium between them as though it were a river neither will cross.
I lifted the hem of one girl's dress an inch and she smoothed it down fast, checking, checking. I carried the smell of another's nervous sweat across the whole gulf to a boy who did not know it was hers and would have died to learn it.
They hold themselves so carefully. Arms crossed, hands pocketed, everything pulled in tight against the terror that someone might see them move wrong. I could show them. I move wrong constantly. I have never once landed where I meant to.
I slipped a slow song under the door and out into the parking lot, where a mother waited in a warm car, and I set the bassline trembling against her windshield so she could feel, faintly, the enormous careful stillness her child was surviving in there. Then the door banged shut behind some latecomer, and I was already gone, out over the fields, carrying one strand of somebody's hair I lifted off a neck and never gave back.