Last Dance

by Caroline B. Cooney

  And even as he turned to run for the phones, and Kip flung open the kitchen door and ran with the first bucket of water to the fire, the fire crawled up another tree and licked branches that reached into the woods.

  Molly stared at the kids in the ballroom.

  Oh, it reminded her of so many other dances.

  As always, the girls seemed to be at one event, and the boys seemed to be at another one entirely.

  Girls had spent hours, weeks even, getting ready for this. They had shopped for dresses, made hair appointments, worried about the color of their shoes dyed to match their dresses.

  Boys, however, had simply shown up. As usual there were a dozen boys who simply refused to dance at all, even slow dances, so their dates had the questionable privilege of being at a dance where they never got out on the floor. One of those girls was Roxanne, a wonderful gymnast, a terrific jazz dancer, who looked incredible in a tight shimmery short dress made to show off long legs and graceful moves. Her date was so unwilling to dance that he wouldn’t even leave the tables where the food was spread.

  Roxanne had begun dancing alone, and the rest of the girls in that position had joined her. This seemed to make the boys very happy: no longer guilty about not dancing, they could stand with a bunch of other boys and talk about what they would do on Sunday, which would be a good day, as opposed to Saturday night, which was a dance and therefore boring.

  Molly gave some thought as to which group she would join.

  The boys?

  Molly was always ready to join boys.

  But Molly was always ready to dance, too, and like the girls on the dance floor, she lacked a partner.

  Molly’s feet tapped. Molly’s hips swayed. Molly’s shoulders moved, and her hair swung lightly with the music. It was the girls she joined.

  She lost herself in the dance.

  Hypnotized by her own rhythms, Molly stamped and whirled and slid and reached. Half the time she had her eyes closed. They danced fast and hard, and the band, thrilled that finally somebody was out there living it up, played faster and harder and they spun like cars around a race track, endlessly circling, and loving every minute.

  A hose was found down by the rose garden. The waiter assigned to that chore unscrewed the hose and carried the whole awkward roll of it up the path and over the croquet court.

  The fire actually seemed to know that trees arched above it: that if it could just shift a few yards into the woods, it could climb—climb an entire mountain! Swallow a whole resort!

  The wind played in the leaves as if teasing the fire to join its dance, high up there, out of reach, out of control.

  The people below prayed for the wind to drop.

  If anything, the wind picked up, and fire grew gold fingers, orange at the tips, like a witch’s hands.

  Swirling as the wind swirled, the fire went west, stretching for the forest. It consumed everything in its reach. It cooked. It grilled. It baked.

  It spread.

  Lee and the busboy dropped two heavy wool blankets down where the fire was low, not raging. He wasn’t afraid of it, yet.

  He had a sense that it was a tie score so far: Kip’s team could win at this stage.

  The chef assigned to call the fire department raced across the lawn to report to Kip that they were on their way.

  Two waiters turned on the ground sprinklers to keep the Inn side of the fire wet and safe.

  Lee was standing right over one sprinkler when it went on. A gentle spray of water climbed up his legs and filled his shoes. Somehow it was an all too familiar feeling.

  Second time tonight I’ve been drenched, he thought. He turned to share the joke with Kip, but she was far too busy to notice or to care.

  Lee thought, This woman is amazing. I have never seen authority and leadership like this.

  Fearless, too.

  She gave orders calmly, so that while the waiters jumped into activity, they were also steadied by Kip’s purpose; nobody was frightened, nobody was wasting time, nobody except me is just standing here.

  Kip said, “Lee, the hose isn’t going to do it, and there’s only the one water hook-up here. We’ve got to organize a bucket brigade from the kitchen.” She turned to the rest. “You! You! You!” And beckoning them to come after her, she ran back to the kitchen and they followed, Lee among them.

  Lee thought he had not met a girl before who could do this.

  In fact, he didn’t know if he’d met anybody before who could.

  Marshaling her workers like an army, he thought. She should go to the Naval Academy, or West Point. She has what it takes.

  He started to tell her that he had decided on the perfect future for her, but it was definitely the wrong time. Kip simply put a spaghetti cooker in his hands and a lobster cooker in the next guy’s arms. It would be a long brigade. There was a long, long stretch of wet grass to hand the buckets down.

  Kip put the assistant cook in charge of that and sent Lee to the ballroom to get the rest of the kids.

  “Me?” Lee asked dubiously. He didn’t know these kids, the band was playing very loudly, everybody was happily dancing—how would he break into this and—

  Kip shrugged and ran to get them herself. The important thing was to cause no panic, but to get them working quickly—get the fire stopped.

  She was in the ballroom in ten seconds and stopped the band short in one more. She simply held one flat hand up to them and took away the mike in the singer’s hand.

  Nobody argued with Kip.

  But then, nobody ever had.

  Not successfully anyway.

  Fire.

  The word was both terrifying and exciting.

  Fire.

  There were those who shrank and those who jumped up.

  Fire.

  Matt, working on this third enormous sandwich, was one who was rather delighted. From the time he was a toddler, he had always wanted to be a fireman. Matt was first through the doors, and the sight of the fire stopped him short.

  He had expected some little piddly grass fire: a little smoke, a few charred embers.

  This fire—it was a real fire.

  Flames taller than he was.

  All the colors of fire: hot red, orange, yellow, gold, even white.

  The colors of destruction and death.

  Matt began running again almost the same moment he stopped, with the result that he stumbled and Kip caught up to him. “Bucket brigade,” she gasped. “You be on the fire end. At this stage I think we can douse the actual fire.”

  Whew, Matt thought.

  He was not at all sure they could put the fire out. If he had been in charge he would have opted to wet down the surrounding area, and hope the fire would burn itself out once it used up what it was eating now.

  But he was not in charge. Kip was, and he obeyed her.

  In the girls’ room Pammy gave up and wandered off. Anne and Emily sighed simultaneously and rolled their eyes at each other.

  “I’m grateful to her, though,” Emily said.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Well, she made it all normal again. I was feeling as if I had fallen off the edge, and nothing about life was average, and everything in life was overwhelming. But life is really just old Pammy being a pain, and running out of Kleenex, and wondering how Matt is doing.”

  Anne grinned.

  They fixed each other’s hair, taking a serene pleasure in making their exteriors smooth, no matter how chaotic their insides might be.

  The door opened and they winced, expecting to be interrupted again by a Pammy type, and feeling, unfairly, that they should be allowed to have the girls’ room to themselves for an hour or two of peace.

  But it wasn’t a Pammy type.

  Not at all.

  Gary got up to the fire first, and Kip stuck a scrub bucket in his hand and a spaghetti pot in Con’s.

  Gary was a relatively relaxed person, but having to search for the body of his girlfriend—and now to find instead an empty scrub bucket
in his hands and a fire raging where he had expected to see Beth’s body on a stretcher—Gary just stood there.

  “Run the bucket back to the beginning of the line, Gary,” Kip said.

  The next bucket was passed down, flung on the fire by Matt, and tossed to Gary, so that now he held two of them.

  Gary stared at the buckets, and then at Kip.

  Irritated by his slowness, Kip said, “Move it, Gary. The wind is picking up. Either we get the fire now, or it gets away from us.” She gave him a gentle push toward the Inn.

  “Kip, Beth Rose is missing. I think she might have fallen off the cliff path.”

  Lee, in line now next to Matt, saw that Gary said this as if expecting Kip to solve it. Gary, who had defeated him in wrestling matches, standing there asking Kip what to do?

  “Might have?” Kip repeated. “Did she scream? Did you hear her fall?”

  Lee marveled that Kip could switch gears from the fire to interrogate Gary and find out the precise situation he was in.

  “No,” Gary said. “She just all of a sudden wasn’t there.”

  Kip shook her head firmly. “I’m sure Beth Rose is just sitting in your car, or else in the girls’ room, or even dancing with somebody else, Gary. Check it out in that order and once you’ve found her come back here to fight the fire.” She relieved him of his buckets and forgot him. “You!” she said, handing the buckets to a waiter.

  It was not, however, a waiter.

  It was Mr. Martin, the manager.

  He had been sitting happily in the resort dining hall, talking with a bunch of people having dinner after a wedding rehearsal. One of the guys was a mountain climber and had some great stories to tell. It was only when the bride-to-be mentioned that Rushing River Inn no longer seemed to have any waiters that Mr. Martin realized something was amiss.

  We walked swiftly to the kitchen, annoyance building up quickly, and found the kitchen filled with teenagers filling every available container with water.

  His hands went cold.

  If Kip had ordered him to carry a bucket, it would have slipped out of his hands.

  But two things he saw instantly: first, that the fire was not a threat to the Inn itself, not now anyway; and second, that the brown-haired girl who had cleared things up at the pool was now in control of the fire.

  He blinked, and stepped back inside. He called the emergency number himself to be sure that had been done—and it had, they told him. They had just gotten a few crew, and the trucks were leaving now. Then he walked back to the wedding party and asked each man to take up a fire extinguisher.

  “Hey,” said the bride indignantly. “Aren’t you an equal opportunity fire fighter?”

  But Mr. Martin had no time to worry about that: he just wanted the people who could carry those heavy things the most easily, and he didn’t want any bulky, flimsy dresses catching fire.

  For the first time in his hotel-managing life he ignored his guests and ran back to the fire, to have a sixteen-year-old girl hand him a bucket and tell him to stand in line.

  Chapter 11

  GARY HAD DIFFICULTY OBEYING his wrestling coach and got into heavy arguments when his father gave him orders and spent a good many hours resisting his teachers, and he was not always the most obedient employee.

  But he never thought twice about following Kip’s instructions.

  It was Kip. She knew what she was doing.

  Stumbling through the mass of teenagers who were now pouring out of the ballroom and crossing the croquet lawn to join in the firefight, Gary raced down hill to his car. He took a short cut through the formal rose garden and paid the price with badly scratched hands.

  Be in the car, be in the car! prayed Gary.

  Be mad at me, be as mad as you want, Beth! Just be in the car. Not at the bottom of a cliff.

  But she was not sitting there pouting.

  Gary turned, gasping for breath and headed uphill again. The slope seemed a lot steeper than when he had escorted the fragile Anne up it a few hours ago. He was more winded than he wanted to admit. The gravel slipped under his shoes, and he momentarily lost his balance, reminding him horribly of Beth Rose’s fall.

  Con took the next two buckets. The wind that whipped the fire along whipped through Con’s dark hair and lifted it from his forehead. He was sure Kip was right. Beth Rose was, after all, much too careful to get anyplace near the edge. They hadn’t heard her scream because she had gone back to the dance. They had flung themselves into a panic over nothing.

  Half laughing, Con said to Kip, “I’ll feel like such a jerk if all along Beth Rose had just been fixing her hair in the girls’ room with Anne.” He had a charming smile, and he used it, sharing the joke with Kip.

  Kip was much too strung out to worry about how her words sounded. She only knew that she had been wanting to tell Con Winters off since the day Anne had decided to leave high school. “You are a jerk, Con,” Kip said. “It won’t hurt you to feel like one.”

  One by one the fire extinguishers were lugged to the scene, but the fire was so hot that no one could get very close, and the streams of chemicals put out by the extinguishers accomplished little.

  The wind picked up instead of dying down.

  People kept shifting from one side of the fire to another to keep out of the heat and away from the reaching flames. Kip moved all girls to the kitchen end of the line because their flaring dresses were too likely to catch sparks.

  Nobody seemed to care about clothes. Dresses girls had spent a month searching for were wet, smoke-stained, and torn, but the girls just grabbed the next bucket and passed it on. The boys’ shoes were soaked, and their trousers were covered with soot, but they just kept at it.

  Kip forgot that she was even at a dance, let alone that her lovely outfit was destroyed.

  The waiters had rounded up two more hoses, screwed them together, and run them to another faucet on the far side of the Inn. So now they had more water, but the pressure was low, and the water that was just fine for somebody’s shower after a golf game was not an effective weapon against fire.

  “Change tactics,” Kip said. “We can’t put this out after all. We’ll have to contain the fire until the fire department gets here.”

  She put them all to wetting down everything in a desperate effort to block the fire from spreading.

  The wind rose, and the leaves rustled, and the kids threw water.

  If the fire gets away from us, Kip thought, it goes up the mountain. And how will anybody fights the fire up among the rocks and cliffs and tangles of wood?

  And the fire spread and pushed her back as it had pushed the waiter back. And, Kip thought, we’re going to lose.

  Molly stared at the fire.

  She felt her tiny purse, hanging by a leather strand at her side, and through the thin supple leather she felt the pack of cigarettes.

  She knew she had not put out the cigarette when she tossed it away.

  It had been on purpose.

  She disliked the idea of having to be careful.

  She disliked being neat on homework assignments, and she disliked paying attention to whether or not a new blouse should be washed only in cold water, and she disliked being told she could not smoke in a particular room.

  She liked flicking a cigarette away.

  It was the same sort of gesture she used driving away: too much pressure on the accelerator, which made the tires scream.

  A flick.

  She stared at the fire. Girls unwilling to risk their gowns stood with her, on the terrace, watching the effort.

  Most of them kicked off their silly heels, hiked up their skirts, and raced to the kitchens for help.

  Oh, they’ll save the day, Molly thought. Kip’s in charge. That means it will work out. And then Kip will be a hero, and everybody will have a story to tell for years to come, and the boys will love it, and the party will last til dawn.

  I actually did them all a favor.

  But still, she did not have quite enough guts
to just watch the fire, and she slithered away from them all, taking refuge, as so many generations had done before her, in the women’s room.

  The women’s room, however, was chaos.

  Just as Emily and Anne returned to the subject of exactly where was Emily going to live now, a body leaned against the door, pushing it open by that alone, and almost fell into the lounge.

  “Bethie!” Anne shrieked, jumping up off the daybed. “What happened to you? You look as if you fell off a cliff.”

  Beth Rose did not laugh. Her lovely dress was torn. The soft papery texture had been no match for the wilderness. Her red hair was standing up, thick with leaves and twigs. There was blood on her cheek, and she cradled her arm at her side because it hurt so much.

  “Oh, no,” Emily gasped, “you did fall off a cliff!”

  Mike watched Kip.

  Her filmy white lace blouse was torn and hung at the shoulders. The low back had a tear in it that could never be repaired. The wild hot pink and yellow skirt had a great green grass stain where Kip had fallen on the wet croquet court. The heel on her left shoe had snapped off, so that when she ran she was lopsided.

  Her hair—

  Her hair had been singed.

  In horror Mike leaped forward and dragged her back from the fire. “Kip!” he said. “You’re going to catch fire yourself! A few feet of brush is not worth getting burned!”

  “It’s winning,” Kip said, meaning the fire.

  “It’s moving out into the woods,” Mike agreed. He tried to comfort her. “But you’re holding it. The fire department can’t take much longer.”

  Kip was so hot from the fire she looked as if she had scarlet fever.

  He touched her cheek, but she didn’t notice.

  He thought, We came as just friends. She didn’t want to be just friends. She wanted me to love her.

  Her dress was too wet to catch fire, but she was so close to the flames he had the sensation she would go up like the trees: become a living torch.