by Will Walton
Matt holds his veggie tray proudly, like it’s his ticket into the dance. Lana presses into my arm with her shoulder. She’s nervous, I can tell. It makes sense, really. She’s a little out-there, after all.
She grabs my arm. “Tretch,” she says. “Wait.”
Matt stops at the double doors and turns. “Y’all coming?”
“Uh …” I turn to Lana. “One second, Matt.”
He hesitates, holding on to the door handle. I look at Lana and see the panic crossing her face.
“Go on ahead,” I say to him. “We’ll be a sec.”
He winks. And I think, Honestly? What does he think I’m about to do? Kiss her? He pushes open the door with his back. Some bass-heavy rap music spills out through the crack, and he disappears. I wonder if I’ll see him again for the rest of the dance.
“I—I don’t want to go,” Lana stammers. “I don’t want to go in there.”
“But,” I say. “We have to. We’re already here.”
“Tretch, I just …” She looks down. I catch a tiny scuff mark on the top of her white flat. “Everyone … everyone’s gonna be in there, and …”
“And what? Amy’s there. She’s your friend, Lana.”
“I don’t have any friends, Tretch! I don’t … I don’t really know anyone, and nobody even tries to know me.” She tugs at the edges of her skirt. “I mean, what am I wearing?” She looks up at me frantically for an explanation.
“Lana, you look nice,” I say. “You look very nice.”
That’s when she starts to sob.
“Oh, yeah?” she says. “Well, if I look so nice, then how come—” Her nostrils flare like a bull’s in a cartoon. “How come you didn’t sit in the backseat with me on the way here?”
“What?”
“How come you don’t like me, Tretch?”
“Lana, I—”
“I mean, is it because my family’s Jewish and you guys are Christian? ’Cuz if it is …”
“Lana.” I place a hand on her shoulder. “Lana, why on earth would that be it?”
“That was Andy McRae’s reason!” She turns her face and wipes her nose. “That’s what he said when I gave him a valentine in the seventh grade.”
“In the seventh grade? Lana, you’re in high school now.”
“It’s just the same, Tretch.” She shakes her head. “Everyone says it’s different and that everyone acts more grown up and stuff like that, but it’s not true. It’s really just the same.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand and pushes one big breath through her mouth—“Hoooo”—like it’s the relief she needs.
“And, Tretch, you don’t have to like me. I just … I really like that you like books and that you’re smart and that you dress nice and …” She looks into my eyes. Oh no, I think. Here it comes. Somehow I’m prepared even though it’s never happened before.
Lana’s face and puckered lips swoop in fast. There’s no time to even think about dodging. “Lana—” I start, but she lands it.
My first kiss.
Quick as it happens, it’s over.
“—I’m gay.”
Lana pulls back. “What?” The expression on her face isn’t quite shock. It’s something else.
“I—I—” Now it’s my turn to stammer. “I, yeah, well, like I said …”
“Oh.” She’s quiet for a moment, observing me. “Really?”
I nod.
“Well,” she tries, “I guess that explains your Great Gatsby theory, then?”
I laugh nervously. “Yeah. You could say my gaydar is pretty fine-tuned, and Nick Carraway totally gives me the red alert.”
She tries to smile, not successfully. “Am I the last one to know? I mean, does everyone else know? How stupid am I right now?”
“Nobody knows,” I confess. “I mean, my brother knows. But nobody else. So you’re not stupid at all. Really.”
“Oh,” she says, taking in all this information. Strangely, I’m not worried that she knows. Well, not any more than a little bit.
“So,” she says, “I guess this changes things a little bit, doesn’t it?” She laughs through the last part, a smile appearing.
But I have to challenge her. “What does it change?” I ask, staring at her fiercely. “Tell me.”
“Uhh … It means, well, obviously, we could never date.”
“Oh yeah, that,” I say. “But, really, what does it change?”
Lana raises an eyebrow. “Uhhh …”
“Nothing!” I answer for her. “It changes absolutely nothing. Isn’t that great? I am still Tretch Farm, and you are still Lana Kramer, and we are still two Warmouth misfits standing outside of what is destined to be a god-awful first high school party experience for both of us. But, more importantly, you like me for being me, and I like you for being you, and you know what that says to me, Lana Kramer?”
She shakes her head.
“It says to me that we are friends.”
Just then, a white Jeep pulls in, and we face each other. I turn to my side and hold out my arm for her to take. “But don’t think for a moment,” I say, “that if I were straight, I wouldn’t try to lasso the moon for you.” Her face goes pink. “You’re worth the moon, Lana Kramer. And then some.”
She smiles and, looking down, says softly, “We both are.”
I can trust her. I know I can trust her. My secret is safe with her. And, even better, it doesn’t feel like it needs to be a secret. Not with her.
Does she understand all this? I’m not sure.
All I’m sure of is that she takes my arm, and together we push through the double doors, Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” pounding down the darkened hallway. This is it, I think. This is the teenage dream. We turn a corner and behold the dance floor.
Totally unoccupied.
I lean into Lana and whisper, “Isn’t this supposed to be a dance party?”
People line the walls, just waiting for someone to make the first move. I even see Matt pulling the plastic top off of his veggie plate and lifting up a celery stick to take a bite. Amy is standing next to him.
I take a step back from Lana and grip her hand. She lifts her chin.
“After you,” I say, gesturing with my free hand.
“Oh, Tretch, no—” she starts, but I spin her out anyway. Lana’s words—“We both are”—echo in my head as she twirls. “Well, I suppose if you insist,” she says when she comes to a stop, her face all red and smiley. “Woo! I’m dizzy now!” She’s laughing—not an embarrassed laugh, either, but a real one.
“I’m not nervous about all these people watching—are you, Lana Kramer?”
“Let them watch, Tretch Farm.”
“Just checking,” I say, and as if on cue, the chorus hits. “We both are!” I cry, and it’s like I’m going into battle, which I’m not—or maybe I am, symbolically? A battle to save this party? Lana’s doing these spectacular arm movements, flailing them out to either side of her and bringing them up in a peak above her head, cupping her hands. It’s like she’s crowning herself. Her eyes are closed, and I get it. Dancing is spiritual. Dancing is personal. Some people look at a dancing person and say, What a total show-off. They only notice the body of the dancing person. They look at the way the elbows jut out, the way the hips shake and the neck bends. They criticize all of these things, saying, This dancing person shouldn’t be dancing. This dancing person has no rhythm!
But the dancer is immune to all of this.
“Hey, Tretch,” someone behind me says.
I spin around. “Oh, hey, Amy!”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this before,” she says, pressing her hip to mine, “but you’re magic, you know that?”
Amy pirouettes away, her fingers fluttering, and I swear that girl is half bird the way she flies. She flies into Matt’s arms, of course, and I look away. A few couples are out on the floor now, and I’m spinning across it in search of Lana.
I can’t help it, though. I look back again. Matt and Amy are bobbin
g in place on the floor, and I get the sense that Amy wishes Matt were a better dancer, even though he really is going for it. His eyes are shut. His head is nodding. He’s feeling it. It’s awesome.
Good, I think. Good for you, Matt. I spin around again and see Lana. On either side of her are two people, Anna McCreigh and Paul Goodroe, and I can tell that Lana has danced herself unknowingly in between them. I can’t help but smile. I am not out of breath, but my throat is dry.
“Hey, Lana!” I call.
Her back is to me. Her arms go up as the final chorus hits. She crowns herself again.
“Lana!” I make my way over to her as Paul and Anna hop aside, fist-pumping like most of the other dancers on the floor.
She turns around. “Oh, hi, Tretch,” she says, smiling. “This is the best.”
“Yeah, it totally is. Um, do you want to get some water?”
“Sure.” She smiles as we join the fist-pumping masses, hopping until we safely reach the double doors.
“I think we got it started, Lana,” I say as we exit into the dark hallway of Sinks’s Young-’n-Fit. If this were a scene from a TV show and Lana and I were your typical teenage couple at a New Year’s dance, then maybe we would swing a couple dance moves by ourselves, right there in the dim hallway. Then a slow song would start playing and we’d hold each other close and sway.
But instead Lana goes for the water fountain and comes up wiping sweat from her forehead. “Whoo!” she says. “You’re right, that was something else! I never knew you could dance like that!”
“Well, I’ve had a lot of practice.” I take my turn at the fountain and slurp.
A slow song comes on. I gulp my water back. “Oh no.” It’s that song “Desperado” by the Eagles. And no disrespect to them. I love the Eagles. There was a solid month last year where Joe played the Hotel California album on repeat in his car. But this song? At a New Year’s dance party?
Lana’s eyes get big, and a smile spreads across her face. “What is this?”
“He’s totally gonna kill what we started,” I say. “In one song, that DJ is going to murder it.” We don’t say anything for a moment. Her eyes dart to the corner of the hallway and then back up at me. I take another swig of water from the fountain—
“So are you in love with him?” she asks.
—and start choking.
“What?” I muster when I come up for air, pounding my chest. “Who?”
“Come on. You know who.”
“Veggie tray?”
“Exactly.”
I look at Lana. I know I can be honest with her. She isn’t one of those conniving types. Sure, she stole some books from her cousin’s bookstore and got fired, but who cares about that?
“Yes,” I tell her. “I think I am.”
Lana nods. “Wow. That kills me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just so … sad.”
“Hey,” I say. “I don’t know about you, but I’m great.”
“Tretch!” Lana smiles. “You are—”
“What?”
“A total freakin’ hero, dude.”
I do a kind of mock dance to the twangy sound coming from the dance floor. “So, is it just me or is this song almost over?” I wink and grab Lana by the hand. “Come on. Let’s put in a request with the DJ. We’ll really be heroes if we can save this dance.”
She follows me back down the hallway and across the dance floor. Again, everyone is standing on the sides of the gym like giraffes at a watering hole. The DJ sits on the far side of the floor, behind a big table with all his equipment spread out on it. He is big, with long hair and a beard and sunglasses with headphones on. I watch him typing stuff into a small silver laptop and wonder what fresh cut of our parents’ favorite tunes he has planned for us next. Can’t he see that no one’s having any fun?
“Hey,” I say.
He pulls an ear of his headphones away from his head. “What up, kid?”
“You got any Ellie Goulding?” I ask. “That song ‘Anything Could Happen’?”
“Sure, I got that. You wanna hear it?”
“You got it, boss,” I say. I figure since he called me “kid,” I can call him “boss.”
“Let me see.” He looks at his computer screen. “Got it. Here ya go, kid.” He messes around with some buttons on a board on the equipment table, and voilà!
The familiar eeh-eeh-eehs burst through the speakers. They push me forward to the middle of the dance floor. (I swear, those eehs have a mind of their own, and that beat! It’s magical.) I feel like Dean Moriarty from On the Road. I feel like he feels whenever he hears good jazz. It’s like everything is shouting at me, “Go! Tretch! Go! Go!” and, before I know it, I am bobbing up and down, flapping my arms, working the moves I’ve practiced at home. And to think, all that time I spent at home preparing, never knowing that this moment was the reason why. This moment. And nothing else. There is only space in my head for two things: the music and my moves.
I forget to bring Lana onto the dance floor with me. This time, I am on my own. I cock my hip to the side and pull the scarf from my pocket. I hold it high above my head. The steady beat of the first verse is climbing, has been climbing now for a while, almost there, almost to the peak, the chorus, “anything could happen, anything could happen,” and then it hits.
The beat does more than spark.
It explodes.
I look up at the ceiling with my head tipped back and my neck stretched out, shaking my shoulders and waving my arms. I look down at the ground and shake my elbows, my hips. I’m looking everywhere while I move, everywhere but right at Matt Gooby. Don’t look at him. The thought comes clearly. Forget about him. I move like crazy, harder than I’ve ever moved, and I am sweating. I feel it on my forehead and inside my shirt. I feel it down the legs of my pants. For one quick portion of the dance, I am on the ground doing a roll-around, and when I pop up, some dust sticks to my arms. The floor hasn’t been swept, which helps when I move into the moonwalk (I’ve only ever accomplished this before in socks), which draws applause.
I hear calls of “Go, Tretch!” and “Do it, boy!” But that doesn’t matter. I’m not dancing for them.
The song is almost over—just a few more steps.
“Anything could happen, anything could happen.”
I focus on them and give them my all.
“Eeh, eeh, eeh, eeeeh.”
I punch my fists through the colored light coming from the spotlights.
“Eeh, eeh, eeh, eeeeh.”
I hop. It’s almost over, it’s almost over, I tell myself. I look left, I look right, the last line of the song comes, and Matt’s face appears in front of me. “But I don’t think I need you”—and then it’s over.
“Tretch! Tretch!” He’s shouting and shaking my shoulders. “That was incredible! I never knew y—”
I reach back for him, but I’m getting swept away by everyone around us. Hands pull me by my arms and shoulders into the heated crowd. Everyone is chanting, “Tretch. Tretch. Tretch. Tretch.” It feels like a good dream.
I feel brave like I never have before, and I think everyone else feels it, too. Because by the next song, there’s not a soul who isn’t dancing. It’s all of us, all of us together, and I’m telling you, it’s miraculous.
After the party, we find Mom parked outside Sinks’s Young-’n-Fit. We’re all beat and happy, and as I step off the curb into the parking lot, I swear I could fly.
It’s like Mom can tell. “So?” she asks, all excited. “How was it?”
Matt speaks up immediately. “Oh man, Mrs. Farm, it was great. Did you know Tretch could move like he can? Gah—”
“Really?” Mom eyes me as I get into the passenger seat. “You got the moves, then, huh, Tretch?”
“He really does, Mrs. Farm,” Lana chimes in. She’s beaming, her face still flushed.
“Well, all right.” Mom slaps me five. “Go, Tretch.”
“Yeah, it was fun,” I say. “We had a l
ot of fun.”
We drive Lana to her house and drop her off. She slides out of the backseat. “See ya, Tretch,” she says. “Swing by Mabel’s sometime.” Then, like she’s just remembered he was there, too, she adds, “You, too, Matt.”
“Will do, Lana.”
“Will do.”
Mom waves out the window as we drive off. “Happy New Year, Lana!” She turns to us. “I like that girl. She’s such a sweetie.”
“See, Tretch? What did I tell ya?” Matt says from the backseat. He pokes me in the shoulder.
“She’s a good friend,” I say. I turn in my seat to face Matt. “Just a good friend. And I honestly don’t want it any other way.”
“Maybe not for now,” Matt prods.
“Or maybe not forever.” I say this a little more forcefully than I intended. Matt slumps back against the seat.
“Tretch,” Mom says in her Things okay? voice.
“I mean, agh, I’m sorry. That sounded bad, sorry.” I turn my head to the window. A graveyard flies by in the night, and I’m just like, What have I done? The first good night since Christmas, and I’m ruining it. “I mean, it’s nothing against Lana at all. It’s just, it’s me, really—”
“What do you mean?” Matt asks. “You two like all the same things.”
That’s it, I decide. I’ve had it with the whole “you like the same things” argument. I turn in my seat. “Matt, it is possible to like different things and still fall in love, you know?”
“I—”
“In fact, some people argue that when two people who like different things fall in love, it brings all kinds of new and exciting things to the table. For both of them!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Matt says. “I didn’t mean …”
“Tretch,” Mom says, this time in her What’s gotten into you? voice. And honestly, what has gotten into me? I’m being a jerk to Matt.
“I’m sorry to be pushy. I know it’s annoying.”
It is annoying!
“I just want you to …” he starts.
What? He just wants me to … what?
“Never mind,” he finishes.
“What?” I press him. I want to know.
“I just want you to have someone. You know, like, after I leave Warmouth. But, I mean, if you and Lana are just going to be friends, that’s fine, too. As long as you have someone when I leave. Friend, girlfriend, whatever, it really doesn’t matter to me. As long as you’re not alone.”