by Shawn Inmon
I think Shawn might have noticed we were getting ready to leave, because he came over and grabbed me and pulled me out on the floor for one last dance. Just as we got to the middle of the dance floor the song changed. Whatever fast song had been playing stopped in the middle, and after a few seconds Stairway to Heaven started to play. A slow song.
I’d been to a few dances at the junior high, sock hops after football games and that sort of thing, but this felt a little different. Those dances were with junior high boys. This was with a high schooler. I didn’t want to chicken out, though, so I just kind of stood there, uncertain of what to do next.
Shawn casually walked up to me and pulled me gently against him, just like it was no big deal. We didn’t really dance; it mostly amounted to shuffling our feet and moving in a circle. He was a lot taller than me, so it felt completely natural to put my arms up on his shoulders and lay my head against his chest. He was kind of sweaty, because he had been dancing a lot, but he smelled good.
When the song got a little faster, the couples around us moved apart and started dancing faster, but we stayed together. Shawn didn’t grope me like the junior high boys always did during a slow song. Instead, he put his hand on the lower part of my back and moved it slowly and gently in a circle. No one had ever touched me like that before. It didn’t feel racy or anything. Instead, it made me feel safe and warm.
As soon as the song ended, someone flipped on all the lights and I turned away from Shawn. I’m not sure why, but I felt embarrassed. When I got back to the table, I saw that Mom and Dad were already standing with their coats on. I grabbed my jacket and we were out the door before I had a chance to say goodbye to Shawn. I couldn’t even remember if I had wished him a happy birthday.
On the car ride home, it felt like I could still feel the vibration that I felt while we were dancing to Stairway to Heaven. I didn’t try to fool myself, though. I knew Shawn didn’t like me that way. He was too old to be interested in me. He was more like my brother than anything else. Even so, it still felt warm where he had rubbed my back while we danced.
Thank You for Being a Friend
Mossyrock Junior High split each grade into two different groups. When I first moved there, I was put into the “A” group, but at the start of eighth grade, I got switched over to the “B” group. I had no idea why I had been in one group the first year and a different one this year. The inner workings of the Mossyrock Junior High faculty were a complete mystery to me. I had been ostracized by the girls in the “A” group since my near-date with Beau, so I didn’t mind the switch at all. In the end, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. In the “B” group, I got to know Cheryl Hipps, Devy Ashe, Cindi Cowan and Missy Snodgrass. Maybe they weren’t quite the popular girls who ruled the school, but they were real, honest, and nice. We all became best friends. We liked a lot of the same things, and none of them seemed overly concerned about whether or not I was trying to steal their boyfriends.
I was still so innocent that I didn’t understand how things like dating worked. I was terribly shy, which didn’t help either. A boy named Joe Woods asked me to go to a dance with him after a football game. I went, but we didn’t say a word to each other the entire night. Another time, a boy I knew asked me if I would like to be Tim Johnson’s girlfriend. I still didn’t really get what that meant, because he never talked to me at school. Almost every night though, Tim would call me and we would talk on the phone. We never really broke up, but I figured it was over when he stopped calling me at night.
Going out with boys was just one more thing to do, like hanging out with my friends, riding horses, or watching TV. In those days, I never put much of myself into the whole dating aspect of life. Having sleepovers with my friends and talking to them felt much more important.
I was nervous when it was time for me to start high school. I had gotten used to being one of the big kids in junior high, and we would all be starting from scratch in high school. One of the reasons I was a little wary was that I wasn’t just the youngest kid in my class; I was the youngest by a lot. My mom had skipped me a grade when I was just starting school, so I was almost a full year younger than everyone else. Everyone else in my class was fourteen or fifteen already, but I wouldn’t be fourteen until December 27th.
Also, I wasn’t exactly the best student. When I was sitting in class listening to the teacher talking about algebra or European history, I had a hard time caring. Mom had been pretty tolerant about my grades when I was in junior high, but now that I was in high school, she said I had to do a lot better.
One day about a month after school started, I brought home a couple of bad homework grades and a bad test score. I thought about hiding them from Mom, but instead I decided to just get it over with. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to take the hit and move on instead of dragging it all out.
“Here,” I said, handing Mom the stack of papers. “I got some of my scores back.”
Mom took them from me, peering over the tops of her glasses at me instead of looking at the homework.
“Am I going to be happy?”
“I think…. No, you probably aren’t going to be happy.”
She took a deep breath and held it, her steady gaze never leaving me. I tried to shrink a little bit, but there was no escaping that look.
She took her time, shuffling methodically through the papers. When she got through them all, she took another deep breath.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “You’re going to go get Shawn from next door and bring him over here. I’m going to ask him to tutor you in…” she tilted her head back and looked through the bottom of her glasses at the papers, “Social Studies and Freshman English. I think he can handle those. And if he charges us for tutoring you, you can babysit and pay me back every penny of what I pay him.”
“Aww, c’mon, Mom. I’ll do better. I just…”
She interrupted me right there. “No, here’s what you will ‘just’ do. You will ‘just’ march yourself over next door and ask Shawn if he will come see me.” Her chin was raised and I knew I was beat. I sighed and walked out the front door, making sure not to close it too loudly. I tried to pick my battles and this one was already over.
I made my way next door, but I took my time. It was a nice day, or at least it had been until I had shown Mom my grades, so I went out back and checked on the rabbits in the hutch. They were all there, which was a relief. I liked raising rabbits. To me they were pets, but to Mom and Dad they were sometimes supper.
I walked out to the back pasture and watered my horse, Shilo. I petted his neck and talked to him for a few minutes. Eventually, I got the feeling I was being watched and looked over my shoulder at the house. Mom was standing in the kitchen window with her mouth a firm line and her eyebrows raised. I knew that look too, so I shrugged and made my way across the yard.
Shawn’s parents always kept their yard and gardens perfect. They had huge Rhododendron bushes out front and little flower beds everywhere. It was just a double-wide trailer, but they always made it look nice.
I trudged up to the sliding glass door at the front of the house. I could see Shawn sitting inside, reading a comic book. I’m pretty sure he heard me come up the steps, but he kept reading the comic. When I knocked, he made a big show out of being surprised that I was standing there. He was a funny, funny boy, at least to himself.
“Hey,” he said, opening the slider.
“Hey. Mom wants to know if you can come see her.”
“Oh. Ummm…” He pretended to be thinking about it, like he was so busy he wasn’t sure he could work us into his social calendar. Sometimes I just wanted to punch him. Sometimes I went ahead and did.
“OK,” he said, smiling. At least he usually laughed at his own jokes, so I didn’t have to.
We raced back across the yard and he beat me to my front steps. He tried to lean against the house like he had been waiting for me a long time, but I just gave him a quick kick on the way by and
went inside.
“Hi,” he said to my Mom, who was sitting in her chair looking very serious.
“Shawn, we have a situation and we need some help. Dawn is struggling a little bit with adjusting to high school and she’s falling behind. We’re worried that if she gets too far behind, she’ll have a hard time catching up.”
I swear to God, Shawn was standing in the middle of my living room frowning and holding his chin in his hand like a concerned grownup. Two minutes ago, he was joking and clowning around like a ten-year-old, and now this. I could’ve killed him.
“I know that you are in Honor Society and make good grades, so we’re wondering if you would be willing to help us out and tutor Dawn one or two nights a week?”
Shawn nodded slightly, like he got asked to tutor people every day.
“Of course, we couldn’t pay you very much,” Mom added.
“Ah, that’s OK. You guys have always been nice to me. I’m glad to help you out with this. Don’t worry about it.”
I was glad to hear him say that since it was going to come out of my babysitting money.
“Well, that’s very generous. Thank you.”
I never understood it, but somehow Mom always got people to do what she wanted, and usually for free.
Shawn got pretty sick after a few weeks, so we only had a few tutoring sessions, but they actually weren’t all that horrible. Sometimes he came to my house after supper, and sometimes I went to his. We always sat at the kitchen table so we could spread my books out. Shawn had been like my big brother for a couple of years by then, but I started to feel closer to him while he was helping me with my studies. Sometimes he was kind of conceited and arrogant, but never when he was tutoring me. He never made me feel bad for not knowing something, even when he could have.
Since we were teenagers, we spent a lot of our study sessions talking about things other than History or English, especially when we were over at his house. At my house, Mom was always just a few feet away, listening to everything we said. At Shawn’s house, his mom and dad never seemed to care.
One night, we talked about the upcoming Homecoming Dance, a Mossyrock fall tradition. A boy I was friends with, Gordon Brooks, had asked me to go, but I never even got a chance to tell Shawn. He seemed too excited about his own date.
“So,” he said, “It’s going to be so cool. I’m taking this girl from Seattle. Her name is Lorraine and she’s a college girl! She goes to the UW. I met her at that Writer’s Conference I went to last year. I never thought she’d actually go with me, but I asked her and she said she would.”
I gave him a half smile that said, ‘Oh, can’t you see by my expression how excited I am for you,’ but he was too slow to catch it. It wasn’t that I expected him to ask me, and I already had a date, but it didn’t make me happy that he was so excited about going with this other girl.
“It’s gonna be great. She’s going to come down and spend the night here…”
There was probably more to that sentence, but I had completely tuned him out by then.
“So what’s the answer to question twelve?” I asked, interrupting him.
“Oh, ummm….” He looked at me a little oddly. I knew it was a breach of etiquette to interrupt our small talk with studying, but I thought that if he went on for ten more seconds about how much fun he was going to have with Lorraine, I might explode.
The situation got a little worse a few days later. Gordon had asked me to the dance as a friend, but we were walking along outside the high school when he leaned in and tried to kiss me. I turned my head. His lips met my forehead, which probably wasn’t what he intended. It was awkward. The next thing I knew, Gordon was taking Lisa Hilton to the dance and I had no date for Homecoming. Again.
This was becoming a tradition I could live without. By then, we were only a few days away from the dance and I knew no one else was going to ask me, so I resigned myself to just staying home. On the day of the dance, I tried not to even think about all my friends getting their hair done, putting on makeup and dressing up for the dance, while I sat at home with Mom and Dad watching television.
There was a knock on our front door around 8:30. When I answered it, it was Shawn. He looked much better than when I first saw him two years ago. He’d gotten contact lenses earlier that year, and I could see his blue eyes much better. Sometimes, when we were sitting in the yard talking, he would be sitting so close to me that it felt like his eyes could see all the way through me. He had a new suit on that was a big improvement over the blue leisure suit he wore to other formal dances at school.
I thought about asking him where Lorraine was, but I was afraid he’d mistake that for a real question and answer me, so I didn’t.
“Well, don’t you look nice,” Mom said when she saw him. Dad didn’t bother to look away from the television.
“Oh, thanks,” Shawn said. “You’ll never guess what happened. Lorraine ended up having to go back to Moses Lake for a family emergency. So, I guess I’m going stag tonight.”
My first instinct was to smile and say “Oh, that’s too bad” in a completely insincere way, but instead I pretended to be so absorbed in The Love Boat that I was unaware of his existence.
Dad grunted and nodded a little, which I interpreted to mean, Yeah, I kind of expected her to stand you up. I put my hand over my mouth to hide my smile.
Mom just said, “Oh, I’m sorry…”
“It’s alright,” Shawn said with a sigh as he sat down on the couch beside me. “I’ll survive.”
We all watched The Love Boat for a few minutes—it was the episode where John Ritter dressed up like a woman to get on the cruise—and then Shawn stood up like he was going to leave.
“Say,” Mom said, “Dawn was supposed to go the dance tonight too, but her date cancelled on her at the last minute too. We already had her dress ready though. Would you be willing to escort Dawn to the dance as a favor to us?”
Shawn looked a little surprised. Hey! Going to the dance with me wouldn’t be all bad, you know. I kept that to myself, too.
“Um, sure, that’d be fine.”
Mom looked at me. “Well, Sissy, go get your dress on. Don’t keep him waiting all night.”
I looked at Shawn. I wasn’t sure he really wanted to take me, but he smiled at me and nodded. I jumped off the couch and ran into my room. I had taken a bath, but I hadn’t done anything at all with my hair and I didn’t have any makeup on at all. I didn’t want to take the time for it, so I grabbed my dress off the hanger and threw it on the bed. I searched through my closet for the right shoes, but couldn’t find them until I remembered they were at the edge of my bed. I had my clothes off and my dress and shoes on in about two minutes. I took an extra thirty seconds to run a brush through my hair, then hurried back to the living room.
When I walked in, Shawn was still standing and talking to Mom. He was in the middle of a sentence when I came in, but he stopped talking. He eyed me closely. I looked right back at him, raising my chin a little bit. I wondered why he was staring at me like that.
“Do I look OK?”
Shawn just nodded, Mom was smiling and for some reason, it looked like Dad was glaring at Shawn.
“Is this Dutch?” asked Mom.
Shawn did not grasp what she meant. “Um, I don’t know. I’m not sure. I guess so.”
I knew what Mom meant, but Shawn was oblivious. She stared at him like he might have gotten stupid all of a sudden. She sighed and turned to me.
“Go get me my purse then, so I can get you some money.”
“Oh,” Shawn said. “I thought you were asking if her dress was Dutch. No, no, no, I’ve got our tickets to get in and everything.”
Mom looked pleased that he finally caught on. She gave me a kiss and told me to come home straight after the dance.
“We will,” Shawn said. “I’m pretty sure it’s over by midnight, but we’ll leave by then even if it’s not and I’ll have her home.”
It felt odd to be walking across t
he yard with Shawn. We had spent a lot of time together, but not with me in a dress and him in a suit and kind of going on a date.
Shawn drove a blue Vega. When we got to the car, he opened my door for me and made a sweeping motion with his hand and said, “Your carriage, m’lady.”
“You’re a dork.”
He laughed, and it didn’t really feel strange any more.
When we got to the dance we found a table and sat down. I was nervous about being around all the older kids, but Shawn stayed with me, and we talked and drank punch and laughed at the other couples. There was a live band and they were good, so we danced a lot. When they played Desperado, we slow-danced. He put his hand low on my back and moved it in a gentle circle, just like when we had danced to Stairway to Heaven. When the song ended and we sat down, I was thinking that I didn’t want him to stop doing that.
The dance started to wrap up a little before midnight. I heard some of the other kids talking about a party somewhere and that there was going to be drinking, but Shawn took me straight home, just like he promised.
When we pulled into his driveway, he jumped out of the Vega and hurried around to open my door again. He made the same silly sweeping motion with his hand.
“Still a dork,” I said.
He laid his hand against the back of my shoulder and we walked to my front door. I wondered if he was going to try and kiss me. I kind of wanted him to, but I was nervous about it too. He was prattling on about something, and of course he eventually insulted me, because that’s what we did with each other. I took that opportunity to turn on my heel, go inside, and close the door behind me. It had been a great night.
Wonderful Tonight
Shawn bought his Vega with money he had made over the summer, so he didn’t have to ride the #9 bus back and forth to school every day. That was great for him, but I was thirteen, and my choices were to take the bus or walk.