The Van Pact

20: Stevie

Jesse and I. Jesse and I danced.

I danced.

Not like how I danced when I took Irish step dancing. That's nice and sexually repressive. No hip movement there.

No. Tonight, we danced like nerds at an eighties theme party. We bopped like the cool kids at a nineteen-sixty-two homecoming dance. We jumped around like scene kids in two-thousand and six. We danced. Like nobody but the Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association was watching. And when that Peter Gabriel song from Say Anything came on, well. Jesse shrugged, held out his arms, and offered to slow dance. When he took my hand, I felt an immediate current of electric heat run up my fingers. When he slipped his arm around my waist, my legs felt like jelly.

And yet, somehow, we slow danced.

We slow danced to the most romantic song. From the most romantic movie. Of all time.

I could smell him.

He smelled like Old Spice. It's not sophisticated masculinity, but he's also seventeen. He could be doused in Axe Body Spray. Considering all alternatives, he smelled gooood. I decided that this "feat of courage" -this dare- was perhaps the best dare I had ever been dared to do in my life. Valerie had danced with Jesse and me for the first couple songs on her playlist, but, like usual, she disappeared in the middle of the third.

By the time Peter Gabriel's voice faded out to silence, Valerie had reappeared behind Jesse. She saw the last thirty seconds or so of us slow dancing, and she gave me two thumbs up. I couldn't even react. I think I was close to passing out. I listened to my heart beating and the bushy-browed man next to Val, as he peppered her with questions about how her "greenhouse" worked. She said something about "jet fuel" and "industry secrets" and "The 9/11 Commission Report." When Jesse heard Valerie's voice, he let go of my waist and turned around. I was a little annoyed, but then again, Val's playlist was over. I knew Jesse wouldn't slow dance with me forever (though I wouldn't have complained if he could have). Val said something about "blowing this popsicle joint" and, after she took her phone from the gala's speakers, we did just that.

As we left the banquet hall and then the lobby, we laughed loud like kings about their countries or fugitives on the lam. I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue at the man behind the front desk as we passed him, just to see what he was going to do about it. He did nothing. He didn't even blink.

When we spilled out the Hotel's front doors onto Main Street, I was hit with a shock of early autumn air. My borrowed blazer didn't do much to cover the goose-pimples on my chest, but I couldn't complain. I had the best friend a girl could have on my right, and my living daydream on my left. Even if I did catch pneumonia then, what would it matter?

We were invincible.

We stumbled down the hill and beneath the bridge to Gus, parked where we had left him. On the way home, I lay across the second row of seats and stared up at the night sky through one of the passenger windows. I could hear Jesse and Valerie talking in the front, but all I could think was that this feeling I experienced right then must have been close to the euphoria of drunks or drug addicts.

Valerie was right. She had been right all along. Life was weird and ripe and -in that moment, in that van, in our sleeping, rusty city- ours for the taking.

***

I got home around eleven a clock. I locked the front door, crept down the hallway to the kitchen, and flicked on the lights. And Janey Mac.