Saturday Night (20 page)

The reporter smiled and nodded, knowingly, proudly, as if in possession of secrets.

“We can’t see Emily as she was,” he boomed, “because Emily ruined her beautiful blue prom dress tearing it on branches; ruined the matching high heels, damaging her own bare feet, and ruined her perfect hairdo. You see, Emily and Matt were on their way to the first formal dance Westerly High has had in three years, and they paused to save the life of a stranger.”

Another smile. Gary was right. They knew him by his teeth.

But we don’t know Emily at all, Kip thought. Emily’s in my history class, I remember that now. I’ve never spoken to her! She looks so nice. And kind of scared. She’s looking at the microphone as if it could bite her. Emily! Enjoy yourself! It’s your moment.

Kip would have loved to be in front of that mike, thinking of something clever to say. Especially with a boyfriend who looked like that. Once you got used to the crummy clothing, he was really something.

“Emily,” said the reporter, holding the mike toward her, “how does it feel to be such a heroine?”

But nobody would ever know what Emily thought, because Gary Anthony performed his second rescue of the night. He didn’t know it; it never crossed his mind that Emily was so embarrassed she was speechless, that she couldn’t even think of a stupid thing to say, let alone something worth television coverage.

“All
right
!” yelled Gary at the top of his lungs. “Let’s hear it for
Emily
!”

The entire room—five hundred kids—began clapping, whistling, shouting, and stomping for Emily.

Like packed cheerleaders, thought Emily, staring at them. She blushed so deeply she turned to Matt to hide her face. Matt loved every minute of it. “Wow,” he whispered. “Do you have a lot of friends!” He took the mike from the reporter and said, “It was fun. Exciting. Not everybody gets to kick off a dance like that, right?”

“Right!” yelled the hundreds of kids back at him.

Matt abandoned the camera and the reporters and the lights, and even the mike. “But Emily and I came to dance!” he shouted. “Come on! You guys are practically ready to close up shop and we haven’t had a dance yet! Let’s have some music!”

He pulled Emily after him, and she followed, stumbling, because her feet were now beginning to get feeling back and none of the feelings were good. She made herself ignore the pain. Here was Matt thinking all these kids adored her! She had to live up to it. Or at least dance one dance.

Heroine.

The word took some getting used to.

But there was no time for Emily to get used to it. She and Matt danced: a wild rock number that used up a little of Matt’s tremendous energy and totally sapped what was left of Emily’s. She sank onto a bench and put her feet up on what looked like a rose arbor lying down. How strange.

Matt kept right on dancing in front of her, having a great time, not caring in the slightest that he no longer had a partner. Everybody kept coming up to Emily to tell her how terrific she was—how proud they were to know her!

Emily kept laughing.

This is impossible. I’m the one whose name they haven’t been able to remember for sixteen years!

Sue and Jimmy. Gary and Beth Rose. Caitlin and somebody unknown. Pammy and Jason. Megan and Roy.

Will it last? thought Emily, laughing, talking with every kid she’d ever dreamed of being friends with. Will they be my friends on Monday? Tuesday? And ever after?

Or is it just tonight?

The lights came on when Gary and Beth Rose had gotten as far as the custodian’s closet. Their eyes hadn’t adjusted to the light when some kid half in, half out of the closet said, “Hey, Gary. Take this snow shovel, will you?”

“It’s turned to snow out there?” Gary asked. “I didn’t know it was
that
cold.”

“No, it’s pumpkin. The junior high kids had a pumpkin fight. I don’t know what else to clean it up with.”

Gary laughed. “I’m a great pumpkin shoveler from way back.” He took the snow shovel and the other kid took a roll of paper towels and a can of spray cleaner. “I’ll find you after we’ve cleaned it up,” Gary said to Beth, smiling. He said nothing about the dress he had promised to notice when the lights came on, and his eyes weren’t on the dress, anyhow; they were on the shovel.

Beth sighed.

Gary said, “I’m really sorry. I forget your name.”

“Mike Robinson.”

I thought he meant me, Beth thought, relieved.

“Yeah. Did Kip line you up for cleaning crew?” Gary asked.

“No. I was just there. The kids who are on clean-up brought blue jeans to change into. But I’m just wearing an old sports jacket and pants, anyway. No problem for me, they don’t even have to be dry cleaned.”

Fascinating, thought Beth. Intoxicating. Thrilling. My idea of romantic talk, too. Oh, well, it was nice of them to clean up for Kip.

The pumpkin really had created a hideous mess. Those junior high kids had had only five minutes, but they had been a very destructive five minutes. Beth Rose stood in awe of the ability to smash pumpkins in a hurry. The dance floor was now half as big, due to squashed pumpkin on the other half.

Kip didn’t even look mad.

In fact, she was dancing, which seemed most unlike Kip. You would have expected her to be supervising.

The fact that Gary was going to drive her home gave Beth Rose a curious poise. Even though nobody else knew about it, she was able now to walk out onto the jammed dance floor and begin dancing alone. Jennie and Bob were on her right, Caitlin and her date, Sue and Jimmy, and all the rest.

When the electricity returned, people had wanted more light than before. There was no dim romantic atmosphere left. It was a real cafeteria now, with acoustical tiles hung with fishing wire and felt and mylar and satin leaves. Half the props and decorations had been shifted, or someone had fallen on them and broken something off. Beth would have expected Kip to be beside herself, but Kip didn’t appear to have noticed anything wrong. She was dancing away like everybody else, lost in the beat and the music.

Sue stopped dancing so abruptly that both Beth Rose and Jimmy plowed right into her. “Look at that!” she exclaimed, with such astonishment that they all whirled.

“Must be tyrannosaurus rex or something,” said Jimmy, laughing at Sue.

It was a television crew.

Sue squealed with pleasure. “We’ll be on the eleven-thirty news! Our first dance in three years! We’re important enough for the news. Jimmy! How does my hair look?”

“Gotta be too late for the evening news,” said Roddy.

“It’s not. It’s five of eleven. They’ll make it if they hurry.”

“Hurry?” said Gary skeptically. “They’ll have to fly.” He was leaning on his shovel, framed against the orange of the pumpkin remains. What a color shot it would make: handsome Gary in his tuxedo, the pumpkins strewn around his feet!

Beth walked over to him. “Let’s be on tv,” she said, smiling.

He grinned, put down the shovel, offered her his arm, and waltzed her toward the crew.

T
HE CLOUDS WERE GONE
. Stars spangled the black sky. Anne stared at their patterns, looking for answers, finding none.

A car pulled very very slowly into the parking lot. A car she knew very well. She knew every ripple of the corduroy upholstery and every scratch on the crimson finish. Con’s car.

At the foot of the steps, the car idled. She stood still. Con saw her. A full minute later he turned off the ignition, got out of the car, and slowly walked up the steps toward her. Anne looked at him. She was so drained of emotion that she felt none, looking at him, and no expression crossed her face because there was no feeling left in her heart.

“You don’t have a coat on,” Con said to her. “It’s freezing out here. Why are you standing outside without your coat?”

She didn’t answer. He pulled his own jacket off and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t react. “Are you waiting for your mother?” he said. “Did you call her?”

She shook her head.

“Well, stand inside. You’re going to die of hypothermia.” He walked her inside the school and the warmth hit her. Now she realized how cold she was. She looked at her hands: transparently blue, trembling. Con took them in his own and began to rub them. She watched the friction of their hands.

After a while Anne looked into his eyes, trying to see past the dark pools of iris into the mind that made Con drive back. His eyes told her nothing. She looked away.

Con drew a deep breath and stopped rubbing her hands. He simply pressed them between his own, as if they were both praying. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “Me, too.”

He couldn’t seem to think of anything to add. He didn’t touch her in his old way, either. He stood apart, and when he began rubbing the still-cold hands again, it was more like a medic with a stranger.

Inside the school, down the hall, they heard the music spring to life. Moments later the television crew rushed down the same hall, elbowing Anne and Con out of the way in their rush to get to the studio on time. Anne had never seen them to start with and barely saw them now. Con saw, but could not fathom what a tv crew could be doing at the school and forgot them the instant he looked back at Anne.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Once I broke a piece of my mother’s wedding crystal, and I said ‘I’m sorry’ and she said ‘Being sorry doesn’t make the crystal whole.’”

Con swallowed. “Okay. Okay. You threw it at me so fast I couldn’t think. I couldn’t believe I had to handle that in front of everybody I’ve ever known. I just had to get out of there. I’m sorry, Anne. I really am.”

Is he sorry he walked out of the dance? Sorry I told him so quickly? Sorry I’m pregnant? Sorry he has to get involved? Anne thought, I will have to interrogate him to know, and I don’t have the strength.

Con had never seen Anne like this. Stunned. Cold inside as well as outside. “I’ll drive you home, Anne,” he said finally. “I don’t—I don’t want any part of this. I want it not to be. But—but okay. I’ll go home with you. I’ll be there when you tell your mother.”

Anne looked at him again and narrowed her eyes trying to focus on him. But she couldn’t see him clearly. She shivered.

“Okay,” he said, drawing a deep breath. “Okay.
We’ll
tell your mother.”

She tilted her head slightly and the beginnings of a slight smile touched her lips. “You’re pretty brave, fella.”

“Yeah. That’s me. Pure raw courage.”

“I like that in a man.”

“Let’s go, then. Let’s get it over with.”

“No,” said Anne Stephens. “I don’t want to go. We’ve missed the whole dance. I want to go back to the dance.”

It was Con’s turn to freeze. “Anne,” he said, dreading the sentence he had to speak, “they all know in there. There was gossip starting when I left. Molly started it. I guess she heard you telling Kip about it. There’s not a person in the cafeteria that doesn’t know.”

Nothing could have amazed Con more than Anne’s sudden happy smile. “Really? I thought it was
Kip
. I thought
Kip
told.”

“No. Kip wouldn’t do this to us. Molly started the rumor.”

Anne’s smile faded. “Oh, it’s a rumor now?” she said in a hard voice.

Oh, Con thought, and we have her mother and grandmother to go. “No. It’s not a rumor. You’re pregnant and I walked away from it. Left you here alone.” The muscle began twitching in his cheek again. He tried to relax, letting go of each muscle the way they learned in gym, but it didn’t work. The muscle twitched involuntarily.

And after I face her family, I have to face mine, he thought. He knew what his mother and father would say. Con, we trusted you absolutely. We gave you freedom in which to be responsible. And look what you’ve done. …

Anne’s chin lifted. “I don’t care what everybody is thinking. We’re going back in there and dance the last dance, Con. Together.”

He would rather have fought a world war with his bare hands. Five hundred kids in there, all quoting Molly who described him—rightly—as the rat who abandoned Anne?

“Okay,” he said. His stomach knotted like chicken wire. Calm down, he told himself. You’re walking in together. She had to walk out of there alone. Con put his arm around her, feeling very shy, as if Anne were a woman he had never met. “You warm enough now?” he said, because temperature was a safe topic.

“I’m okay.”

They walked toward the cafeteria door.

The muscle in his cheek throbbed until his jaw hurt.

Anne leaned on him.

Con seriously considered picking her up bodily and hauling her to the car. The car! “The car,” he said happily, “is not in a real parking space. We have to go move it. And since we’re moving it anyway, we might as well just drive on to your—”

“So we get a parking ticket. Big deal. What’s a ticket at a time like this?”

“Right,” said Con, who was having to take such deep breaths his own breathing winded him. My parents told me one more ticket and they’d ground me, he thought. That’ll be the pits. I’m the father of this baby, I’m the rat who abandoned her, and I also don’t have a car to drive.

He swung open the door to escort her in and it was the most difficult motion in his life. Walking away was a snap. Staying was pretty grim.

Everybody was dancing. Good. They’d be too busy to look up. Anne and Con could just slide along the wall, hopping over the apple barrels and the—

But they were not too busy to look up. Sue and Jimmy looked up, Bob and Jennie, Gary and Beth Rose, Kip and Roddy.

“You had to do this to me,” Con said. “You had to give me an audience.”

“I’m sorry. Bad timing. I couldn’t help it. I was going insane and I split apart at the wrong moment.

“Next time tell me sooner.”

“Next time?” she snorted. “If you think there’s going to be a next time, you’re out of your mind!”

He laughed. It was a real laugh, and so was Anne’s. He kissed her, and it was a real kiss, and so was hers. “I love you, Anne,” he whispered.

She began to cry.

“Oh, no, don’t cry on me!” he begged.

“I’m not,” she whispered back. “I’m really laughing.”

“Then why are there tears running down your cheeks?” he murmured.