The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (2 page)

***

As evening on Saturday approached, my mother reminded me again
and again, with increasing urgency, that I needed to start putting on my suit. My
last best hope had been to forget to go to the dance, but no one was letting me.

I pulled the suit out of my closet and dropped it on the floor,
a small protest. Before closing the door I stood looking into the darkness at the
other end, the good end. Tucked behind a shoebox of dusty G.I. Joes was a square
of shiny contact paper with the name
Micah
written on it in block letters. The name-tag of a boy I’d known—just seen,
really—at summer camp between sixth grade and seventh. I had rescued it crumpled
from the trash, where Micah tossed it after walking away into eternity on the last
day. I had smoothed it and pressed it to the inside of my t-shirt, rode home with
it against my skin.

I had told myself I wanted his name, wanted his looks, his smile,
admired his skills with whittling sticks and heading soccer balls. That’s all, and
for a while I believed it. But I started telling myself about him, too, at night
when I was in bed, when I pushed my pajamas and underwear down around my ankles
and rubbed against the smooth sheets.

Now, crawling under hanging clothes and over scattered shoes,
I sat in the closet holding Micah’s name-tag. Its backside, fuzzy with t-shirt fibers
and stray hairs, was no longer sticky. On the shiny side I could see my blurry reflection;
his name in black went across my face.

From downstairs I heard my mother call again. I was running out
of time.

***

“Try to have fun tonight, Ollie, OK?” my father said. I was
standing in front of him, my back to his chest. He was tying my tie. I looked at
him in the mirror. The top of my head was level with his throat. When the tie was
tied he straightened my collar and put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around.
He looked into my eyes. “You’re so serious all the time. Loosen up a little.” He
punched my arm lightly. “It’s a dance, not the end of the world. People actually
have fun at these.”

After he left the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror.
People had fun, but I wasn’t people. The suit, the tie. They had dressed me up for
my execution.

***

Here’s what I knew: That I was in the car on my way to be the
date of a girl and I had no flower to give her. Amid all my worries this was the
most tangible, the one I was guaranteed to confront. But I couldn’t get a flower
because I needed my mom to buy the flower. And I couldn’t tell my mom I needed a
flower because then she’d know I had a date, and she’d know I didn’t want a date,
and why. And then? And then...? I couldn’t see anything after that. There was
nothing
after that. It was gray static,
like the end of a videotape.

My mom looked over at me. “I really wish you’d worn your suit
jacket, Oliver.”

***

We rolled to a stop in front of the school, in a lot full of
kids and parents.

“I’ll pick you up at nine,” my mother said, but I was already
out of the car. She sighed. “Are you sure I can’t get out?”

I pretended not to hear. Reaching back, I swung shut the door.
I wanted her to leave before she had a chance to talk to anyone.

Kids were milling around the playground, posing for photos while
waiting to be let into the school. The boys in their suits were easy to recognize
but I was shocked by how different the girls looked—their hair was up, they
had makeup on, their gowns brushed poofily against the basketball lines on the blacktop.
Why could we not have worn jeans?

And some couples were holding hands; I averted my eyes. My awareness
of Micah, my awareness that I was aware of him, this had been private knowledge,
an unfortunate fact, easy to keep under wraps. I thought I’d be able keep it under
wraps forever. A perpetual bachelor. Why would anyone know? Why would it ever come
up? But tonight it was being brought up, in supposed celebration. With gowns and
balloons. Wait, what? Balloons? It didn’t even make sense.

I spotted Tyson at the back of the playground, standing alone
beside a telephone pole. He had on khakis and a wide argyle tie. He was kicking
at the dirt as though his life depended on it.

“Seen Taylor?” he said when I walked over.

“Nope,” I said while gazing around nervously. “This is
stupid already.” I hadn’t watched my mother leave but our car was no longer in the
lot so she must have complied. I still didn’t see Taylor either. Maybe she forgot.
Maybe she was sick. I found myself hoping she got in a car accident on her way here—then
I felt funny and looked down at my shoes. This thing I was
was
making me wish things like that about someone like Taylor
Corgan
,
who wore pink barrettes and was obsessed with butterflies in third grade. This thing
I was made me want her to die.

Dwight and Michael showed up together. Michael’s parents were
flaky so Dwight’s sometimes looked after him. We had to pose for photos.

“Are you boys all going stag?” asked Dwight’s mom from behind
the flash. The word was like a taunt now.

“‘
Cept
for Ollie,” said Tyson.

“Ollie’s got a girlfriend,” Michael snickered.

“Where is she, Ollie? Do you want to get her in the picture?”

I shrugged.

Mrs. Macklin pursed her lips. “You’re still missing Boyd too,”
she observed, then snapped a few more shots.

Soon Mr. Allen, our principal, pushed open the double doors
and kicked down the doorstops. Behind him the cafeteria was lit in a rosy glow.

“They’re giving you dinner?” Dwight’s mom asked, slipping the
camera into her purse.

“Spaghetti,” Michael said.

“Dwight, don’t eat any ricotta, remember. I don’t want you getting
the squirts in your suit.”

“
Mom
,” Dwight said.

Locked in my group’s gravity I approached the mass of students
funneling into the cafeteria. Moments after I passed inside, a hand seized my wrist.

“There you are,” said a girl named Erika. Erika was friends with
Taylor. “She’s been
waiting
for you.”

She pulled me alone toward a row of windows, the kind with chicken
wire between the panes. Taylor was leaning against one of them, her palms cupping
her elbows against her chest. Her gown was yellow, patterned with sunflowers. These
were the only flowers between us; when she saw my hands were empty, that I had neither
a corsage nor even something wild picked at the edge of the playground, disappointment
saddened her face. She quickly covered it with a smile.

“The streamers are cool,” I said, looking around, flushed with
my inability to meet her one request.

“You look handsome, Ollie,” she said.

“Thanks.” A reflex of manners made me want to add
You too
,
but if I did that, what would be next?

Around us chairs were beginning to scrape across the tile as
couples took seats at the tables we ate at every day, but which tonight looked glamorous,
with white paper cloths and narrow vases holding roses and sprigs of baby’s breath.
The other half of the cafeteria was cleared, the extra tables and chairs stacked
high against the walls to allow for a dance floor.

“Should we sit down?” said Taylor, waiting to be led.

“Um. I guess. I’m going to go make sure Boyd gets here OK first,
OK?”

“Oh. But. You’ll be back? Should I find us a table?”

I didn’t know what to say so I tried to smile, but my face felt
as stiff as my brain.

On my way to the door I passed the table Tyson and Michael and
Dwight had chosen. It had a few empty chairs; Tyson was draping his suit jacket
over the one beside his, I assumed to save it for Boyd.

“Going out to wait for Boyd,” I said.

“Should we save you a seat?” Michael asked.

“What?”

I exited the cafeteria confused. Was I expected to sit with my
friends? Of course not. But if Michael thought I could, then
I
could think I could. Taylor could sit with
her friends and I could sit with mine. That would be OK. I realized my hands were
shaking.

I sat down on the curb and watched the parking lot. Behind me
someone—Miss
Onedo
—told me the spaghetti was
on its way out.

“Just waiting for Boyd Wren,” I told her. “It’s important that
I make sure all my friends get here.”

I heard her laugh at me, even as I was realizing how stupid I
sounded, how earnest. As if I had a goal, as if it were important—I wasn’t
hiding, I was working. I wasn’t being hideous, I was being thoughtful.

I only had the luxury of waiting a few minutes before Boyd, in
suit and tie, spilled out of his parents’ red minivan. I walked him inside.

“My dad doesn’t know how to tie a tie,” he explained, smoothing
the white silk against his black shirt, “so we had to get one of the neighbors.”
He looked around. “Where are you and Taylor sitting?”

“Taylor’s probably with her friends,” I said. A glance confirmed
she was with Amy; both of them were looking at me expectantly. “I’ll sit with you
guys.”

“Ollie, that’s lame. You should go sit with her, you’re her date.”

“It’s fine. It’s just spaghetti.”

It wasn’t just spaghetti, though. Not to the hair-netted lunch-ladies
who volunteered to cook it for us on the only night we were polite enough to say
thank you. Not to the chaperons overseeing their charges’ first tottering steps
into adulthood. And not to all my classmates, in their suits, in their gowns, paper
napkins carefully draped across their laps, spinning pasta on dented forks delicately
so as not to spray sauce. Not even to me; it felt like a last meal to me. While
I ate I felt like everyone’s eyes were on me, willing me to get up and go sit with
Taylor. Under that weight I twirled my spaghetti and breathed.

***

Stag.

Stag had offered me an escape, a chance even to have fun, the
way Boyd and Michael and Tyson were having fun now, doing robotic dance moves under
the colored lights. The only thing stag had required was that I commit to it. I
had balked, I had failed to commit.

Now I was being punished. Now I was standing at the edge of the
cafeteria beneath a tower of stacked chairs, seeing intermittently past dancing
bodies the tears-moistened cheeks of Taylor
Corgan
glistening
in the lights. Now I was feeling the weight in my chest, the breath I couldn’t get
a hold of. I had imagined that not sitting with Taylor at dinner would make her
forget about me, lose interest, find someone better, but I was wrong, it had only
made everything afterward more important. Not sitting with her at dinner was rude.
Turning down her offers to dance was monstrous.

Yet I did turn them down, again and again—when the offers
came from her friends, when they came from mine. Even when I saw in her eyes the
dawning realization that the night she had so looked forward to was crumbling around
her like a dream scraping into a nightmare. Even when she cried and pretended not
to be crying.

My friends, realizing it was up to them to salvage things for
a crying girl in a sunflower dress, turned on me at 8:30, when there was only a
half-hour left. I was not only a monster then but an outnumbered one, which was
the only thing worse.

“Ollie, jeez,
look
at her,” Boyd said, directing my eyes across the dance floor with a stab of his
hand. “You need to go dance with her while you still have time.”

“She’s been crying half the
night
,” Tyson said. And it
was true: Erika and Amy were ministering to Taylor with tissues and plastic cups
of water, and casting furious glares at me.

“I’m waiting for the right song.”

“Never mind the song. Just go dance!”

“I’m stag.”

“You’re not stag, Ollie, you’re her date,” Boyd said. “Stop being
such a fucking wimp.”

Having the swear word directed at me in anger for the first time
startled me. And from
Boyd?

“I’ll do it when I’m ready, Boyd, so leave me alone.”

I turned toward the chicken-wire windows and put my elbows on
the sill. I was face to face with my own awful reflection. This time shadows of
wire crisscrossed my skin but they might as well have been Micah’s handwritten name.
I closed my eyes tight and counted. Before I hit three something yanked me back
toward the dance floor, a yank that closed my throat. Tyson was pulling me by my
tie.

“Come, Ollie,” he said, as though to him I were an obstinate
dog. He dragged me a few feet, past a few dancing couples, before my struggling
outweighed his commitment. And when he released me my instinct wasn’t to punch him
or scream, but to straighten my tie and get everything back to normal. No one could
see how much my throat hurt or how much my heart weighed, but they could see my
tie.

Then Boyd, from behind, grabbed my shoulders and started steering
me toward Taylor. I stretched my legs out stiffly to brace myself but he was bigger
than I was, and stronger. My rubber-soled shoes scuffed jerkily across the tile;
the squeaking wasn’t audible over the music but I could feel the rigid vibrations
rattling painfully up my bones.

“Boyd!” I yelled, half crying. “Leave me alone!”

I wrestled out of his grip near the center of the dance floor
and we stood there beneath the mirror ball, breathing hard, looking at each other,
and I hated him. I hated him so much.

“Whatever,” he said, lights playing over his face. “But see those
tears?” He pointed to where Taylor was standing, though now she was facing the wall,
unable to bear watching a boy resist so strenuously the possibility of being near
her. “The last song is coming up. You better fix this.”