The Dance
Les looked up. Mo wanted to go to her, hug her, but an unfamiliar awkwardness hung between them. She sat at the other end of the sofa from Les and crossed her legs, trying to look relaxed. “I see you’re on your way to the dance,” she said, not as evenly as she would have liked. Petty questions ran through her mind: Did you forget who you’re going with? Did you come here out of habit? But she was smart for a change. “Why are you here?” she asked. “I mean, I’m glad you dropped in. I want to talk to you. About what happened. But I was going to do it tomorrow.”
In response, Les made a show of rolling her eyes to the left. She tipped her head that way, too. Mo looked across the room. Nathan sat perched on the edge of one of the chairs, watching them. She’d been so focused on Les, she hadn’t noticed him. “Nathan, go play or something.”
“I don’t feel like it.” He swung his legs. They hit the base of the chair with a thump. He did it again. Thump.
“Don’t you have homework?” Mo asked.
“Nope.”
“Why don’t you go find Andrew?”
“I don’t feel like it.” Thump.
If he didn’t stop swinging his flaming legs, Mo would tear them out of their sockets. “Stop with the legs, all right? Go find Andrew. We want to be alone.”
“I don’t feel like it.” Thump.
“I know why he doesn’t want to leave,” a voice piped up from the doorway. Andrew entered and plunked himself down on one of the other chairs.
Oh, great. “Why doesn’t—”
“He wants to see you kiss.” Andrew squeezed his eyes shut, puckered his lips, and smacked them loudly.
Nathan giggled, then mimicked Andrew.
“Mama!” Mo shouted. “Get these two out of here. Mama!”
Mama rushed into the living room. “What’s all the—” She put her hands on her hips. “All right, that’s enough. Go upstairs and play.”
The smacking noises stopped. “We don’t want to,” Nathan said.
“Well, you can’t stay in here, so if you don’t want to go upstairs, you can help me cut the flowers I brought in earlier. Unless you’ve changed your mind about going upstairs.”
“Upstairs,” Andrew said, looking at Nathan. They tore from the room. Mama winked at Mo and followed them out.
Les chuckled. “I bet you wish they were back at the Indoctrination Academy.”
Mo met Les’s eyes and managed a weak smile. For a moment, she felt the comfortable connection that usually existed between them. But only for a moment. Les was all dressed up to go out without her. Les would dance and laugh and who knew what else, while she sat at home alone. Not that she could blame Les, who was only doing exactly what she’d told her to do. And looked so cute while doing it. “You look nice.”
“Thanks,” Les said, her cheeks colouring slightly.
“Is it Patty . . . that you’re taking to the dance?”
“No.”
Mo was momentarily speechless. Did Les have a new girl every five minutes? No, it must be Patty. She must have heard Les wrong. “But you were having lunch together.”
“No, we weren’t.”
“I saw you! And you looked pretty cozy.”
Les’s face tightened. “First of all, we didn’t have lunch together. I ate alone. She showed up later. And as far as what you think you saw, did you see me doing anything?”
Mo replayed her memory. Les sitting at the picnic table. Patty reaching out and touching Les’s cheek, then leaving. “Well, no,” she admitted.
“I think she noticed you watching.”
“Oh.” Come to think of it, Patty had glanced in her direction. Mo hadn’t thought anything of it at the time; she’d been so shocked at seeing Patty in her place that she hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d stood paralyzed, her mind blank, until Les called her name.
“She did ask me to the dance,” Les said. “But I said no. And I know she talked to you about it. She didn’t tell me exactly what she said, but I gather it was something about us acting like Chosens when we aren’t.”
Blood rushed to Mo’s face. She wanted to blurt “I hope we are,” but she bit her tongue. “I’m sorry. They ambushed me after class. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t agree with her, but she said she was going to ask you to the dance whether I agreed or not.”
“But then you not only told me that you didn’t want to go to the dance, but that you couldn’t go to the lake. You made it sound as if you didn’t even want to date.”
“I was trying to do the right thing.” Mo felt her chin trembling. “They made it sound like we were doing something wrong. And I thought . . .”
“Thought what?” Les said, an edge to her voice.
Mo couldn’t—she couldn’t tell Les that inside, deep inside, she was afraid she’d eventually be cast aside for someone prettier, someone taller, someone curvier, someone who looked stunning on Les’s arm. How Les turned heads and she didn’t. How she pretended not to notice the coy looks girls shot Les in the corridors. How invisible she felt when girls flirted with Les. About the gnawing doubt that grew every time Les smiled at another girl, stopped to talk to someone pretty, paid another girl a compliment.
“Thought what, Mo?” Les repeated.
Les looked concerned, but she was also dressed for the dance, the dance they weren’t attending together. “It doesn’t matter what I thought,” Mo said.
“You can’t mean that. It doesn’t matter? Our relationship doesn’t matter?”
“Les, I made a mistake, okay? I wish I could take back everything I said about the dance, about us, about everything. But it’s too late.”
Les’s brow furrowed. “Why is it too late?”
“Well, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I guess it’ll depend on whether you’ll still want to talk tomorrow.”
“Why can’t we talk now?”
Mo swallowed. “Because you have a date waiting for you.” Her chin started to tremble again. She looked at her lap.
“Mo, I’m hoping to go to the dance with you,” Les said softly. “I don’t want to go to the dance with anyone else. I never did.”
“Really?” Mo lifted her head to study Les’s face.
“Do you think I’d stop here first if I was going with someone else? You think I’m that mean?”
Mo sighed. “No. That’s why I asked why you were here. Because I couldn’t understand why you’d stop in.”