At prom one boy asked me to dance and everybody else in that room spent three hours not looking at me. Thirty years later he mopped up my spilled coffee in a hospital cafe in worn scrubs, counted the last coins in his pocket to buy me another, and did not recognise me at all.
PART 1 — ANOTHER WAY
Six months before prom a man who had been drinking went through a red light on Corwen Road and I have not walked properly since.
I was seventeen. One week I was in a shop with two friends holding a dress up against myself in a mirror, and then I was learning how to live in a body that had stopped taking instructions.
By the May I nearly did not go.
My mother stood in my bedroom doorway and said, “You deserve one decent night.”
So I went.
I spent about three hours in the corner by the sound desk with my dress arranged over my legs, watching everybody else, and it is not that people were cruel.
It is that four hundred people managed, for three hours, not to look directly at one chair.
Then Rye Colvin came over.
He was the quarterback. He was that boy, in that school, in that year, and he was the last human being I expected.
“Hey. Want to dance?”
“I can’t.”
He said, “Then we’ll find another way.”
And we did. He got behind me and turned that chair, and then he came round and held both my hands and moved us, and he was not good at it and did not care.
