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 4 — THE NEXT DAY
I went back the next day and found him in a corridor on the third floor.
I want to be honest that I spent that night deciding not to, twice.
Because there is a version of what I was about to do that is a rich woman feeling something in a cafe and buying herself the feeling off a man who cannot say no, and I know what it is like to be the object in somebody else’s good deed and I have hated it every single time.
The first time I decided not to was at about eleven at night, and the reason was that I did not want to be the school friend who turns up thirty years later to find out he has come down in the world.
That is not a noble reason. That is vanity with a coat on.
The second time was at about half past three, and that one was real.
I lay in a hotel room and worked out that I had sat one table away in that canteen with a sandwich in my hand and said nothing, and that there was no version of the following morning in which I was a person who had behaved well.
If I went back, I was a woman doing something about a thing she had watched happen and not stopped.
If I did not go back, I was a woman who had watched it happen and gone home.
There was no clean option left by half past three and that is what got me out of that bed, and I would like anybody reading this to notice that the thing that moved me was not kindness.
It was that I had already failed once by then and there was only one direction left that was not worse.
So what I had decided by about four in the morning was that I would not offer him anything. I would say one sentence and see what he did with it.
