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By Root 626 0

it was the flask of brandy she had told him she would bring. He was surprised how papery her dress felt, how rough its stitches were, like seams in one of the meal sacks his father bought for the trapline. Her body pressed the material like the flour: solid, yet her waist was small. His own hands felt big, holding her. Gracie’s hand, after it slipped him the flask, slid under his jacket and warmed his kidneys. He felt her against his crotch. Because of her dress, with its layers of material, no one could see how close they were; he felt her heat and became aroused, which puzzled him, because he had not thought about Gracie as having to do with sex. He had come here with her because she had asked him to; everyone came to the dance, and Gracie had asked him unsentimentally in the corridor, her little face composed, in case he said no. Could you become aroused just by touching a girl, even if you felt nothing special towards her? It troubled him, but he was heated and excited just the same, and did not think of moving his body away. He could smell her perfume. The whole gym was thick with a scent like that of the sickly lilies a family had brought the boy next to him the night he had spent in hospital. Gracie moved her other hand on his chest and played with the flowers in his boutonniere. His heart beat under the flowers and she found it and put her hand on it; she knew exactly where to touch him. Her hand on his heart almost made him cry. He had not realized how much his heart had waited for someone to touch it, physically, with a hand as strong as Gracie’s. It was as if someone had given her a booklet on how to melt a boy. He had been worried about the night: what to do, how to dance. With Gracie, all he had to do was stand there and move naturally to the music, and she carried the whole problem of how to hold each other and what to talk about.

“It’s cry,” she said now. She raised her cheek so it grazed his neck.

“Cry?”

“It’s where eagles cry. Not fly. No one even notices. The grad committee decided the real words were too sad for the theme, so they changed them. Cry. She plagiarized half the song in her speech.”

“She did?”

“The road is long, there are mountains in our way, but we climb steps every day.” Blah blah blah. You didn’t notice that?” Gracie said this as if being slightly stupid were a lovable trait in Wayne. She touched his jawline and moved her hand across it; he felt the pad of flesh between his testicle and anus tighten and loosen. He remembered she had told him, during spin the bottle in grade seven, how she had been kissing lots of boys since she was four. The peaks at the top of her lips were still sharp, and the scoop between them still had three little freckles, stars behind the mountains.

“You have aftershave on.” She took a hungry little sniff. “Let’s go out behind the school and drink the brandy.”

Parents and some teachers had volunteered as chaperones, but they weren’t in gear yet. They were still talking to each other, eating date squares, and fixing balloons that had come unmoored from their Scotch tape. Some male teachers were dancing with bolder girls who were on the volleyball team or the grad committee and who had been teasing the teachers about this dance for months.

“How did she get her hair like that?” Wayne asked, as Donna Palliser twirled past in the arms of Mr. Ollerhead, who looked flattered and dazed. Donna’s hair had new platinum curls, lifted above a sheen of combed hair that followed her head like the pelt of a seal. “How do the curls stay there, and what makes them so fat?”

“It’s a hairpiece. She got it done at Details and Designs in Goose Bay. She had to sleep in it last night.”

“How?”

“You use two pillows and an empty Javex bottle. You have to make a kind of mould and sleep in it, and you can’t move all night.”

Wayne looked at Gracie’s home-styled curls, pulled on top of her head too, but without the mould, the lacquer, or the Sun-In spray.

“Do you like hers better?”

“It’s pretty artificial looking.”

“But do you like it?”

Wayne admired it because it was the pinnacle