Tilt - Alan Cumyn [38]
Stan felt something in his belly turn sour.
A boyfriend at this point would just say, “Wanna dance?” And Janine would throw her arms around him . . .
“Do you want to get a drink?” Janine said to him instead.
What did he want?
He wanted to breathe in her intoxication. He wanted her to bury her head in the hollow of his shoulder. She was a little taller than him but it still might work.
He wanted the music to be so much better than this. He wanted to open his eyes slowly and find that her mouth was searching for his. What would that be like?
He wanted . . .
He wanted to not be standing all alone in the middle of everything — of nothing — while she moved off to get a cup of juice.
—
And then she disappeared. One moment she was sipping from a paper cup and the white-dress girl bumped her elbow and Janine splashed something on her own killer dress. It was black, anyway. How much could show in a darkened auditorium? And then the two of them were heading off to the washroom. So Stan went to the men’s room and checked himself out in the mirror. He looked stupid, and the jeans didn’t fit. With that belt cinched tight and the cuffs rolled up he looked like a farmer.
He needed to call his mom to tell her where he was. If he had a cellphone he’d call her right from there, in the men’s can.
It smelled of wine and someone’s cigarette.
Those same muscles that had run out the back door at home now wanted to run out of this suffocating place.
She’d held his hand most of the way on the rainy car ride here.
Why hadn’t he just said, “Wanna dance?”
He didn’t know any steps. But she would have rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder and they would have clutched and shuffled, welded together for infinity.
—
Back in the dark again, the music still tortured the air. Next slow dance, whatever it was, he’d just grab her and everything else would disappear.
Where was she, anyway?
Stan couldn’t see her on the dance floor. The whole crowd was up writhing, wriggling, Gillian and Joe in the middle, clutched like lovers.
Stan didn’t know where to stand, what to do, where to put his hands. He shuffled over to the drink table. It was fifty cents for an apple juice and he had nothing in his pockets.
They were Janine’s pockets.
He smiled dopily at the guy behind the table and backed away as if he’d planned all along to pick up one of the paper cups and look at it and put it down again without drinking or paying.
No harm no foul.
There she was! Janine exited the girls’ room with the white-dress girl.
The girl was welded up against her. Janine took the girl’s hand and removed it from her waist.
Stan felt like he was in a movie all of a sudden. Janine dropped the girl’s arm and looked around the room — searching for him? — but she couldn’t see him. She was real, he was in a movie, this was all happening and it wasn’t.
She liked girls. Simple as that. He’d known it and had fooled himself into not knowing it. The truth of it was like a ball bouncing hard off the rim straight down into his face.
She’d dragged Stan to this dance to be a cover for . . . for what?
She was scanning the room, looking for him. But he was turned to nothing.
Janine saw him trying to push through. He felt stopped but his body kept going. Past the writhing, dancing families, out the doors into hard rain but night now, too, and again no umbrella, no jacket.
Where?
Feet slipping on the pavement. It was a drenched street in an unknown part of the city. There was Janine’s parents’ car parked with dozens of others. Why hadn’t he paid attention to where they were going? It was colder even than it had been that afternoon. But he was running.
He was going to cramp up soon. He was going too fast. Lactic acid