One time after the music started somebody stayed behind. She was taking a long time running the water, washing her hands, combing her hair. She was going to think it funny that I stayed in so long. I had better go out and wash my hands, and maybe while I was washing them she would leave.
It was Mary Fortune. I knew her by name, because she was an officer of the Girls’ Athletic Society and she was on the Honour Roll and she was always organizing things. She had something to do with organizing this dance; she had been around to all the classrooms asking for volunteers to do the decorations. She was in Grade Eleven or Twelve.
“Nice and cool in here,” she said. “I came in to get cooled off. I get so hot.”
She was still combing her hair when I finished my hands. “Do you like the band?” she said.
“Its all right.” I didn’t really know what to say. I was surprised at her, an older girl, taking this time to talk to me.
“I don’t. I can’t stand it. I hate dancing when I don’t like the band. Listen. They’re so choppy. I’d just as soon not dance as dance to that.”
I combed my hair. She leaned against a basin, watching me.
“I don’t want to dance and don’t particularly want to stay in here. Let’s go and have a cigarette.”
“Where?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
At the end of the washroom there was a door. It was unlocked and led into a dark closet full of mops and pails. She had me hold the door open, to get the washroom light, until she found the knob of another door. This door opened into darkness.
“I can’t turn on the light or somebody might see,” she said. “It’s the janitor’s room.” I reflected that athletes always seemed to know more than the rest of us about the school as a building; they knew where things were kept and they were always coming out of unauthorized doors with a bold, preoccupied air. “Watch out where you’re going,” she said. “Over at the far end there’s some stairs. They go up to a closet on the second floor. The door’s locked at the top, but there’s like a partition between the stairs and the room. So if we sit on the steps, even if by chance someone did come in here, they wouldn’t see us.”
“Wouldn’t they smell smoke?” I said.
“Oh, well. Live dangerously.”
There was a high window over the stairs which gave us a little light. Mary Fortune had cigarettes and matches in her purse. I had not smoked before except the cigarettes Lonnie and I made ourselves, using papers and tobacco stolen from her father; they came apart in the middle. These were much better.
“The only reason I even came tonight,” Mary Fortune said, “is because I am responsible for the decorations and I wanted to see, you know, how it looked once people got in there and everything. Otherwise why bother? I’m not boy-crazy.”
In the light from the high window I could see her narrow, scornful face, her dark skin pitted with acne, her teeth pushed together at the front, making her look adult and commanding.
“Most girls are. Haven’t you noticed that? The greatest collection of boy-crazy girls you could imagine is right here in this school.”
I was grateful for her attention, her company and her cigarette. I said I thought so too.
“Like this afternoon. This afternoon I was trying to get them to hang the bells and junk. They just get up on the ladders and fool around with boys. They don’t care if it ever gets decorated. It’s just an excuse. That’s the only aim they have in life, fooling around with boys. As far as I’m concerned, they’re idiots.”
We talked about teachers, and things at school. She said she wanted to be a physical education teacher and she would have to go to college for that, but her parents did not have enough money. She said she planned to work her own way through, she wanted to be independent anyway, she would work in the cafeteria and in the summer she would do farm work, like picking tobacco. Listening to her, I felt the acute phase of my unhappiness passing. Here was someone who had suffered the same defeat as I had—I saw that—but she was full of energy and self respect. She had thought of other things to do. She would pick tobacco.
We stayed there talking and smoking during the long pause in the music, when, outside, they were having doughnuts and coffee. When the music started again Mary said, “Look, do we have to hang around here any longer? Let’s get our coats and go. We can go down to Lee’s and have a hot chocolate and talk in comfort, why not?”
We felt our way across the janitor’s room, carrying ashes and cigarette butts in our hands. In the closet, we stopped and listened to make sure there was nobody in the washroom. We came back into the light and threw the ashes into the toilet. We had to go out and cut across the dance-floor to the cloak-room, which was beside the outside door.
A dance was just beginning. “Go round the edge of the floor,” Mary said. “Nobody’ll notice us.”
I followed her. I didn’t look at anybody. I didn’t look for Lonnie. Lonnie was probably not going to be my friend any more, not as much as before anyway. She was what Mary would call boy-crazy.
I found that I was not so frightened, now that I had made up my mind to leave the dance behind. I was not waiting for anybody to choose me. I had my own plans. I did not have to smile or make signs for luck. It did not matter to me. I was on my way to have a hot chocolate, with my friend.
A boy said something to me. He was in my way. I thought he must be telling me that I had dropped something or that I couldn’t go that way or that the cloakroom was locked. I didn’t understand that he was asking me to dance until he said it over again. It was Raymond Bolting from our class, whom I had never talked to in my life. He thought I meant yes. He put his hand on my waist and almost without meaning to, I began to dance.
We moved to the middle of the floor. I was dancing. My legs had forgotten to tremble and my hands to sweat. I was dancing with a boy who had asked me. Nobody told him to, he didn’t have to, he just asked me. Was it possible, could I believe it, was there nothing the matter with me after all?
I thought that I ought to tell him there was a mistake, that I was just leaving, I was going to have a hot chocolate with my girl friend. But I did not say anything. My face was making certain delicate adjustments, achieving with no effort at all the grave absent-minded look of these who were chosen, those who danced. This was the face that Mary Fortune saw, when she looked out of the cloakroom door, her scarf already around her head. I made a weak waving motion with the hand that lay on the boy’s shoulder, indicating that I apologized, that I didn’t know what had happened and also that it was no use waiting for me. Then I turned my head away, and when I looked again she was gone.
Raymond Bolting took me home and Harold Simons took Lonnie home. We all walked together as far as Lonnie’s corner. The boys were having an argument about a hockey game, which Lonnie and I could not follow. Then we separated into couples and Raymond continued with me the conversation he had been having with Harold. He did not seem to notice that he was now talking to me instead. Once or twice I said, “Well I don’t know I didn’t see that game,” but after a while I decided just to say “H’m hmm,” and that seemed to be all that was necessary.
One other thing he said was, “I didn’t realize you lived such a long ways out.” And he sniffled. The cold was making my nose run a little too, and I worked my fingers through the candy wrappers in my coat pocket until I found a shabby Kleenex. I didn’t know whether I ought to offer it to him or not, but he sniffled so loudly that I finally said, “I just have this one Kleenex, it probably isn’t even clean, it probably has ink on it. But if I was to tear it in half we’d each have something.”