“No, I mean, you know,” Alex protested. “What is it?”
“It’s cherry,” Eerie said flatly. “Do you want it, or what?”
Alex looked at Eerie, and then hesitantly took the proffered candy from the smiling, sparkling girl, trying not to make a face as he stuck it in his mouth. He sucked on it cautiously, but it tasted like any other cherry-flavored candy he’d ever had. He wanted to ask her again what it was, what it was she had given him, but she was already pulling him toward the dance floor, closer to the giant stacks of speakers and the devastating pulse of the bass, her hands wrapped around his own.
Alex shook his head, confused, and tried haplessly to pull away. To him, somehow, it appeared that Eerie was sheathed in a soft golden light, a gentle luminescence that pervaded her, radiating out from a core that smoldered somewhere within her. She stepped backwards through the crowd thoughtlessly, somehow never touching anyone in the press of bodies, pulling him along through the haze of golden dust that trailed behind her. He gave a worried glance at the people around them, but none of them seemed to find anything unusual in the glowing girl trailing luminescent dust in their midst.
Alex wondered again about the candy. For some reason, he found himself thinking about the cloud of monarch butterflies from his dream, orange wings against a blue sky, somewhere he couldn’t remember visiting, somewhere he could hear the ocean. There was sadness in the memory, a sweet kind of sadness that he wasn’t exactly adverse to.
He managed to extricate himself when they reached the dance floor, batting her away gently and making excuses, eventually making his way alone to one arm of the speaker array, sitting down on top of the vibrating pile of speakers, next to an intertwined couple and a passed-out teenager in drag. They all seemed very young, somehow, Alex thought, though he wasn’t sure that he was actually older than they were. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he might have actually been more embarrassed sitting there then he would have been staying on the dance floor.
Eerie pouted briefly, tapping her foot and glaring at him. Then she shrugged, and turned away from him, gliding to the center of the humid floor, and then spinning around in a slow circle, her eyes closed. Alex sat with his legs dangling off a column of stacked woofers, the surface beneath him pulsating with the music, his skull reverberating with the bass beat, and he watched Eerie dance.
Later, he would not be able to describe it, although he would remember it clearly. She was not, he would say haltingly, an amazing dancer, not exactly. Not that he would know, having never danced in his life. But, he didn’t think it was entirely whatever she had given him, though he felt an exhilarating combination of calm and elation that he could only attribute to drugs. No, he would try and explain, there was something special about Eerie dancing.
Margot would tell him much later about other nights the same thing had happened; at retro-styled swing clubs in Los Angeles or hip-hop clubs in Baltimore, in the parking lot of a Phish show outside Phoenix, minutes before closing at a basement club in London, where a small crowd of puzzled transvestites had watched her dance to electro. Eerie, she would tell him, simply liked to dance.
Also, Margot would add, frowning, she has a thing for fucked up people.
But he found out those things later, after he had watched her dance, after he had fallen for her a little bit, in that intense and irrevocably irrational way that even he knew was a hallmark of total naivety. Still, that knowledge didn’t change anything for Alex. Watching Eerie dance, knowing that eventually she would come back to sit next to him, that was the first truly good thing that had happened to him since his home had burned to the ground. Maybe before that, too. He couldn’t remember that well.
She spun and twirled and the light around her had the quality of honey, warm and amber-toned, ambient and soothing. She was not athletic, not flashy, and not dramatic. Her hair hung down in front of her eyes, her sweatshirt slipped down to expose the gentle slope of shoulders, the rise of her collarbone above her tight black top. She moved with a self-assurance and grace he had never seen in her, not in any previous circumstance, but he found himself wondering how it was that he hadn’t always seen it.
People should have stared. They must have seen the sparkling girl, making slow revolutions through the dance floor like she was alone on it, in the midst of the press of bodies but never actually touching anyone. She was vibrant, gleaming with an inner radiance, a honey light. They must have seen her.
Alex couldn’t see anyone or anything else. He stared, his head pleasantly spinning, his heart filled with a benign euphoria, a mild intoxication. The world around him softened, became universally warm and gentle. The light around Eerie seemed to pass right through him, like a current of warm water, or the sound of a summer wind brushing over long brown grass. He tried to hold up his hands to the light, and he could not, or he did not want to. There was no way to be certain. He sat and watched Eerie dance.
And eventually, she came back to him, smiling and breathing hard, her face flushed, soaked with sweat. Alex reached for her without thinking, watching it happen without a trace of panic or anxiety, and she took his hand and squeezed it with her own for a moment, before letting go with a smile.
“What…” Alex croaked, pausing to drink greedily from the bottle of water that she offered him. “What was in the candy you gave me?”
Eerie laughed and patted him on the head. Her smile was benign, tolerant and amused. She beamed at him indulgently, like a favored child.
“Bubble gum, Alex.” She paused, then her expression turned suspicious. “You didn’t swallow it, did you?”
“What? No,” Alex shook his head, confused. He found himself wondering what he had done with the gum, anyway. All he had in his mouth was a soggy paper stick. “I didn’t mean that. What made me all fucked up?”
“Oh,” Eerie said with concern, sitting down next to him on the speaker. “Is it bad?”
She peered into his eyes, concerned, and Alex couldn’t help but grin at her until she smiled back.
“No, not at all,” he said earnestly. “I was wondering, you know, because I don’t really have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”
Eerie looked at her hands shyly.
“It’s just me, Alex.” She smiled at him hesitantly. “Because I… because it was in my mouth, you see? Because my whole body is like a drug, Alex.”
“No shit?”
At the time, anyway, it sounded reasonable enough.
“Uh-huh,” Eerie said, nodding. “For normal people, anyway. That’s how the Fey communicate with each other, chemically. Pheromones and particular compounds in… you know,” she said, clearly embarrassed. “Sweat. Saliva. That sort of thing.”
Eerie blushed, and Alex wished he could think of something cool to say to change the mood. Alex snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Her small round face was earnest, and it was easy to see how nervous she was. His eyes drifted down to her lap, to the strip of thigh that showed between the hem of her skirt and the top of her black knee socks, and for a moment, his train of thought disintegrated. Then he caught himself, and quickly looked back up at Eerie’s face, but she did not appear to have noticed anything. She was staring off at the still-packed dance floor, the crowd increasingly disheveled, energetic and sweaty.
“Is this like empathy?” Alex asked doubtfully. It didn’t feel anything like what Rebecca did — he had no special awareness of Eerie, her thoughts, or her feelings; rather, a general sense of well-being, a fading physical high, and a strange, benign fuzziness.
Eerie shook her head emphatically.
“No, not at all. It’s all chemistry. I like being around parties. They make me happy. When I’m happy, the people who, you know, come into contact with me, they are too.”
Alex sat next to her, and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything at all to talk about. Eerie sat restlessly beside him, kicking her legs against the speaker they hung off of, watching the people dance with obvious desire to rejoin them. He wished he could have thought of a good reason to make her stay there, beside him.