Last Dance (11 page)

But what Molly liked best of all was that the ballroom was shadowy.

Once, during a wild number that was all drum and screaming, they turned up the lights and added some flickering colors, and everybody loved that.

Now it was dark again, and Molly slid from fern to piano and listened.

“Come on, let’s kiss and make up,” Con said. “Let’s dance, okay?”

Anne shook her head. Just once, just slightly.

Con’s chin tipped up—just once, just slightly. He was getting mad. He said, “I’m sorry it happened. Let’s not dwell on it.”

“I have to know why you did it, Con.”

“I
didn’t
do it, Anne. I’m sick of this discussion. Let’s dance, huh?”

“You did,” she argued. “And I need to understand why. Do you hate me? Do you hate our baby? You haven’t asked about her.”

“Anne, she isn’t ours any more. She got adopted. Let
them
worry about her.”

Molly was tickled. She had taken quite a risk, shoving Anne into the water. If Con had realized she was doing it, she’d have dug her grave with him. But Anne didn’t, and Con didn’t, and nobody else did either.

Molly gave Con and Anne about another fifteen minutes to break up forever. Of course, he’d have to drive Anne home. Anne might be able to work him over going home. But Molly didn’t think Anne would bother this time.

And then something happened to make Molly totally happy.

Kip—good old, organizing old, charitable old Kip—came across the room to rescue Anne. Well, Kip and Anne might not figure out what was going to happen next, but Molly sure knew, and she sure loved it. Con might hang in there with one girl he used to love, but Con would
never
stay when two girls were both trying to make him say he was sorry.

Lee Hamilton cleaned up a mess of spilled soda somebody had just reported over by the piano. He took a long time mopping. Some of the girls were really lovely, and he liked watching them dance.

Kip was standing with her so-called boyfriend. Why weren’t they dancing? If he, Lee, were here with Kip, he would be dancing.

Her boyfriend said, “Listen, Kip. I’m not going to get involved. They want to run around the cliffs in the dark, that’s their problem, not ours.”

“Mike, you’ve got to stop them. Come on, you’re a boy, make them stop.”

Mike groaned and rolled his eyes. “Kip, nobody is going to
make
Con or Gary do anything, least of all me. You can make your little brothers obey you, and no doubt you can make your girlfriends obey you, and you can make your yearbook staff obey you. But you can’t push Con and Gary around tonight, do you hear me? This is their dance, they bought tickets, and if they want to dance up on Two Cliffs with Anne and Beth Rose, so be it.”

“But they could fall,” Kip protested.

Mike said, “Kip, they don’t want to die at seventeen. They don’t want to get their bones broken and their lungs punctured. They’ll be careful, okay? They’ll watch what they’re doing. So just leave it, okay?”

Kip glared at him. And then she whirled. If her boyfriend wouldn’t stop Gary and Con, she would give it another try herself. Lee hadn’t noticed the skirt before, but now he saw how full it was, and how it swished like a ballet dance when she spun around so angrily.

Mike caught Kip’s arm and held it hard. Mike wasn’t interested in dancing. He was just furious. “I am so sick of the way you interfere with everybody, Kip. It just so happens that I’d kind of like to walk up to Two Cliffs at night myself, and don’t interfere with me, and don’t come along. Got it?”

Kip flinched as if Mike had hit her. She actually turned her face away from those words and bit her lips. “Mike, please—”

Mike said, “Kip. Get lost.”

He walked away.

Kip stood still.

Lee seriously considered taking his mop up on the cliff and giving Mike a little shove over the rockiest, highest part.

He might have, too, except that Mr. Martin appeared by his side. “Lee, we got more spilled food all over the verandah. Go sweep that up. Then we need more soda on the bar out on the terrace, and we’re out of hot hors d’oeuvres at the snack bar there. Be sure to put out more chips while you’re at it. Potato chips are cheap. Check the dip. Come on, Lee, move along.”

Should he tell Mr. Martin what the boys were planning?

It didn’t sound dangerous to Lee.

Besides, Lee wasn’t at all sure that Two Cliffs was really the destination. Hadn’t he dried Anne’s hair himself? Hadn’t he watched that beautiful redhead Beth Rose dance with his wrestling opponent Gary? Those were two gorgeous girls. If he, Lee, were wandering around in the dark with girls that lovely, it wouldn’t be to see the profile of Two Cliffs in the dark.

As crowds do, this one shifted.

The quiz-oriented group around Pammy and Caitlin moved toward the piano and ferns that hid Molly. Gary, trying to convince Beth Rose to go with him on an All Night Hike, decided four might be fun and began looking for a couple with more get-up-and-go than Beth Rose. The dedicated dancers were really warmed up now and swinging all over the place. Sharp elbows and whirling skirts took up space the rest had to avoid.

Anne said, “Just take me home, okay?”

Con said, “Anne, I did not push you, okay?”

Gary said, “Just a walk, that’s all, Beth Rose, and nobody’s going to fall over the cliff edge, okay?”

Kip said loudly, “Maybe we should all get out our quizzes and work a little harder to find some of these answers.”

Molly said, “Kip, nobody cares, okay?”

And Con said, “Hey, what are you up to, Gary? Did you say a walk up to Two Cliffs? That would be neat. In the dark? I love it! Let’s go. Come on, Anne, let’s go with them.”

“Great,” Anne said. “First you shove me in the pool, now you want to shove me off the cliff. It’s called love.”

K
IP HURT SO MUCH
she wanted to double over and hold her side.

Nobody cares,
Molly had said.

And nobody did.

Because nobody argued, nobody turned to comfort Kip, nobody put his arm around her.

Nobody even noticed.

She meant to find the bathroom—that ever-perfect place for a girl to run when she had problems, emotional or physical. A double hiding place—the room itself, and the cubicle if you really needed solitude.

But she turned down the wrong hall once outside the ballroom and when she flung open the door she thought would take her to the women’s room, she found herself in a sort of kitchen. Nobody was cooking anything there; it seemed to be more of a storage area. Its stainless steel counter-tops gleamed, and its refrigerators were spotless. The tiles were tiny beige octagons, and the windows were high above the shelves.

And Lee Hamilton was pouring potato chips from enormous yellow cellophane bags into enormous wicker serving baskets.

He was glad to see her.

And Kip stayed for one reason only: there didn’t seem to be anybody else at the Last Dance who was glad to see her.

Molly did not want Con hanging around Gary.

Gary had an amazing ability to calm people: Gary could hand out peace of mind the way a waiter could hand out pieces of chocolate cake. Somehow he would say the right thing to Anne, and Anne would laugh and the tension would lessen. Then Gary would say the right thing to Con, and Con would grin, and exchange a glance with Anne…and Con and Anne just might make up.

Well, Molly would not have that happen.

Molly would separate them somehow.

She listened to the crowd, and circled, and tried to come up with a solution.

Beth Rose said to Gary and Con, “But it’s against the rules. We’re not supposed to be anywhere but the ballroom, the terrace, and the screened verandah.”

Gary grinned and chucked Beth Rose under the chin. “Yeah, but I’m bored with the ballroom, the terrace, and the screened verandah. I want to see the world, and I’m going to start with Two Cliffs at night.”

“We don’t have shoes for that kind of thing,” Beth Rose said weakly.

Gary could not have been less interested in what sort of flimsy dance slippers the girls had on. He and Con just laughed and pressed through the dancers toward the glass doors and the mountain trails.

Oooh, good, Molly thought. Con’s leaving without Anne!

Gary had a firm grip on Beth Rose, who would not, if Molly knew that wimpy girl, protest a second time. Con strode after Gary. Delight rose like carbonated bubbles inside Molly.

Con paused.

No, Molly thought, no, don’t, Con, come on, don’t.

Con Winters stretched out a hand Anne could not reach unless she took a step toward him. “Come on,” he said pleadingly, as if he really wanted her. Con did not look at Gary, nor at the dancers, nor at Molly. He looked only at Anne, with little boys’ eyes, wanting her company on his walk.

Molly grit her teeth. She had to stop this now, or they’d melt back into each other’s arms.

Pammy unexpectedly said, “It’s gotten chilly out. The wind is cool now. You need a jacket, Anne.”

Good idea!

Molly slithered out of the crowd like a snake through rocks. She passed the ferns and the piano and found the chair where most of the girls had tossed their sweaters earlier when it was so hot they were gasping for breath. Anne, whose mother and grandmother dressed her as if she were a tall Barbie doll—eleven hundred matching outfits—didn’t have just any old cotton sweater. Oh, no. A beautiful shawl with dark wintry colors, that nobody else would think of wearing in June, but that set off Anne’s golden hair perfectly, and turned her from a blonde angel to a sultry princess.

Molly swept the shawl behind her back, knotting it, and slid past the ferns again. One potted fern—a great tall tropical thing that reminded Molly of a hotel lobby in New York City—sat in a tub of dark earth. Molly tucked the shawl in back of the fern, draped a few fronds over it, and the shawl was invisible.

There.

Now Anne would whine that she couldn’t find her wrap. Con would be patient for—oh, maybe a minute—and then Con would go on without her and that would be that.

Lee perched on the stainless steel rim of a vast center preparation table. He had very, very long legs and the minute he sat down he seemed slightly out of proportion. But Kip wasn’t sure. She kind of wanted to stand next to him and see where his waist and each knee and elbow folded; see if he was just very long, or really out of whack. Lee said, “I need your opinion.” Kip loved being asked for her opinion. And this kid was serious, she could tell. A deep wrinkle furrowed a brow that obviously had never wrinkled before. The wrinkle had a hard time staying there in such unfamiliar territory. Lee’s face kept going back to a smooth cheery one and he had to struggle to force the frown to stay. She also had this truly weird desire to run her finger across the wrinkle. Especially in that little dip a little left of center. His forehead wrinkle was shaped exactly like a bracket you made to attach different paragraphs together: rounded at the ends, peaked in the middle.

Lee said, “See, this is unfamiliar territory to me.”

Kip liked standing in front of him now. Their eyes were even. She had always thought that was the neatest thing about Anne and Con: their eyes were always even. It put them, literally, on the same wave length. Kip had always thought a boyfriend precisely her own height would be perfect. Well, she was wrong. Mike was her height and he was gone.

The L word.

He’d said it enough back in the winter.

Now he appeared to have forgotten even how to spell it, let alone use it.

“What territory?” Kip asked. She liked to know exactly what was happening; she could give him a better opinion if he gave her all the facts.

“Falling in love.”

Kip tried looking at the boy from several angles to see if he was being a jerk, or pulling her leg, or entertaining himself at her expense or what. All she could see was that funny little frown. “Okay,” she said cautiously. “Go on.”

“What’s it
feel
like?” Lee asked intensely, leaning way forward. He leaned almost into her face. If Kip had leaned forward the same number of inches, they would be kissing. She restrained herself, but it wasn’t easy.

She said, even more cautiously, “Well, tell me how you feel, and I’ll tell you what I think.”

“I’m obsessed,” Lee said. “I can’t even sweep a floor without thinking about her.”

Kip nodded, letting out a lungful of air in a very controlled fashion, as if she could control Mike that way, or The L Word, or at least herself. “Yup,” she said, “that’s part of it.”

“You have fantasies that would make the girl abandon you before you’ve even met,” Lee said.

“Oh, absolutely. Definitely. You’re getting warm now.”

“Warm!” Lee Hamilton said. “I’m burning up.”

“I think you’ve got it,” Kip said. “Sounds like love to me.”

The big white station wagon made the familiar turn into Emily’s own street. There was the red house on the corner, where even in the dark, the three boys were throwing a baseball. And then the two identical ranch houses. The tiny Cape Cod where Emily used to babysit. The empty lot. And then the next-door neighbors, where Mrs. James drove them all crazy practicing her piano, which even after years of lessons she could not play without a zillion errors—and then her own house.

The forsythia bushes her father had planted when they bought the house new—Emily’d been in nursery school—had grown into two immense balls of green. The weeping willow was forever dropping its thin whiplike branches all over the grass, so that the Edmundson household had a permanently littered look to it. The narrow porch, only three steps up and running the width of the house, had a row of hanging pots: impatiens mostly, flowering hot pink and orange in the shade of the porch.

I’m home, Emily thought, oh, I’m home!

She jumped out of the car and ran up the steps, so glad that her mother’s car was still there, and her father’s truck, so glad to know that it was going to be okay, they could—

Her mother stormed out of the house, flinging the screen door so hard that it actually snapped off the bottom hinge. A little piece of metal flew like shrapnel across the porch and into Emily’s bare leg. “What are you doing here?” Emily’s mother shouted. Emily shrank back.