“This is a nightclub?” I asked, then repeated, louder, when I realized no one could hear me.
“It’s Start!” Vicky replied. Her normal speaking voice was loud enough that she didn’t even have to try to project over the music. “The greatest underground dance party in the world!”
Pippa shook her head, and I could see her lips moving.
“Pippa says that she once went to a better underground dance party in Sheffield. But she’s full of shit. Start is it, Elise. Start is as good as it gets. You’ve really never been here before?”
I shook my head and admitted, “I’m not really twenty-one.”
Vicky cracked up. Even Pippa almost smiled, and I could tell from the night so far that she wasn’t much of a smiler. Vicky said, “Honey, none of us are really twenty-one. We’re both eighteen.”
“The drinking laws in this country are ridiculous,” Pippa contributed.
“I don’t care about drinking,” Vicky said. “But I don’t see why you have to be twenty-one just to have a good time.”
Even at eighteen, Pippa and Vicky were both at least two years older than me. I’d just turned sixteen in January. They were probably already out of high school. Maybe they were in college. That explained why they could get dressed up in sequined dresses and feathers and go to a dance party at one a.m. on a weeknight. Because they were free.
“Speaking of drinks,” said Pippa, “I’m going to get one.” I watched her stride off across the room, her spindly legs balanced on high-heeled boots.
On her way to the bar, Pippa stopped by the DJ booth. She climbed two steps to the platform, where some guy with headphones around his neck was bopping in front of a computer, two turntables, and some other electronic equipment. The platform was so small that she had to stand right next to him, her elbow practically brushing against his. I could see her talking, but I couldn’t tell if he was listening, since he kept his eyes focused on the equipment before him as he adjusted various dials.
“The DJ’s name is Char.” Vicky spoke directly into my ear. “Pippa loooves him.”
I looked at them differently after Vicky told me that. I tried to see the love in Pippa’s behavior. I tried to figure out if he loved her back.
“They look good together,” I said. “Like a pair.” He was a few inches taller than Pippa was, even in heels, and his dark hair perfectly complemented her platinum blond locks. Even their leather jackets looked like they’d been purchased together, a Barbie and Ken Go to the Discotheque boxed set.
Vicky grinned. “I’m going to tell her you said that. She’ll love it.”
Char held up a wait a minute finger to Pippa, then put his headphones on. Pippa hovered next to him for a moment, but when he didn’t look up from his computer, she climbed down from the DJ booth and continued on to the bar.
The song transitioned into “Girls and Boys,” and the crowd went wild.
“We’re dancing!” Vicky shouted at me, which wasn’t strictly true. She was dancing.
Here are all the dance floor experiences I’ve had so far in my life:
1. Ruining the Tiny Dancers year-end recital at the YMCA when I was six years old because I didn’t know how to skip.
2. Going to a school dance in seventh grade, where they played songs like “Shake Your Ass,” only with the word ass bleeped out, and everybody grinded up on everybody else, except nobody grinded up on me.
So, for what I think are some pretty good reasons, I don’t dance.
The boys near us stopped sucking face for long enough to scream out the chorus with everyone else. I shifted my weight from foot to foot and sang the words and tried to move my arms like Vicky did. Then I realized I looked stupid and put my arms back by my sides, where they belonged.
Pippa ran back onto the dance floor, holding a beer.
“Elise!” Pippa screamed at me, and she thrust her beer into my hands.
“Thank you,” I started to say, because for a moment I thought Pippa was trying, however misguidedly, to give me a gift.
Pippa grabbed Vicky’s hands in her own, and they started jumping up and down together, screaming the words straight into each other’s faces. On one of their jumps, Pippa’s heel landed right on my foot, but nobody seemed to notice.
I realized a beat too late that Pippa wasn’t giving me a gift of a beer can. She was using me as a living, breathing cup holder. That’s all. My legs slowly ground to a halt, like a wind-up toy that had run out of power.
I had this feeling suddenly. I get this feeling a lot, but I don’t know if there’s one word for it. It’s not nervous or sad or even lonely. It’s all of that, and then a bit more.
The feeling is I don’t belong here. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know how long I can stay before everyone else realizes that I am an impostor. I am a fraud.
I’ve gotten this feeling nearly everywhere I have ever been in my life. There’s nothing you can do about it except drink some water and hope that it subsides. Or you can leave.
I set Pippa’s beer down on the floor. She and Vicky were still holding hands and jumping in unison, twirling each other around. A few guys nearby were watching them appreciatively. The man with the big expensive camera elbowed me out of the way to snap a photo of them. No one was looking at me. So I took option B, and I left.
Just before I slipped out the door, I paused for a moment to look at the room one more time, trying to cement this image in my mind. The darkness and the music, the sparkly headbands catching the lights, the brightly colored sneakers sliding across the dance floor.
Across the room, Char glanced up from his DJ equipment. He held one headphone to his ear but left the other side free as he surveyed the crowd. He moved his mouth slightly, as if talking or singing to himself. His eyes scanned the room and rested, briefly, on me.
I held his gaze with mine for a long moment. He didn’t smile, but his expression was friendly, I think, or maybe just curious.
Then he looked back down at his computer, and I walked out.
When my alarm went off at 6:35 the next morning, I felt discombobulated. Even though I stayed up too late all the time, I didn’t usually feel so groggy. I had trained myself to get through days on minimal sleep. In fact, school felt better when I felt out of it. It’s like getting anesthetized before a surgical procedure.
After turning off the alarm, I stared at my ceiling and tried to figure out what was going on. Had I actually uncovered a secret warehouse dance party? Or had I dreamed up the whole thing as some kind of pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy?
Then Alex came running into my room, screaming, “Mom says I’m supposed to tell you to get up! And she says it’s going to rain! And she says what do you want for breakfast!”
That’s the problem with life. You never get enough time to stare at your ceiling and try to figure out what’s going on.
At breakfast, not one member of the Myers household said anything to me like, “So, did you stumble across any nightclubs at one o’clock in the morning while you were pacing the back roads of Glendale?” Instead, people at breakfast said things like, “I have a five o’clock call with the funder, so can you pick up the kids from afterschool?” (Mom), and “Champ, I promise that is the same sort of Eggo we get every week. It just looks browner, but if you closed your eyes, it would taste exactly the same” (Steve), and “I’m not going to go to school, I’m going to sit on the couch all day, and you can’t stop me, ’cause I’ll be participating in the democratic process” (Alex), and “It looks like it’s whole wheat. You know I don’t eat whole wheat Eggos” (Neil).