"Champaaaaagne."
He will say it in a sultry and drawn-out sort of way, doing his seventeen-year-old best to simulate a baritone by wrapping his lips around the cold black dimpled microphone. And with this word, you are mandated to kiss your partner.
"Can you turn the stereo down?" Hand asked.
I did. Hand was curled toward his door.
"I could never sleep after those dances," said Hand. He activated the car's windshield defrost.
And after the dance, at home and on my bed, bent toward the wall and trying to sleep but completely unable, we knew we had been given this, a point on the sun where it burst for us -
"But I'm so tired now," Hand said. "I just got hit by it."
"You're gonna sleep now?"
"I just have to close my eyes for a second."
"Okay," I said.
Maybe ten seconds after the uttering of "Champaaaaaagne," as we were just starting to know the shape of the partner's mouth, would come "Snooooowwball," at which point we were supposed to switch dance partners, mid-song, giving us a chance to meet and enjoy the next partner. But we only really had to trade if it suited us, if our current partner no longer held appeal or if there was someone better, freer. Did B.J. enforce the partner-switching suggestion? He did not. And almost half the night's songs were slow songs, meaning that if you wanted to, and I did, some did, most did, all did, you could dance with twelve different people, kissing each for two, two and a half minutes – and more if one of the songs was "Stairway to Heaven," in which case, though, hell, you'd have to kind of try to dance again when it got fast at the end. No one knew just how to dance to "Stairway to Heaven." Some continued to hobble slowly, ignoring the quickened pace, the sudden urgency, all that screaming, while most people started bouncing a little, jumping in place, maybe a little air guitar, anything. It's just the wrong song for dancing; that's the lesson there.
But when the word Champagne arrived, we pulled our heads off each others' shoulders, same height we were, and her mouth was upon me, a black hole approaching. Our teeth clicked at each other, and she breathed into me. There was so much moisture! I found myself flying quickly around her mouth, a bat scanning the walls. As food stuck between molars makes explorers of tongues, the tongue becoming topographer and every cankar sore a ridge of sawtoothed mountains, so did my tongue become the mapmaking conquistador of Mary-Kate's dark wet mouth. I knew its crevices, its stalactites and -mites, the smooth runs of the tops of her flat back teeth. I fought for dominion with her tongue, which probed my mouth while guarding her own. After thirty seconds, having explored her mouth's offered worlds, I went further and soon could feel the extremities of her brain, could tickle its smooth underside. I scuttled around the back of her skull, was rushing through her, pinballing between cartilage and capillary, then up again, devouring and searching, her eyes like marbles in my mouth. That reminded me: I opened my lids to see if hers were open too but they were not, they were closed but just barely, lips resting softly atop mine, and so I closed my lids too and went further into her, into her center, and there, finally, I found her landscape. It was dark where she was and I could see almost nothing, doubted what I knew, but I did make out her winding river, a thin and clear one, warm from the day's sun, and then her cluster of a dozen or so small hills, and at their base was her tall white home, clean and fair in the spotlight of a three-quarter moon, illuminated within by a hundred tall thin candles.
I opened my eyes and Jack was watching me. He was there, arms around Jenny Erdmann, watching me, smiling his old man's wise and benevolent smile. It was this time, more than any other, that I noticed how far his ears stuck out. He really was a jug-eared bastard. I gave him the finger.
"Hand."
He slept.
"Hand."
– Hand, there's activity below me. They're going nuts down there. They're all working in the library. Hundreds of them. I don't know where all of them came from. They're multiplying.
After the dance we waited for Molly but not very long. We knew she wouldn't pick us up, after I called her an assmuncher. Shirts wet with sweat now cooling in the night, we started home. It was 2.2 miles to our neighborhood; we knew this because Hand had made his father measure it with their car's odometer.
We walked through the woods first, behind the rec center, then across two fairways of the county golf course. There was a new berm built between the highway and the new housing development, so we climbed that and walked atop its rounded ridge, only half-sodded then, past the pond the developers had made into a lake.
Hand wanted to stay out and I wanted to stay out. We stood on the top of the berm, the highway busy below, the air cooling, the wind gusting. Jack wanted to go home.
"Why?" we asked. The electrical wires howled. Jack looked perplexed. Because we have to go home, he said. Because we lived at home and we had curfews.
We argued for a while, though Jack didn't really know the terms of debate. He didn't understand exactly what would be gained by staying out. What would we do? he asked. We'll be tired all day tomorrow, he said.
We couldn't think of anything to do. But it felt good to be out on the berm, above the new lake.
– Hand, we shouldn't have brought him with us.
– He was fine.
"Hand, we shouldn't have."
Hand continued to sleep.
– He didn't want to come. He never really wanted to come. He wanted to be with us but he never saw the point in the things we decided to do.
– He wanted to come.
– I have had visions of that cow for ten years now, twelve. I see its eye, I see it just burning and its eye seemed awake, alive for so long. That black liquid eye.
– Stop.
– Hand, it's what we did to that cow.
– Will. It's not the cow.
– Hand we burned that cow alive.
– The cow was dying.
– We poured gasoline on that cow and we burned it.
– We were young. We don't talk about the cow.
– We knew this was an affront to the world.
– The cow would be eaten. We were thirteen and we had to react violently to the world. We'd seen its rules and the demons it allows to live among us. We killed the cow to express our outrage.