PART 1 — ANOTHER WAY
Six months before prom a man who had been drinking went through a red light on Corwen Road and I have not walked properly since.
I was seventeen. One week I was in a shop with two friends holding a dress up against myself in a mirror, and then I was learning how to live in a body that had stopped taking instructions.
By the May I nearly did not go.
My mother stood in my bedroom doorway and said, “You deserve one decent night.”
So I went.
I spent about three hours in the corner by the sound desk with my dress arranged over my legs, watching everybody else, and it is not that people were cruel.
It is that four hundred people managed, for three hours, not to look directly at one chair.
Then Rye Colvin came over.
He was the quarterback. He was that boy, in that school, in that year, and he was the last human being I expected.
“Hey. Want to dance?”
“I can’t.”
He said, “Then we’ll find another way.”
And we did. He got behind me and turned that chair, and then he came round and held both my hands and moved us, and he was not good at it and did not care.
Ten minutes. For ten minutes I was not the girl in the corner. I was a girl at a dance.
I never saw him again after we graduated.
There are two things about that ten minutes that I did not understand until I was about forty.
The first is that he did not ask me whether I minded. He did not crouch down and check in the voice people use. He came over and asked me to dance the same way he would have asked anybody in that room, and when I said I couldn’t he did not agree with me.
The second is what happened afterward.
Nothing happened afterward. He did not stay with me for the rest of the evening and he did not come back and check on me, and for about fifteen years I held that against him slightly without ever admitting it.
