Imagine the fun I could soon have chaperoning one! Perhaps I’d even get to waltz with one or two of the more outgoing male students under the guise of fun and frivolity—the boys who would confidently grab my hand and lead me to the center of the floor, not realizing until our bodies were pressed that they could smell the pulsing, fragrant wetness just one layer of fabric away beneath my dress. I could subtly push against them, blow their circuitry with the confusion of blithe laughter and small talk funneled into their ear by my moist lips. [...] It would require the boy to be an upstanding sort—the type who wouldn’t be able to convey such a sentence to his mother or father, who would second-guess and recall the moment only in the dark, liquored sleep of his loneliest adult moments: post–business dinner while traveling at some Midwestern Comfort Inn, after he’d called his wife and spoken to his children on the phone and then unwrapped the plastic skin of three or four airplane bottles of bourbon, set his alarm, and allowed himself to sit upright in bed [...] Inside the school’s walls no less, amidst the thundering electronic notes of that year ’s favorite pop song, a song he’d listened to at his very first job in the mall as he folded display shirts and greeted mothers and children who entered the store—had I really breathed that sentence into his ear? But I felt it, he’d remind himself, felt my words form in warm air, one sentence whose breathy shape dissipated in seconds, prior to the arrival of understanding or memory. For the rest of his life, part of him would always be on that dance floor, unsure and hungry for clarity. So much so that as an adult in that hotel, he might likely be willing to give up a great deal in exchange for the sense of order that I’d stolen from him, or even to have someone to say to him, It did happen.
