This Is How It Always Is(114)

At first she had rejected utterly the suggestion that she do her big coming back at the Valentine’s dance. It was stupid to have a dance in fifth grade. They weren’t even middle-schoolers yet. Plus, no one had seen her for months. They might not even let her in. Her hair was growing back, but it was still short and strange-looking. If she showed up in a dress with a bow in her too-cropped hair, it was going to look like she was trying, and failing, too hard.

But the low lighting was too tempting to turn down. The low lighting plus Ben’s point that nothing—not a guy in a dress, not a girl with a penis, not a shorn, world-traveling, jungle-dwelling weirdo—was more awkward than a fifth-grade Valentine’s dance. Especially one where everyone (not just the guy in the dress, the girl with the penis, or the shorn, world-traveling, jungle-dwelling weirdo) had been made to dress up. At first she wasn’t compelled by his argument that the entire evening was sure to be uncomfortable, embarrassing, humiliating, and tense. Who would be compelled by that? Then she saw his point: her reentry was going to be uncomfortable, embarrassing, humiliating, and tense anyway; the question was only if she wanted to be the only one.

Aggie was apparently not talking to her. Poppy had tapped on her window her first night home, and every night since, but Aggie’s curtains had not so much as quivered. Now that they knew to though, Natalie and Kim said all the things they hadn’t in the cafeteria that terrible day those terrible months before. They knew who she really was. They saw her and loved her anyway, loved her more even. They had stuff that was weird about them too. They sometimes didn’t know who they were either. They did not care what was under her pants or her skirt, whichever it was. They told each other everything. Even the one thing.

She huddled in a tight knot against a wall with the two of them. Everyone was huddled in a tight knot against a wall—it was hard to imagine there’d be very much dancing—but at least she had her own knot. The gym overheads were not just low but off. Poppy supposed they had only one setting: basketball blazing. But there was some kind of spastic bulb-and-mirror apparatus strung from the ceiling so that dim flashes lit here and there unpredictably as bats, illuminating a pack of students like lightning then plunging them back to blessed darkness. Poppy occasionally made out faces she knew, their eyes often already staring at her when they flared, but much more often, her sleepy recognition lit but not her memory. I know that kid from … somewhere, as if she’d been gone years, not months, as if she’d become an old woman while everyone else froze in place like people in photographs, as if she’d become an adult, or at least less like a child, while everyone around her was just a fifth-grader allowed to wear eye shadow for the night.

Kids broke from their knots and wandered by hers occasionally. “Hey, Poppy.” Neither nasty nor apologetic, cruel nor welcoming. Not even curious or appalled. “Hey,” she said back, careful in case it was a trick, their “Hey, Poppy” a prelude to taunting or worse.

Then she saw Jake Irving. She saw him because he was walking right toward her. He got up from where he was slouched against the opposite wall and walked right across the gym and right up to her. Everyone saw. Every single eye in the gym, every single eye in the school, maybe every single eye in the world was on him, but he either did not notice or did not care or did a really good job of pretending not to care.

“Hey, Poppy.”

“Hey.”

“You’re back?”

Was she supposed to answer that? Obviously she was back. If she weren’t back, how could he ask if she were back? “Yeah.”

“I heard you went to Taiwan.”

“Thailand.”

“Oh. Did you get my text?”

The one he sent a million years ago? The one he sent before time had stopped for him and sped for her? The one she deleted practically without reading? “Yeah.”

“Oh. Good.”

The questions were weird, but at least they gave her something to say— “Sorry again,” Jake added.

—whereas she had no idea what she was supposed to say to him now. It’s okay? It wasn’t okay. I understand you think I’m a disgusting freak, and you’re probably right, but my parents are making me go to school anyway, so please be nice to me? That was true, but she wasn’t going to say it. If only he would go back to the inane questions, at least she would know what to say.

“So. Wanna dance?”

She had no idea what to say.

She looked at the completely empty middle of the gym where nobody—nobody—was dancing. The music was so loud she could feel it through her shoes, but no one was so much as wiggling to it. He looked up from his toes for the first time all night (month, year, lifetime, eon) to follow her gaze to the uninhabited, masquerading-as-a-dance-floor basketball court. He grinned—like the Jake Irving she’d sat next to in third grade who brought his grandma in for show-and-tell—and said, “We’ll be the best ones out there.”

How could she say no to that?

The song that was playing as Poppy followed Jake Irving onto the dance floor started to end, and she closed her eyes and willed Mr. Menendez not to play a slow song. She was a woman of the world now and saw that this was exactly the sort of move adults liked to make. Here were two lonesome souls, braving a wilderness together—what could be cuter than to put on some sappy slow song and do a little experiment in sociological torture? Don’t. You. Dare, her brain told Mr. Menendez’s brain at the telepathic volume of a howler monkey. And she was in luck, not because Mr. Menendez did not indeed think it would be lovely to put on a slow song for this fine young couple, but because his kid had preprogrammed the playlist, and the principal had no idea how to do anything with his phone but make phone calls.