Begin Again(83)

By the time we’re all released for the dance party, I’m already in absurdly high spirits, buoyed by friendship and cookie dough cream cheese and the thumping bass of a Beyoncé song in the distance. Milo waves us off to go meet up with one of his sisters on campus, and Shay and Valeria and I head straight into the maelstrom of Blue Ridge students getting dangerously amped by the key changes to “Love On Top.”

“Andie,” says Shay, jostling my shoulder in an up-and-down motion. “You have to dance.”

“I am dancing,” I protest.

Valeria shakes her head at me. “You’re doing the a cappella bop.”

Shay snickers, not unkindly, and I ask, “The what?”

“That thing where you . . .” Instead of explaining, Valeria demonstrates, doing an all-too-accurate impression of me shifting my weight between my feet and vaguely moving my arms with them. “That bop.”

I stop my bopping. “Well, I can’t dance.”

“Bullshit,” says Shay, yanking me by the elbow with one hand and yanking Valeria by the elbow with the other. “Dancing isn’t a skill, it’s a goddamn right. And you’re a single woman now. Nothing to hold you back.”

I feel the press of bodies against us, the sound of the music nearly drowned out by people whooping and shouting and singing along to the words. My heart starts beating like it never has before, so high in my chest it feels like it might burst. I glom onto Shay and Valeria, equal parts thrill and terror, feeling less like I am walking into a crowd of strangers and more like I’m walking into a new version of my life. Something I couldn’t fully see on my own, but is all too clear with two of my best friends on either side of me, pulling me through.

“Now dance like you mean it,” Shay yells over the noise.

I grin back at her, pinching my nose with one hand and making a sea-diving gesture with the other as I lower myself to the ground.

“Still counts!” says Valeria, letting out a hoot of approval.

Shay’s laughing hard enough that she’s doubled over, almost as low to the ground as I am. “What else have you got, Andie?”

I jokingly pretend to drive a bus with one hand and use the other to open an invisible bus door and welcome a passenger in. Valeria enters my “bus” without missing a beat, getting into the back seat and grooving right alongside me in a manner decidedly more graceful, but dorky nonetheless. Shay groans and knocks on the invisible bus door until we let her in and starts grooving beside us.

“Where is this godforsaken bus going?” she asks.

“The Kingdom of Lumarin!” I exclaim.

I can practically feel the heat of Valeria blushing next to me, but it’s as if now that we’re in the middle of this crowd, all our usual self-consciousness has worn away.

“Then you’d better fasten your seat belts,” she says, “because there’s a whooole lot of witchcraft and confusing romantic shit ahead!”

Shay unsheathes a fake sword. “Bring it on!”

And then for a long while, the rest of the world just falls away. We’re goofing off and jumping and dancing and yelling, three people in a crowd of hundreds, ribbons flying everywhere but none of us even bothering to reach for them. We’re just sweaty limbs and ridiculous cackling and breathless energy, like there isn’t a past to worry over or a future to account for. The kind of moment that forms a tattoo in your heart before you even fully understand how much it means to you, living in it and outside it at the same time, making it a part of your story before you know how the story ends.

There’s a brief scheduled pause in the music so the upperclassmen can do a recap of this year’s ribbon hunt, which I know from asking around that they do just before they unleash a bunch of ribbons on the crowd. I reach out and hug Valeria and Shay, the three of us sticky and grinning and smushed against one another.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I tell them.

Valeria points to the other end of the quad. “I’m gonna grab us some water bottles.”

Shay glances to the left. “And I gotta pee. Meet back here in a few?”

“Sounds good,” I say, pulling out my phone before I even reach the end of the crowd. I’m all buzz and adrenaline and bass, but it’s grounding. Clarifying. I don’t know if my thoughts have ever been so clear, if I’ve ever felt so certain about anything.

It will be brutal. It will hurt for longer than I can say. But I can’t put it off anymore—I have to break up with Connor.

Once I can hear my own thoughts instead of the chattering of the crowd, I press the phone to my face, letting it ring. It rings and rings and rings, my heart still beating so hard I can feel it in my ear, my jaw, every part of the screen against my head.

I’m about to get Connor’s voicemail when instead I get Connor’s voice.

“Andie?”

I pull the phone away, trying to figure out why he sounds like he’s right in front of me. Then I realize that he is, in fact, right in front of me.

His hair is mussed, his eyes practically bruised from lack of sleep, his clothes all wrinkled. I’m so stunned to see him that it barely registers, my brain trying desperately to catch up to what’s right in front of me.

“I, uh. I didn’t leave last night,” he explains. “I stayed with some soccer buddies.”