We move together,
breathe together,
my hands gripping his shoulders,
his thigh pressed between mine.
I don’t have a clue who I’m dancing with,
but our bodies are acting like old friends,
as though they know something
we don’t know.
WHAT I WANT
I want
to keep on dancing
slow with him.
I want
to keep on dancing
on and on.
I want
to dance real slow till dawn
like this.
I want
to dance and dance
and dance,
then kiss.
THE SONG ENDS
But I float
in my masked man’s arms
for a few seconds more,
and when I lean back to look into his eyes,
they’re so alive,
so totally locked to mine,
that when he takes my hand
and presses it to his heart,
I feel like my knees might give way.
Then Whoever He Is
bows deeply,
and disappears into the crowd.
(I knew something
was going to happen
tonight.)
WHEREFORE ART THOU?
When I snap out of it,
I start scouring the gym for him,
kicking myself for not even thinking
of asking him his name,
for not just reaching up
and whipping off his mask
to catch a glimpse of his face
while I still had the chance.
But no matter how hard I search,
I can’t find him anywhere,
and when the last note of the last song
fades away,
I drift outside
to wait for my mother,
wondering if there could be such a thing
as “love at first dance.”
I’D PICTURED IT BEFORE
Where it would happen.
Whose hand it would be.
How it would feel.
But never like this.
Never waiting on the corner
for my mother to pick me up
after a school dance,
the last of my girlfriends already gone,
standing next to
a couple of tenth-grade boys
I’ve seen around school.
Them joking with each other, guzzling beer,
me wishing my mother wasn’t always so late.
I never thought
it would happen this way—
with the guy standing closest to me
suddenly bursting out laughing
and grabbing my breasts
with his slimy paws,
squeezing them for a split second
that seems to last forever.
I never once envisioned
the devirginization of my breasts
happening like this,
with the guy and his scumbag buddy
slapping five afterwards
as though he’s just done something
to be proud of,
the two of them snickering
and nudging each other,
the one who did it whispering,
“I told you they were real.
You owe me five bucks.”
I never imagined myself
just standing there
with this huge lump in my throat,
feeling so mad
that steam would practically be
blasting out of my ears.
I never pictured my hand
morphing into a fist
or the fist swinging out
to sock his jaw.
I never knew how great it would feel
to slam my knuckles into his chin,
how satisfying it would be
to smash my foot into his friend’s knee,
how good it would be to watch them
backing away from me wide-eyed,
stumbling before they turned and ran.
And I never ever expected
that when my mother pulled up
a second later
and I leapt into the car,
that I’d be feeling like
slapping five with her
and shouting out “Yes!”
My mother
whips around,
slashing me
with the knives
gleaming in her eyes,
and whispers in dark
soap opera tones,
“That dress!”
TEARS
Usually
I can feel them coming,
feel them swirling in my chest
like a swarm of angry bees,
buzzing up through my neck
and filling my head,
till it feels like a balloon
getting ready to burst.
Usually
there’s time to at least try to stop them
before they sting out through my eyes
and slip down my cheeks like hot wax.
But not this time.
AFTER THE FIGHT WITH MOM
It’s lying there
where she threw it
after she tore it apart,
while the echo
of the rrrrrriiiippping
still ricocheted off my bedroom walls,
right where it landed
after she yanked it off the hanger
and wrenched it into two ragged shards,
after the toads
stopped springing
from her lips,
after her red-rimmed eyes
stopped trying to escape
from their sockets.
It’s lying there where she threw it,
in a heap,
like roadkill:
my no-longer-gorgeous black dress.
ALL I WANT TO KNOW IS
How come just a minute ago,
when my mother was talking to me,
she made her voice
so dead and flat and hollow
that the mere sound of it
flooded me with guilt,
but when the telephone rang
just now,
and she picked it up,
her voice was a perfectly cheerful,
bright and lively
chirp?
And how come
this makes me feel
like slapping her so hard
across her face
that the shape of my hand
will leave a stinging print?
I HATE HER
I hate her for destroying my dress.
Hate her for going ballistic.
Hate her for all her screaming and crying
and for making me feel
like I’m the worst daughter
in the world.
I hate her for being so controlling.
Hate her for being so melodramatic.
Hate her for fighting with Dad all the time
and for never once admitting
in her whole entire life
that anything could ever
possibly be her fault.
I hate her for watching TV all day.
Hate her for not ever talking to me.
Hate her for not ever listening to me.
And I hate her for not being more
like Rachel’s mom.
Or like Grace’s.
I hate her.
I hate her.
I hate her.
But I hate hating her.
I hate it.
I’D RATHER BE GROUNDED
My mother’s down there in the basement
right now,
where she always goes
when she gets like this.
Down there in
her bathrobe,
in the clammy dark,
sprawled on the old mattress,
stuffing Hershey’s Kisses into her mouth,
chain-smoking, watching her soaps,
and weeping.
Weeping just loud enough
to make me wish I was deaf,
just loud enough
to make me wish I had the courage
to storm down there
and yank her back upstairs.
My mother’s down there
right now,
and she hasn’t been up for days
except to cook our meals,
dragging herself around the kitchen
like a zombie,
tossing the food onto the plates,
tossing the plates onto the table,
then trudging back down into her hole
without saying a word.
At least Dad’s managed to get home
in time for dinner these past three nights,
like he doesn’t want me
to have to go through it alone.
But I haven’t been able
to swallow a bite,
even so.
Maybe if I hadn’t
gone behind her back to buy that dress,
maybe if I hadn’t
forgotten to change out of it
before she picked me up,
maybe if I hadn’t
lied to her in the first place,
my mother wouldn’t be down there
in the basement
right now.
MY MASKED MAN WOULD KNOW
I bet I wouldn’t even
have to tell him
about my mother.
He’d just look into my eyes
and know how it feels
to be buried under an avalanche of guilt.
Know
that I needed to be held.
Know that I needed to be kissed.
So he’d hold me and kiss me,
and for awhile
I wouldn’t care where my mother was.
SHE’S BACK
Maybe it was the note
I slipped under the door to the cellar.
The one in which I apologized abjectly
for sneaking around behind her back
and said I missed her
and couldn’t stand having her
living in the basement
for one more second.
Or maybe she just got tired
of being miserable.
But when I got home from school today,
she was actually out front in the yard
raking up some leaves.
She even smiled at me.
And for a second it almost looked like
she was going to say she was sorry
for guilting me into buying that ugly dress
in the first place.
She didn’t say it.
But the smile was good.
ELEVEN P.M.
There’s this
real corny thing
that Channel 5 does every night
after the late movie,
just before the news comes on.
They flash this sign on the screen
that says:
“It’s eleven p.m.
Do you know where
your children are?”
And just now,
when it came on,
I heard this little tap tap tap on the wall
coming from my mother’s bedroom,
and I tapped right back.
FOREARMS
Okay.
So I’ve become obsessed with arms.
Well, forearms, actually.
His forearms.
I’m painfully aware
of just how bizarre this is
but ever since the dance,
I can’t seem to get a grip.
Forearms R me.
Today in the cafeteria
Grace said, “There goes Tommy A.
Look at those buns.”
But I was thinking,
“Look at those forearms.
I wonder if they
belong to my masked man.”
Wherever I go, I’m checking out forearms.
I’m thinking, “How would those feel
wrapped around me? Or those?
Are those my masked man’s forearms?”
I’ve got to find him.
Him and those forearms of his,
the ones that devastated me
when he held me in them
just ten days,
fourteen hours,
thirty-two minutes
and twenty-nine seconds ago.
Okay.
So I don’t
really know
how many seconds.
WHEN I’M NOT OGLING FOREARMS
I’m making my way
through the halls at school,
searching every boy’s face
for my masked man’s eyes,
but it’s harder than finding Waldo
because the truth is
I can’t even remember
what color they were.
I guess it wasn’t how they looked
that got to me.
It was how it felt
when they connected to mine—
like this door
was opening up inside of me
that had never been opened before,
and his soul was walking right in.
THE PERSONALS
I wish I could put an ad
in the school paper:
WANTED DESPERATELY—the boy who owns the arms and eyes that held me at the Halloween dance. Haven’t been able to think about anything else since that night. Haven’t been able to breathe. Call 555-9910 before I shrivel up and die!
GRACE DOESN’T GET IT
She says she can’t figure out
why I’m getting so worked up
about a guy I’ve never even said
two words to.
So I remind her
how worked up she got about Henry
before she’d ever said
two words to him.
“That was different,” she says.
“Henry wasn’t wearing a mask.”
But Rachel
totally gets it.
“Fee’s in love with him even though
she hasn’t seen his face,” she says.
“Don’t you see how incredibly deep that is?
She’s in love with his essence.”
“She’s not in love with his essence,”
Grace says.
“She’s in love with his body parts.”
“That’s so not true,” I say.
“I’m in love with
the essence of his body parts.”
And we all crack up.
TWENTY QUESTIONS
1. Is he as obsessed with me, as I am with him?
2. Is he thinking about me at this very moment?
3. Has he ever thought about me?
4. Has he never thought about me?
5. Was our dance as amazing for him as it was for me?
6. Will I always feel this way?
7. Am I going to spend the rest of my life fixating on him?
8. How much sense does that make?
9. Why can’t I stop thinking about him?
10. Am I totally losing it?
11. Do I know him?
12. Is he a freshman?
13. Does he even go to my school?
14. Why hasn’t he revealed himself to me?
15. Will he ever reveal himself to me?
16. What’s he waiting for?
17. Does he already have a girlfriend?
18. Does he think I’m ugly?
19. Does he think I’m an idiot?
20. Am I an idiot?
GRAY SKY BLUES
It’s been overcast
for more than
a week now.
Heavy clouds hang low
like a thick gray soup
boiling overhead.
I’m gray
through and through.
Even my thoughts are gray.
If I cut my finger
I’d bleed
gray blood.
No sign of sun.
No sign of blue sky.
No sign of masked man.
It’s going to be a long gray winter.
AT THE BEACH
Rachel’s mother
(who I wish was my mother)
has driven us down to the Cape
to let us get our yaya’s out, she said.
Whatever.
Even though it’s still overcast,
there are all these
slivers of sunlight
reaching down through the clouds
like God’s fingers,
looking like if one of them
were to touch me right now
something magical,
something masked-mannish
might even happen.
But the mystic rays
are shining down onto the sea
instead of me,
probably making some lucky
halibut’s day.
I BET HE’S A JERK ANYWAY
One of those real hunky, gorgeous,
rich, stuck-up jerks
who thinks he’s the greatest thing since
the invention of the cell phone.
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit
if it even turned out to be
Hamilton Hurley III.
Or that annoyingly perfect Peter Scrinshaw.
I mean
he must be a jerk.
Because if he wasn’t,
he wouldn’t be torturing me like this.
I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED
Zak asked me out.
On a date.
Zak
who I used to call Wacky Zakky