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"I can't believe they let us do that," Hand said, rolling down his window and throwing out an apple core.
"They caught up with us eventually," I said.
"I know, but still -"
This is the way of Champagne Snowball: First, a slow song. "Open Arms," "Up Where We Belong," anything by Spandau Ballet. You scope, you choose, you find someone, you say these words: "Will you dance?" and then lead them to a spot crowded enough where you won't be easily seen. Put your ski
"Champaaaaagne."
He will say it in a sultry and drawn-out sort of way, doing his seventeen-year-old best to simulate a baritone by wrapping his lips around the cold black dimpled microphone. And with this word, you are mandated to kiss your partner.
"Can you turn the stereo down?" Hand asked.
I did. Hand was curled toward his door.
"I could never sleep after those dances," said Hand. He activated the car's windshield defrost.
And after the dance, at home and on my bed, bent toward the wall and trying to sleep but completely unable, we knew we had been given this, a point on the sun where it burst for us -
"But I'm so tired now," Hand said. "I just got hit by it."
"You're go
"I just have to close my eyes for a second."
"Okay," I said.
Maybe ten seconds after the uttering of "Champaaaaaagne," as we were just starting to know the shape of the partner's mouth, would come "Snooooowwball," at which point we were supposed to switch dance partners, mid-song, giving us a chance to meet and enjoy the next partner. But we only really had to trade if it suited us, if our current partner no longer held appeal or if there was someone better, freer. Did B.J. enforce the partner-switching suggestion? He did not. And almost half the night's songs were slow songs, meaning that if you wanted to, and I did, some did, most did, all did, you could dance with twelve different people, kissing each for two, two and a half minutes – and more if one of the songs was "Stairway to Heaven," in which case, though, hell, you'd have to kind of try to dance again when it got fast at the end. No one knew just how to dance to "Stairway to Heaven." Some continued to hobble slowly, ignoring the quickened pace, the sudden urgency, all that screaming, while most people started bouncing a little, jumping in place, maybe a little air guitar, anything. It's just the wrong song for dancing; that's the lesson there.
But when the word Champagne arrived, we pulled our heads off each others' shoulders, same height we were, and her mouth was upon me, a black hole approaching. Our teeth clicked at each other, and she breathed into me. There was so much moisture! I found myself flying quickly around her mouth, a bat sca
I opened my eyes and Jack was watching me. He was there, arms around Je
"Hand."
He slept.
"Hand."
– Hand, there's activity below me. They're going nuts down there. They're all working in the library. Hundreds of them. I don't know where all of them came from. They're multiplying.
After the dance we waited for Molly but not very long. We knew she wouldn't pick us up, after I called her an assmuncher. Shirts wet with sweat now cooling in the night, we started home. It was 2.2 miles to our neighborhood; we knew this because Hand had made his father measure it with their car's odometer.
We walked through the woods first, behind the rec center, then across two fairways of the county golf course. There was a new berm built between the highway and the new housing development, so we climbed that and walked atop its rounded ridge, only half-sodded then, past the pond the developers had made into a lake.
Hand wanted to stay out and I wanted to stay out. We stood on the top of the berm, the highway busy below, the air cooling, the wind gusting. Jack wanted to go home.
"Why?" we asked. The electrical wires howled. Jack looked perplexed. Because we have to go home, he said. Because we lived at home and we had curfews.
We argued for a while, though Jack didn't really know the terms of debate. He didn't understand exactly what would be gained by staying out. What would we do? he asked. We'll be tired all day tomorrow, he said.
We couldn't think of anything to do. But it felt good to be out on the berm, above the new lake.
– Hand, we shouldn't have brought him with us.
– He was fine.
"Hand, we shouldn't have."
Hand continued to sleep.
– He didn't want to come. He never really wanted to come. He wanted to be with us but he never saw the point in the things we decided to do.
– He wanted to come.