“I’m supposed to be having fun,” I said, remembering Aunt Helen’s note suddenly, feeling the weight of it in my purse.
“Oh. Well—would you like to dance?”
“I didn’t mean... You don’t have to entertain me or anything.”
“Well, what if I just want to dance? Would you also want to dance?”
“Are people even dancing?”
We looked inside, moving closer to the open door to get a look at the small mob of people on the dance floor. I saw Abe doing some complicated moonwalk-type move and Amy doubled over and holding her stomach as she laughed at him.
The answer to my question was: yes, basically everyone was dancing. I watched my mother and father twirling around in circles so quickly it made me dizzy. I saw Em returning from the bathroom, holding Jackie’s hand and leading her through the crowd to get a spot near the DJ. The DJ?
“There’s a DJ? Since when is there a DJ?” I asked.
“That’s DJ Cloud. Very popular, I guess,” Sam said.
“You guess?”
“I googled him.”
“Are you from England? Or somewhere else? You have this accent...”
“Oh, no. Mystic born and raised,” he said.
“My aunt loved Mystic. She loved how it was a place within a place. Like a secret.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I can tell she meant a lot to you. I can tell this is probably the last place you want to be.”
“Dancing sounds nice. I think I’d like to dance. If you still want to.”
Sam took the soda can from me and held my hand. We walked back into the ballroom, and he put the empty glass of water and the can on a table as we passed. His hand was warm, almost feverish, but it felt nice in mine. We pushed our way past dancing bodies—I spotted Harry, my aunt’s lawyer, dancing with a man in a top hat and coattails—and found ourselves in the thick of it all. It was like prom, only bigger and louder and more frantically fun, like people’s lives depended on dancing.
“LikeHocus Pocus,” I whispered to myself.
“Hmm?” Sam asked.
“Nothing.”
That was a good reference; I’d have to tell Abe later.
Everybody seemed like they were having such a good time. Sam held my hand, and at first it was easy and fun, dancing with him. He was a better dancer than I expected; his movements seemed fluid and effortless. And he was cute, sort of serious and unexpected.
“You’re really good,” I shouted over the music, but even then he couldn’t hear me and cupped his free hand over his ear.
And then suddenly, like someone had hit the off switch, it stopped being fun. The laughter and music and talking that surrounded me turned dark and menacing, and I couldn’t understand why any of it mattered, why we bothered withanything, why we went through the motions of dancing and making friends and reading books and cleaning our rooms and all these things that wouldn’t matter in a hundred years anyway because everyone in this room would be dead, even the youngest ones, even the kids who seemed like they shouldn’t be here, like they should be home in bed sleeping instead of jumping around in small blurry groups. They would all be dead like Aunt Helen had died, because nobody lives forever except in books. Nobody lives forever except Alvin and Margo Hatter, and they weren’t even real.
You can’t think about things like that, my aunt would have said, but my aunt wasn’t here anymore, because no matter how good and how known and how loved you were, it wouldn’t matter in the end. None of us was eternal. None of us would beat it.
“Is something wrong?” Sam yelled, but I didn’t hear him, just read his lips. “You’re not dancing anymore.”
“It was nice to meet you,” I said, leaning closer to him, putting my mouth next to his ear. “But I think we have to leave soon.”
I left him on the dance floor, and the people moved closer to swallow him up, so that when I turned around, right before I left the room to go hide in the bathroom until we were all ready to leave, I couldn’t even see him.
She went back sometimes, without Alvin.
He would have killed her if he’d known. (Let him try. She was, after all, immortal.)
