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“She’s in the bathroom,” I tell Devon, watching Holden walk away and feeling... disappointed? Relieved?
He slicks back his already slicked-back hair. “She’s been in the bathroom for like ten minutes.”
“If you know everything, why did you ask?” I try to keep track of Holden’s progress through the dancing crowd, but lose him when a song makes everyone scream and throw their hands up.
He rolls his eyes. “Can you go in there and get her for me?”
“No. She’s busy.”
“I’ll just text Kayla, then.” He pulls out his phone, but I cover it with my hand. “What?”
“What do you want to talk to her about?”
“I want to work things out.”
“There’s not much to work out. You’re an asshole and she’s too good for you.”
He furrows his brow. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You were a jerk to my friend. That’s enough reason for me to not like you.” I cross my arms. “I don’t care if this makes things awkward; I’m on Juniper’s side.”
He gestures wildly. “You can’t be on Juniper’s sideandKayla’s best friend.”
“Why not?”
“Because Kayla is in a band with me.Kaylacan’t be Juniper’s friend. She has to pick—”
Something happens in the room and I can’t tell immediately what it is; I just know that something is different. I look at the dance floor, trying to figure out what made the energy shift, but it takes about ten seconds for me to realize that the song I’m hearing is the one from that movie,Napoleon Dynamite. The dance song.
A squad of goose bumps zooms up my arms and that’s when I see him. The fool.
Holden breaks through the confused—but still dancing—crowd and stands on the cusp of our classmates. He shrugs when we lock eyes.
And then he dances. By himself. Without a care in the world.
He dances our dance. To our song. And it’s soooooo embarrassing, but I can’t leave him hanging, subject to all sorts of glances, laughter, and imitation. Plus, it kind of helps me escape Devon, even though it means dancing in public to a song no one really knows.
I walk away from Devon, ignore him shouting my name, and stop in front of Holden, mid-dance.
“This doesn’t count as real dancing,” I say with a huff. “That’s the only reason I’m here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, swinging his body this way and that way, like an inflatable person outside a car dealership. “I didn’t ask the DJ to play this.”
“Sure. Because this is just a song they regularly keep in their high school dance playlist.”
He bites his lip. “I saved you from Devon, didn’t I?”
“Shut up and dance.”
After the winter formal, we end up in the parking lot of Sheetz, as most bored people do in central PA. Kayla and Corrine, despite the forty-degree weather, lie on the hood of Kayla’s car eating French fries while Juniper argues with Logan about the proper pronunciation of “GIF.” Apparently, she has very strong feelings about it. (It’s pronounced like the peanut butter, if you ask her—though, I don’t recommend it.) Logan doesn’t care how it’s pronounced, but it’s clear he enjoys seeing her passionate side.
I sit in the passenger seat of Kayla’s car, door open to let out some music for the small group of us accumulated, and film everyone. A few guys two cars over are, for whatever reason, physically fighting, but not in the way where anyone gets hurt. More cars that were previously filling our school parking lot pull in, and one of them is Holden’s beat-up minivan. I watch as he, Nita, and Taj get out and go inside the store. More awkwardthan our choreographed dancing was the fact that after the song ended, we kind of just... parted ways.
My friends are preoccupied and I don’t feel like being cold, so I head inside, content in knowing they can’t go anywhere without me and the keys I have in my bag. There’s maybe only a few more minutes until one of the Sheetz employees comes outside to tell us to stop loitering, so it doesn’t seem bad to spend that time not being completely miserable.
I sidle up to Holden as he’s debating snacks—protein bars or baked fruit pieces,really?—and nudge him. He seems genuinely surprised to see me and I’m genuinely surprised to see that he looks even better under these harsh fluorescent lights than he did in the darkness of our humid gym.
“Fancy seeing you here.” I start filming him. “We should have gotten more footage at the dance.”
