Free The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham Page B

emboldened by her matter-of-fact feminine complicity: all right, you would throw yourself onto the conveyor belt and let it carry you toward the dance.
    “Mark Henderson,” she said in her light, silvery voice as she wrote. “Very sweet boy.” She smiled at you again. “ Muy bien, Marisol .”
    AT THE DANCE
    Your band played. You were up on a platform, grooving with Mr. Bloe. Then suddenly Henderson lifted his head and yelled out, “Drum solo!” and the kid on drums went crazy for a few minutes, banging out what sounded like a big collision of pots and pans and sandpaper all happening in a bowling alley. “Keyboard!” yelled Henderson, and you started to realize that you were going to be next. Shit. “Bass!” shouted Henderson, and the other instruments quieted down and there you were—the lighting didn’t change but you felt like it had and that you were suddenly standing in a cone of merciless brightness—and you didn’t know what to do, but you settled for plunking out your usual sequence of notes with what you hoped was special emphasis, as loudly as possible, twice; and then you nodded at Henderson and he went into his own loud, squeally guitar solo which, you saw then, had been the whole reason why he’d accorded solos to the rest of you.
    Seeing this—how badly he had wanted to play this energetic, incoherent solo, how transparently he’d tried to hide his desire to do it, how the tape on his glasses gleamed beneaththe lights—made you tender toward him, and maybe a little less shy when Mr. Bloe finally came to an end and you laid down your instruments and joined the dance. Still, you were pretty shy.
    “Mrs. Sturm put us together,” Henderson said, leading you over to the punch table.
    You shrugged. Mrs. Sturm winked at you from her seat by the refreshment tray.
    You and Henderson fast-danced. Then you slow-danced. He held one of your hands and put his other arm around your waist, leaving six inches between you: mannerly, respectful, correct, a relief, disappointing. Everyone else was hugging, barely moving. All these strange girls had arrived on a bus, pretty, in pretty dresses, and had gone in straight for the kill. Their faces were buried in the shoulders of the boys from your school. They were letting themselves be touched, and kissed, forgetting or not caring about the teachers who were chaperoning. Sperber’s hands were moving lower on Lily Joyce’s back; her dress was hiked up and you could see the striped cotton of her underpants. Mr. Sturm came over and said something to them, and they moved apart a little. The Sturms danced: majestically. They looked like ice skaters. It would have been funny, if they had done it with any less grace or dignity.
    In the last slow dance Henderson pulled you gently to his chest and you were one of the hugging couples. “I like you,” he said, low against your ear. “You’re my girl.”
    IN YOUR BED
    You replayed it over and over. He holds you. “I like you,” he says. “You’re my girl.”
    YOU ARE NORMAL
    Or if not quite normal, then at least pretty close.
    YOUR GODMOTHER
    “I’m so glad for you,” Mrs. Sturm said. “Tell me everything.”
    You did. About how Henderson was getting off-campus permissions now and coming over to your house, often, on Saturday afternoons. How much he liked your parents, and how much they seemed to like him. How your mother cooked for him: pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, rice pudding—he said her rice pudding was his favorite dessert ever. How he teased your little brother and sister (he introduced himself to them using an outlandish false name, and refused to back away from it even when they shrieked at him to tell them the truth), and how they teased him about his accent (he was from Kentucky). How gentle he was when he petted your old German shepherd. How you and he went for long walks in the fields and woods behind your house, how the two of you never ran out of things to talk about.
    “He’s a nice