Free Daddy Lenin and Other Stories by Guy Vanderhaeghe

suppose we were like two little kids shutting the real world out, imagining ourselves living in an alternate universe where life was like it was in Abbott and Costello and Dick Powell movies, everything hilarious or inconsequentially light-hearted, a place where no one was saddled with a horrible, shameful family or a crazy, angry, sad mother.
    Everything was fine, better than fine as far as I was concerned, until one afternoon Sabrina went quiet while we were watching
Buck Privates
. I sent her a curious
What’s up?
glance, but when she didn’t take the bait I chose to let her be and concentrated on Abbott and Costello’s loony capers. After a few minutes, she whispered huskily, “Hey, I want to ask you something. We’re friends, right?”
    Her tone alerted me that this
something
was not going to be either inconsequentially light-hearted or hilarious.
    “Sure we’re friends.”
    “You know me. Always making plans, using the old forebrain?”
    “Right.”
    “I graduate this year. I’m going to be valedictorian.”
    “So how do you know you’re going to be valedictorian? Isn’t it months before they choose somebody?”
    “My marks will be the best.” One eyebrow tilted wryly. “Then there’s the pity factor. My leg.”
    I dodged saying anything about her leg. I didn’t like to be reminded of it. “Okay, so you’re going to be valedictorian. Congratulations.”
    “The valedictorian and their date lead the graduates into the school gym after the ceremony. For the dance. It’s tradition.”
    I played stupid, just stared at her.
    “So who am I supposed to march in with? Nobody’s going to ask me to be their date. I’ll be humiliated. It’ll be the most humiliating thing in the long string of humiliations I’ve had to live with.”
    “You don’t need to be valedictorian. Nobody can make you be valedictorian. You can turn it down.”
    “I don’t want to turn it down! Goddamn it, what’s the matter with you? I want to be valedictorian! And I need a date!” she shouted at me.
    There was no mistaking where she was headed. “I can’t dance,” I said.
    “So you can’t dance. You think I’ve been spending my last three years of high school dancing up a storm? With
this
?” She struck her stick-like leg with a white-knuckled fist, hard.
    I had to look away. It says a lot about me that I knew it was wrong to feel a certain way about something but that I could still keep feeling it. The sight of that leg, the jerky way she had to flop it forward with every step, her lunging, plunging gait always gave me the heebie-jeebies, made me want to look away.
    “Billy,” she said, “the first dance is always a slow dance. All we have to do is hold on to each other and shuffle.”
    “Let me think about it,” I said. “There’s no hurry. It’s a long way off.”
    “We could practise,” she said. “You could get comfortable with the idea, with doing it.” She waited for my answer. When it didn’t come she fired a strident “
Billy?
” at me.
    I was sweating clean through my pants, thinking of me and Sabrina Koenig trooping the graduates into the gym, everybody looking at us, whispering, smirking.
    “I said I’ll see.” I was stubbornly holding my eyes off her. I heard Sabrina struggle up from the sofa, the floppy, slapping sound the sandal on her bad leg made as she crossed the floor. The television clicked off and the radio sitting on top of it snapped on. She started fiddling with the dial, setting off strangled bursts of rock and pop until she hit the only station in the area, maybe the only station in the Western world, that still devoted itself twenty-four hours to geezer music. The opening strains of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” wafted into the room.
    I raised my eyes. Sabrina was standing there in the middle of the floor, waiting for me.
All right
, I said to myself.
Suck it up
. I got out of my chair and walked towards her. As I did, she slowly raised her arms to