Yellow Mama E zine

One Last Dance

 

by Kevin LeCompte

 

     It was Sunday afternoon, and the final dance recital would be starting in almost half an hour. When Charissa had peeked through the curtain a few minutes ago, she could see that people were already entering the auditorium. Each night had been sold out so far and it looked like today’s performance might be as well.

      She smiled at the thought of a full house. She knew this had a chance to be a special theatrical experience, a memorable one to say the least. One that might never be forgotten. One with consequences, perhaps permanent ones.

       She sat by the high school dressing room mirror now for one of the last times no doubt as her senior year was upon her and this was the Spring Recital already. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced over at Tanya beside her, watched her drag the lip gloss brush back and forth across her upper lip, noticed how full and beautiful her lips were. She could see how guys would be attracted to her.

      “I don’t feel good,” Tanya said as she stopped putting the lip gloss on and brought her hand down to her stomach.

      “It’s just nerves,” Charissa said. “You’ll be fine.”

      “I hate Ms. Rupert for making us wear this stupid pink, glittery lip gloss.”

       Charissa nodded. “Same.” She had finished with her purple eye liner so now got to working on her lips as well.

       Charissa thought they all looked ridiculous, but Ms. Rupert had come up with this bizarre theme that required a bland costume for all and ridiculous makeup for some. It was supposed to have this Fosse-like feel initially with all the girls dressed in black except for the gloves, which were white. The sophomores started the show, and they wore no makeup, and the juniors followed with a reasonable amount of makeup. The seniors, however, ended the show with their cheeks caked with makeup, outlandishly colored eye shadow and liner and this plain old disgusting glittery lip gloss as a sort of gross cherry on top of their strawberry shortcake looking faces. It was supposed to portray how people get more ridiculous with age, how they lose themselves more and more with each passing year, forget their faces, the people they wanted to be. That instead, they’d gunked themselves up with a bunch of shit that didn’t matter, chosen a mask over their real face, or some weird stupid crap like that.

       Theme or no theme, message or not, it was just too much, and the seniors had whined and complained about it for weeks now. Though Charissa had hated the lip gloss initially, just like all the other girls, she’d softened on the idea of it in recent days and had stopped talking about the makeup drama with anybody.

       The reality was, she hadn’t been talking much at all lately. Not since what had happened with Troy a couple of weeks ago. They’d been dating for several months by then, ever since the Fall Turnabout Dance where they’d both ended up at Tanya’s after-party where there was of course plenty of booze and zero parents. That’s the night they first kissed and exchanged numbers. After texting and talking on the phone much of the next day, after flirting in the hallway every chance they got the following week, they made it official.

       Fifteen days ago, they’d made something else official. It was their six-month anniversary and Charissa wanted it to be special. A few weeks prior, Troy had pulled a condom out of his pocket while they were making out in her grandparents’ basement.

       “Put that away,” she said with a smile. “What if you accidentally left it laying around and my grandma found it?”

       They’d laughed at the thought of it and made jokes about the things her grandmother might say to her in that situation.

       That helped her come up with a plan as to how she could surprise him on their little anniversary.             She loved the look on his face when she pulled a condom out of her purse and tossed it on the side table beside the couch. “Happy Anniversary,” she said.

       She watched his face light up as he leaned forward onto his knees and just stared over at the table then up at her. He stood and moved quickly toward her then and that got her excited, though she felt nervous too.

        Charissa wanted him to kiss her neck and work his way up her shirt but instead he went right for her pants and brought her down onto the floor. Then it was over, so much faster than she thought it would be. Charissa had passed the time mostly by staring over at the wall, focusing on a dent she’d put into the wall with a toy hammer when she was still a little girl.

       Charissa didn’t like how it felt, and she told him she didn’t want to do it again for a little while. Just a little while she’d said.

       When she saw him at school the next morning, he was acting very strange. She’d assumed they’d be closer than ever now that they’d taken it to the next level, but she wasn’t so sure now that she’d seen him acting cold and distant.

       He was standing at his locker rummaging through some books and folders seemingly searching for something. The locker door blocked his face though as Charissa continued asking him questions, disappointed by his cold, short responses.

        “I can pick you up after dinner,” she said. “Wanna go to the mall?”

       Troy groaned. “Hate the mall.” He stepped back a bit then and Charissa could see his dark and handsome profile just inches away, but he didn’t turn toward her, didn’t kiss her, barely even acknowledged her as he just stared emptily into his locker.

        “We can walk the trail over by your house,” she said desperately, her heart racing as she could sense something was wrong though couldn’t imagine what it could be.

       “Nah,” he said. “Listen, let’s take a little break, ok? I’ve got some stuff going on.” He slammed his locker shut and walked away without even looking at her.

       Charissa’s heart dropped into her stomach, but she tightened her chest enough to keep from crying till she could make it to a bathroom stall.

       She hadn’t felt like talking to anyone about anything after that, except for Darla of course, her closest friend, her truest confidant, the only person she’d ever deeply confided in regarding all her demons. About her dead father, her jailbird mother. She’s the only one who knew that Charissa had forgiven her mother for winding up in prison, but not for what she’d done. She’s the only one who knew that Charissa felt that her mother had punished the wrong person.

       Charissa took a sniff of the lip gloss then shook her head; her face scrunched together in disgust.    She glanced over at Tanya who was just a couple of seats down from her then, right next to Darla, because of course she was. Charissa found herself wondering what Tanya’s lip gloss smelled like though they were all the same brand and style of lip gloss. Ms. Rupert had insisted upon that. Still, Charissa knew that Tanya’s must smell different than the rest, at least a little bit. In fact, she’d heard her over there continuing to complain about not feeling well, saw her touching her stomach, shaking her head a lot, looking around for help or something, not knowing what to do it seemed.

       Charissa inhaled deeply then let out a long sigh. It had been quite the week. On Monday, something was brewing in the hallways. She could feel it as she walked toward her first class alone as she’d been doing ever since Troy had dumped her. A few girls she didn’t know well were whispering animatedly outside some lockers.

       “Can you believe that?” One girl asked as Charissa drew near.

       “That’s disgusting,” a girl added before they all glanced back at Charissa and silence followed.

       It was awkward. One girl turned back toward her locker while the other two took their phones out. Had the girls been talking about her?

       She experienced something similar with a couple of girls she knew from dance. They stopped talking as Charissa walked past them, so she froze, backtracked, and said, “What the hell? Are people talking about me?”

       Her friends stared at each other for a moment then looked back her way.

       “Not exactly,” the one said.

       “Someone lost their virginity last night,” the other girl added as they finished gathering their bags.

        Charissa was horrified when she heard that, not because she cared about anybody else losing their virginity, at least not at that moment, but because the conversation made her nervous. She didn’t know how to add to it, to comment on anything, because surely, she’d sound strange. People would hear the awkwardness in her voice, the discomfort she felt as her paranoia took over as she assumed they all knew. That everybody probably knew already but nobody had said anything to her. Besides, if everyone was talking about this other girl, had they talked about Charissa a couple of weeks ago?

       “What?” Charissa finally asked. “Who?”

       “You don’t wanna know.” The girls walked away.

       It wasn’t until Wednesday during Chemistry that she’d heard more details regarding the juicy gossip about what had happened over the past weekend. She had just been sitting there in class listening to Mr. Glasnow discuss how extremely important it was to be careful when working with Acetonitrile. It was apparent that Darla, who was of course sitting next to her as always, was quite bored as she’d been doodling in her notebook with a pen she’d borrowed from Charissa. She borrowed things from everybody, truth be told. She might in fact have been the only person in their class poorer than Charissa and her grandparents.

       That’s when somebody tapped Charissa on the back. She turned slightly, just enough to glance behind her without drawing too much attention. The girl behind her—Charissa always forgot her name because she wasn’t all that pretty, wasn’t a threat to her—handed her a note. While turning back around slowly, she could see that everybody on the right side of the room was taking turns looking her way, clearly waiting to see how she’d respond to the note. That meant each of them had already seen it, already knew what she was about to find out. And that was it. That was how she discovered that Tanya had lost her virginity to Troy.

        Charissa’s face froze in place, and she wasn’t even sure what she must’ve looked like in that moment because she’d forgotten she had muscles anywhere above her neck. It made her picture the faces Troy had made when they slept together. She pictured him making them again but looking down at Tanya instead. She just couldn’t move, was barely breathing, until she swallowed the growing lump in her throat, imploded the note with a painfully tight squeeze of her hand then asked to go to the bathroom claiming it was an emergency.

       She’d been in there for just a minute, leaning against the sink, cooling her flushed face with little palmfuls of cold water, when Darla came in after her.

       “What happened?” she asked as she rushed over to comfort her friend. “The whole class erupted right after you left so I’d asked to go help you. What’s going on, Charissa?”

Charissa inhaled deeply again, exhaled slowly before pulling the note out of her pocket and handing it over to her good friend.

        As she read it, Darla’s jaw slowly dropped before she looked up at Charissa. “Are you sure that’s true? We should make sure before getting all upset.”

        “It makes sense,” Charissa said, head nodding up and down over and over again, her pacing back and forth in the bathroom. “It makes sense to me. I remember Tanya coming up to us multiple times at her party last fall, getting in between us, trying to dance up on Troy, stuff like that. I let it all go because she was drunk and him and I got together so whatever.”

        Darla nodded. Didn’t say anything. Looked down at the ground and just stared off at nothing.

        “But I never forgot,” Charissa said, finger pointing up toward the ceiling definitively, like a statue refusing to budge. “It makes a lotta sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had something to do with us breaking up.”

        That was on Wednesday. They’d had a dress rehearsal for the dance recital that night, another one the following afternoon after school, before a quick dinner in the cafeteria. Sandwiches were provided by the Theater Department before their first performance at 7:00 that evening.

        It went well. The full house applauded, flowers were handed over by the dozens out in the hallway and the theater cleared out quickly after that, being as it was a Thursday night and not quite the weekend yet.

        Charissa still remembered watching Tanya closely as she walked out of the school with a parent on each side of her. She was curious to see if she’d begin walking funny, start falling over grabbing her stomach wrenching in pain or just start vomiting blood profusely. But nothing happened.

        Yet now, on this Sunday afternoon, after two dress rehearsals and three performances, it seemed to finally be kicking in. It was showtime, time for the grand finale. Tanya didn’t look good at all. Charissa had been watching her closely and had seen the change come over her a little bit last night and even more so as they prepared for this last dance.

        Charissa considered again how disturbingly easy it had been. Sure, the science lab with all the chemicals was locked up securely. But the classroom was just a classroom. It was easy to hide a little vile of Acetonitrile buried under the dirt of one of the plants next to the windows. And students leave things in classrooms all the time, as Charissa had done with her notebook that Wednesday. The cleaning crew was always more than happy to let an emotionally desperate student back into a classroom for a quick second to grab some missing item. Or in this case, a chemical that when ingested or absorbed through the skin converts to cyanide.

       On top of not feeling well, Tanya seemed to notice, as Charissa already had, that her lips were beginning to look quite strange, even with all the glittering lip gloss. When Charissa watched Tanya touching her lips, heard her complain about not feeling well before responding by applying more and more lip gloss, Charissa knew that something was going to happen during the show. She wasn’t sure exactly what.

       She was, however, sure that her mother had punished the wrong person. That, fair enough, her father was guilty, but so was his secretary. Charissa was also sure that she missed her mother so badly, as much as she missed her father. She understood she’d never see her father again. But with her mother, there was at least a chance.

       Charissa sent herself back to that morning almost exactly five years earlier, recalled the moment she stood at the top of the stairs yawning, deciding to head down to start the day. She wanted to hit pause right there, tell the girl to rewind, walk backwards into her room and stay in bed for longer, hours, days, years even, wrapped up in blankets not knowing what had happened.

       Instead, the girl walked down the stairs and saw that her mother had rearranged the couch in the living room, all the chairs as well, had them all dragged up almost all the way against the front windows.          She watched her mother rocking back and forth staring out at nothing.

       “What are you doing, mom?” the girl had asked.

        Her mom didn’t immediately reply but did move from the couch to a chair before facing out the window again. After a few seconds, she moved back to the couch.

        “Mom?” the girl asked again. “What’s wrong? What’re you doing?”

        “Waiting,” her mom said sweetly. “Just waiting.”

       She glanced around then, not seeing or hearing any sign of her father. “Where’s dad?”

       “Sleeping,” her mom said.

        And that was strange, her father never slept so late so the girl went up to her parents’ room, lay beside her father for a while but couldn’t get him to wake up. It wasn’t until she’d got her hands on an old newspaper several months later that she’d learn her mother had given her father sleeping pills the night before, then smothered him with a pillow in the middle of the night.

        The call for places came just then, and Charissa began heading out of the dressing room, anxious for the show to begin. She knew that Troy would be in the audience today, so everything was really coming together just as she’d planned.

        With all of her wandering thoughts, Charissa had forgotten to bring her white gloves with her. So, she turned and rushed back into the dressing room just in time to hear Darla ask Tanya if she could borrow her lip gloss one last time, notice them both turn and stare at her awkwardly, see Darla’s shoulders drop along with her gaze as it drifted down to the floor with a clear sense of guilt.

       Tanya huffed out some clear frustration before folding her arms and staring hard at Charissa. “Jesus Christ, Charissa. It’s not true, ok? It was a nasty rumor started by your asshole ex-boyfriend. I would never do that to you.”

       The stage director yelled out places more aggressively this time. Tanya immediately sprung toward the hallway leading to the theater. Darla, who had just finished applying another layer of glittering lip gloss followed just behind her.

       “I don’t feel good,” Tanya said. “I literally feel worse than I’ve ever felt.”

       “I feel really sick too,” Darla said. “It’s probably just nerves. One more show.”

       Charissa stared out at nothing for what seemed like hours but was probably just a few seconds. The stage director screamed her name, pulling her back to the moment. Charissa turned and headed out of the dressing room because she didn’t really know what else to do. She was jogging toward the stage now, but it felt like a slow march.

       She recalled her first dance recital as a child, the energy she felt from the crowd, Darla’s smile right before they rushed onto stage together for the first of many times, her parents close together as they hurried to meet her after the show, her father reaching toward her, flowers in hand. That’s when she’d decided she wanted to be a dancer for the rest of her life. That seemed so long ago.

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      Kevin LeCompte is a high school English teacher who loves stories of all genres, though he tends to lean towards horror because he grew up in the 80s and was sneaking out of bed to watch scary movies long before he should have been. He loves to read obsessively and learn from other writers. He has published several short stories and is currently querying novels he's written. You can find updates on his publications at https://kevinlecompte.net. 

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Cynthia Fawcett has been writing for fun or money since she was able to hold a pen. A Jersey Girl at heart, she got her journalism degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee and now writes mostly technical articles about hydraulics and an occasional short story or poem on any other subject.