Part 26 (1/2)

Soon enough, the doorbell rang, and there they were, our dates, fresh out of the limo Thomas's parents had rented for the occasion. Joel, Kelsey's date, got him a discount from his cousin's car service company. Because the event was formal, they'd all worn the tuxedos that males tended to wear for such things. They looked cool, excited, cute, and happy. Logan looked good. I couldn't deny it. He always did. He'd worn a pink c.u.mmerbund and bow tie to match my sash, and had a single white rose for me. We stood on the front porch and tolerated a round of photographs at the hands of Victoria's mother, all the while feeling the b.u.mping ba.s.s coming from the heart of the limo as the driver blasted a heavy, throbbing hip-hop rap song and waited for us. There was something sort of tragic to me now about the scene, a bunch of rich prep school kids, headed to the limo daddy rented, listening to thug music, the guys trying to pimp-walk. It was all such a sorry approximation of everything that was real, sincere, and even painful about Demetrio.

Demetrio.

I tried desperately to push the idea of him from my mind. I missed him with a purple pain the sliced through the very center of me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't want to see him, not like it had been, and he knew this, and he was staying away. I knew that he just wanted me to get on with my life. I was trying.

The back of the limo was lit up with blue neon, and there was a TV on, with music videos playing. They didn't match the songs that blared, but it didn't matter. The whole scene was surreal, and, to the girl I had been one short month before, probably somewhat fun. I was the walking wounded, but I had enough self-control to be able to pull myself out of the self-pitying missing of Demetrio in order to appreciate the situation. There were two Marias inside of me now, the one I had been, and the one I'd become when he touched me. I hadn't lost my former self completely, and I still enjoyed the moment - if not for my own sake then for the sake of the friends I loved.

I sat next to Logan on the long seat. He put his arm around me, territorially, and tried to kiss me. I didn't move. I didn't want to.

”Don't start this again,” he warned me, whispering in my ear and biting my neck. ”You know what your mom will think.”

I kissed him, and tried to enjoy it. I was so confused, and lost.

The limo stopped at a fancy trendy restaurant near downtown, called the Slate Street Grill, and we went inside. Thomas's dad, a successful trial attorney, had already paid in advance for our dinner, and we were escorted like prized guests of honor to a reserved table. All of the adults in the place watched us walk across the room. At the time I thought they admired how adult and sophisticated we looked, but as I've gotten older I have decided that they probably watched us more in a nostalgic and sweetly patronizing way that, had we realized it, would have only served to make us feel even more like kids. They remembered what it had been like - except that none of them, or few of them, probably remembered what it was like to be me, torn between two worlds, that of the living and that of the dead. I tried not to think about Demetrio, but everything reminded me of him. The candles. The mood lighting. The way the waiter walked. A few times, I saw sparkles of light in corners, in my peripheral vision, and thought it was him. I'd gasp to myself in those moments, and my heart raced.

”You okay?” Logan asked, as he held my chair for me to sit down.

”Huh? Yeah. Why?” I'd been looking at the twinkling of light on a woman's winegla.s.s and wondering if it were Demetrio somehow.

”You seem distracted,” he said suspiciously.

”I'm fine.” I realized I needed to do a better job of acting like I was having a good time, so I poured the happy-face on thick.

He smiled at me, and took his own seat. We ordered fancy things, like caviar and crusted salmon, the kinds of things we thought, then, that adults like us might eat. We drank sparkling cider from champagne flutes, and Thomas even got up to give a heartfelt toast expressing his love for all of us, as his best friends, and especially his love for Victoria. We had chocolate cake for dessert.

After dinner we returned to the limo and took a ride back to Coronado Prep. The gym was decorated beautifully for the event, as only happens, I would imagine, at very expensive private schools - with ice sculptures, and curtains draped over the walls, pooling romantically upon the floor. The tables had candles flickering in the centers, and again I was haunted by his memory, and thought I felt him. It was all very elegant and gorgeous. I wanted to enjoy it more than I did. I couldn't focus. All I could think about was him. Him. Demetrio.

We all took a table, and then Logan showed us something he had in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. It was a flask of whiskey. Everyone's eyes lit up, even Kelsey's. She was trying to pretend she liked Logan, too, because she loved me so much. I adored her for this effort she made. I normally wouldn't have approved of something like drinking at a school dance, but given how much pain I was in, and how much I hated being with Logan, and seeing how none of us would be driving ourselves home later, I didn't protest. This was when the other two boys showed their own flasks, in their own jacket pockets, and everyone sort of laughed secretively. We couldn't let the chaperones see the stuff, or we would have been thrown out of not just the dance, but more than likely the entire school. It wasn't like we were the kinds of kids who drank all the time, or ever. Once wouldn't kill us. Or so I thought then.

”C'mon,” said Victoria, eyeing a side door that led out to a dark part of the campus. ”Let's get some fresh air. G.o.d knows you need it, Maria.”

We were up then, all six of us, and walking as casually as we could toward the door while all around us our cla.s.smates danced and talked and partied to the loud, excellent music being spun by the DJ. Thomas was the first one out the door. Soon, we were all huddled near a dumpster, taking sips of the horrible-tasting, bitter liquid, directly from the flask. I needed it. That's what I told myself. I needed to forget. I needed to loosen up. I wanted to have a good time and stop sulking.

It was like liquid fire going down, and I coughed and grew red in the face. Yet and still, when the flask came around a second time, I partook of more. And a third, and a fourth. Pretty soon, I didn't mind the burn so much, and everything seemed sort of fuzzy and faraway, and silly and fun and perfectly manageable. Victoria watched me closely, and didn't drink as much as I did.

”Be careful,” she said, as we were somehow walking back toward the gym. I didn't remember getting up or moving, but here I was anyway. ”I know you're feeling pretty good right now, Maria, but whatever you do, don't talk about him. They won't understand. Got that?”

”Yeah,” I said.

We went back through the front door, as the side door we'd used to exit locked itself automatically once you were out. We were all chewing mint gum now. I couldn't remember exactly how I'd gotten it, or who'd given it to me, but I did know that my mouth was wintergreen fresh. The thought made me laugh. Kelsey and Victoria took me by the elbow and led me past the parents at the front door, both of my friends, I think, less drunk than I was.

”Act naturally,” said Victoria. ”Don't breathe on them, dragon breath.”

This made me giggle. That was bad. I turned my head away from the chaperones, and walked into the darkness, where a moody rap anthem was blaring. I felt the ba.s.s beat upon my sternum. The preps were out on the floor, getting down in their own special way. I watched for a while, and felt sort of sickened by the way my cla.s.smates tried to imitate a reggaeton video, dirty dancing. Something very sad about it. We were cruel, Kelsey, Victoria and I, joking and laughing about the rotten dancing we saw going on. The other kids? They couldn't all be us, now could they?

Meanwhile, the guys we were with had grown in confidence exponentially with the addition of alcohol. Something unmistakably hungry and manlike came over them now, all the boyish tentativeness gone from their eyes and bodies, testosterone boiling in their veins. That's what I liked so much about Demetrio, I realized: confidence. Add confidence to a boy, and he became a man.

At this point, I spotted some of the other girls from the dance team, and I remembered that we had agreed that we'd meet up here and perform a number from our repertoire. Before I knew it, I was being whisked away from my friends, around the room, gathering others from the troupe like a magnet with metal shavings, and then there we were at the DJ booth, requesting the song, and then there we were, taking over the dance floor, as the song b.u.mped on, and in formation, doing our thing. I was loose, and free, and my body newly awakened in ways it never had been. I shook, s.h.i.+mmied, moved, lived, breathed, and was. I felt alive, and this was melancholy, wonderful, horrible, and in spite of the pain, my dancing was better. I was better. I felt stronger.

Delectation.

I finally understood what he'd meant about the pain of unrequited love being different from other kinds of pain.

My pain hadn't killed me. It hadn't destroyed me. It had made the colors brighter, even if they hurt my head; it had made the songs more dimensional, even if my body moved to them completely alone; it had made everything somehow more than it had been before. I was more for having loved him, even though I felt like less without him. I smiled with this understanding, and looked up, toward the end of our routine, feeling energized and cared for by The Maker, like everything was going to be alright, even if I never saw Demetrio again.

It was at that moment exactly that I saw him, s.h.i.+mmering in a flash of light, materializing out of the ether in a darkened corner of the gym, hidden from view by his ghostliness, flas.h.i.+ng visible for just one small second, before flickering away again.

He was here.

And though I initially thought he was watching me as I shook up the dance floor, the next flash of light he gave me showed him to be watching someone else, who was watching me like a tiger.

Logan.

I stopped dancing, in the middle of the routine, so spooked was I by the apparition of Demetrio at my Winter Ball, staring down my date. Kelsey saw me, and caught me before I literally fell to the floor. She held me up.

”Keep going, Maria, don't stop.”

”He's here,” I told her, breathless.

”Who?”

It must have been the alcohol that made me stop dancing, and tell Kelsey the truth about Demetrio, there, in the middle of the dance. ”He actually is a ghost, Kelsey. I'm not supposed to tell you, but you need to know.”

She looked doubtful. ”Someone's had a little too much to drink.”

”No, it's true! You have to believe me.” I felt sick. Dizzy.

”It's okay,” she said, though her eyes widened with fear. ”Just dance. We'll deal with it later.”

I shook myself out of my fear, and looked at the other girls to get my place. I continued, I soldiered on. My eyes kept straying to the corner where I'd seen him, but he was gone. I danced like my life depended on it, tears coming, laughter coming, so many emotions welling up within me at once. I saw Logan watching me with a predatory look that I'd credited to the alcohol. Demetrio didn't like that look. How could he be jealous? He'd told me there was no such thing for his kind, and yet I saw it all over his face.

Demetrio had told me at the cafe that he was capable of doing everything human beings did.

Everything? I'd asked him.

Everything, he'd said.

Even, I thought as the dance came to a stop, lying.

The crowd clapped wildly for us when we finished, and the DJ immediately began to play another song. We stayed on the floor, and Kelsey and Victoria and the guys joined us. I tried to look normal, but my eyes kept roaming the room, trying to see him. I felt dizzy suddenly, and sick.

”What's wrong?” asked Logan.

”I don't feel well,” I told him.

”Let's get you some air,” he suggested.

”You look green,” said Kelsey. ”Doesn't she look green?”