Homecoming

The hook at the back of the dress was tiny, the kind that required two hands and a specific angle, and I’d been trying to get it for thirty seconds before Pops appeared in the doorway.

“Turn around,” he said, which was the full extent of the conversation. He fastened it with the calm efficiency of someone who had figured out hooks a long time ago and didn’t feel the need to editorialize. I’d expected a comment. He didn’t make one. Hook fastened. Hand on my shoulder for one second. Gone.

I turned back to the mirror. The burgundy dress fell the way it had in the boutique, that soft weight that moved when I did. The strappy heeled sandals added three inches I hadn’t fully accounted for. I’d practiced walking in them once, decided I was fine, and now I was discovering that fine and actually fine were slightly different things. I was taller than I’d expected to be. The gold earrings caught the light.

Noelle knocked at the door frame. She’d been in the hallway, giving me the mirror without making it a production.

“Okay,” she said. Not a question. Like it was already settled.

I looked at myself for one more second. “Okay.”

Evan picked us up at seven. He was in a charcoal suit jacket over a white shirt, collar open, the kind of put-together that didn’t happen by accident. He looked at me in the doorway and something moved across his face, genuine and slightly unguarded.

“You look,” he started.

“I’m aware,” I said.

He smiled. “Okay.”

The gym smelled like body spray and ambition and was doing more work tonight than usual. The lights were low enough to be forgiving and high enough to see everyone, which was the calculation homecoming committees had been making since forever. Everyone looked a little more like the version of themselves they’d been building toward.

Evan kept his hand at the small of my back as we came through the doors. His hand was against the keyhole, skin on skin, and I was aware of it in a way I hadn’t planned for. He didn’t notice. I didn’t say anything.

We danced. He was fine at it. I was better than fine, or I had been before October, and the heels made everything a degree more deliberate than I was used to. I adjusted. The song was good and the gym was full and Noelle was somewhere behind me doing something with Stetson that involved significantly more choreography than the situation called for.

Tahni was in an emerald bodycon, V-neck, the kind of dress that announced itself without having to try. She was positioned at the edge of the floor where she’d be impossible not to notice. She wasn’t looking at us. That was the whole thing.

For maybe an hour it almost worked. The dancing, the lights, the noise of two hundred people in a gym pretending December didn’t start on Monday. I let myself be in the evening for a while.

Then the tempo dropped.

Tahni moved. Not toward us exactly, toward Evan, with the ease of someone who’d already decided the geometry of the room worked in her favor. Her hand on his arm. Something said close to his ear. The smile she used when she wanted something and already knew she was going to get it.

Evan looked at her hand on his arm. Then at me. Then back at Tahni. “I’m here with Sloane,” he said. Easy, no edge, just the fact of it.

Tahni’s smile didn’t move. “Of course,” she said, like she’d expected exactly this and found it charming. She peeled off toward the floor without losing a step, already scanning for the next thing.

Evan came back to me. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said. He’d done the right thing. I let that sit.

The slow-adjacent song came on around nine.

I’d ended up near the edge of the floor with my sandals in my hand, feet flat on the gym floor, which was a practical decision I didn’t regret. Noelle had disappeared with Maekynzie. Emory was somewhere. Tinsley was against the wall, exactly where she always ended up.

Chandler appeared.

He didn’t announce it, just materialized the way he did, dark green dress shirt, charcoal pants, faux hawk slightly less structured than usual, like the evening had loosened something. He looked at my sandals in my hand and then at my face and didn’t say anything about either.

“You look like you need rescuing,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

The corner of his mouth went up. “I didn’t say from what.”

He held out his hand. Not formal, not a production. Just there.

I put my sandals down next to Tinsley’s bag and took it.

It wasn’t a dance hold exactly. His hand was at my waist and mine was at his shoulder and we were moving in the general direction the song suggested. The gym was loud enough that we didn’t have to talk. We didn’t.

I was aware of Evan somewhere across the floor. I made myself stop.

Chandler’s jaw was slightly set. I knew without looking directly because I’d been reading that jaw since we were eight. His posture was easy, deliberately easy, the kind that costs something to hold. His hand at my waist was warm and didn’t move.

Two minutes forty seconds. I know because I counted.

Then Stetson appeared with the specific energy he deployed when he was being helpful and didn’t want it to look like that. “My turn,” he announced, stepping between us with the confidence of someone who had never once questioned whether he was welcome.

Chandler stepped back. His expression didn’t change. He said something to Stetson, quiet and sideways, and then he was gone toward the edge of the floor.

Stetson danced with me for the rest of the song and made a whole thing of it, which was the Stetson method of creating cover. I was grateful. I was also not. Both things sat in my chest without resolving.

When I glanced toward the edge of the floor, Chandler was talking to Tinsley with his back to the room.

The party was at someone’s house in a house up on Redstone Terrace, one of those glass-and-steel places on the ridge where the music bounced off the cliffs and the driveway was heated and the windows were floor-to-ceiling panoramic. The kind of house that was built to make a statement. Evan drove me. Stetson took Noelle, Emory, and Maekynzie.

In the car he put on something low-key and we talked about Emory’s dancing, Noelle’s group photo operation, nothing that required anything from either of us. California ease. I’d spent two months finding that quality restful and tonight it was sitting a half-step off. I didn’t examine it.

The house was loud and warm, too many lamps doing the work of overhead lights nobody had turned on. Evan kept his hand at the small of my back moving through the first room. Palm against the keyhole again. I was aware of it in a way that had no clean resolution.

Stetson and Chandler arrived ten minutes later. Chandler was in the doorway for a second before Stetson pulled him into something across the room. Tinsley showed up after that with a senior from the football team, tall, jaw like a movie poster, and she introduced him to no one and went to get a drink, which was exactly what Tinsley would do.

Evan’s friends were there and they pulled him into something across the room. I found Noelle and Maekynzie near the kitchen. Normal. Easy. I ate something from the snack table and drank something that wasn’t alcohol because Cycle 5 VDC had opinions about that, and let the party happen around me.

For a while it was fine. Almost the thing I’d wanted it to be.

Then I heard it.

I was ten feet away, turned toward Noelle, when Evan’s voice carried over the music.

“…yeah, that’s Sloane. She’s a friend of mine, she’s going through some stuff right now.”

A friend of mine.

Going through some stuff.

I kept my eyes on Noelle. She was mid-sentence. I stayed on her face.

He knew. That was the part that didn’t move. He’d been in the waiting room once, had sat in the car while I went in, had asked careful questions afterward with the particular discomfort of someone who cared and didn’t know what to do about it. He knew the diagnosis. He knew the cycles. He knew the treatment schedule. And when a stranger asked, he’d reached for friend and stuff and going through, the softest and most distancing language available. The kind that made it smaller. The kind that let him stay adjacent to it without having to hold any of it.

I understood why. That was the worst part. I understood exactly why.

Noelle’s eyes found mine for just a second.

She kept talking. I kept nodding.

Across the room Chandler laughed at something Emory said, and his eyes moved and found mine for just a beat before he looked back. No expression. Just the look. I turned to the snack table and put something on a plate I wasn’t going to eat.

Evan found me twenty minutes later, easy and warm, hand at my waist, asking if I was good. I said yes. He kissed my temple and went to find Stetson.

I was standing at a party in a dress I’d bought because Noelle believed in futures, and the night had been almost exactly what I’d wanted, and one sentence had done whatever it had done, and I was not going to let it be the thing that mattered most about tonight. I decided that very firmly in someone’s kitchen at eleven-thirty and then I went to find Noelle.

Sunday morning Maekynzie called.

She didn’t text first. Maekynzie always texted first.

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “I’m telling you because you should know, not because I think you should do anything about it.”

She told me what Tahni had said. Not to her directly, to someone at the party who’d told Maekynzie by midnight. The words were: it’s hard to watch, honestly, when someone uses what they’re going through to make themselves the center of every room.

Maekynzie’s voice had her voice very controlled, which was how she sounded when she was angrier than she was going to let herself be.

There was a pause when she finished.

“Sloane.”

“I heard you.”

“I shouldn’t have told you.” Smaller now. “I’m sorry. I just, I needed you to know, and now I’m looking at what I just did and I’m,” she stopped. “I’m sorry.”

“You were right to tell me.”

“Was I.” Not a question.

I didn’t answer that. We both already knew.

After I hung up I sat on the edge of my bed. Bernard put his head in my lap. I put my hand on him and stayed there.

I’d known how this worked since September. Knowing didn’t make it smaller.

The dress was still on the back of my closet door. The gold earrings were on my desk. It had been a good night. Most of it had been a good night. I kept that, and I put the rest somewhere I wasn’t going to look at right now, and I got up, and I went downstairs.

In the car later, Pops driving me to the pharmacy, I looked out the window at the December street.

I am so tired.

Not the treatment kind. That one I knew, had names for, had learned to measure and manage across days. This was the other kind. The kind that came from spending energy you didn’t have on things you shouldn’t have to spend it on. The kind that accumulated without asking.

Pops didn’t say anything. He never did when I needed quiet.

I watched the street and let it be what it was.