CHAPTER 9 |

Peer Pressure & First Dances

 

 

“Next stop.”

We pulled up to the River Canyon Park, which wasn’t much of a park at all. It was really a small landscaped area with a gazebo and a statue of William Fuller, River Canyon’s very own Paul Revere. During the day, the little garden buzzed with locals and farm stands. A live-action postcard print of small town living, where everybody shook hands and asked how the wife was and if the dog’s neutering surgery went well.

But then, in the dark, it was dead quiet. Spooky, even, with the eyes of Willian Fuller following your every move. And on that night, there was no breeze to gently sway the blades of grass or the branches of the willow trees. A night so still, almost frozen in time. An exact opposite of my heart, beating wildly at the sight of the gazebo, because there was only one reason he would have brought me there.

I accepted help from the truck without protest, and he walked me to the wooden structure, illuminated by fairy lights. He positioned me in the center, hands on my shoulders, before pulling his phone out of a back pocket. He tapped along the screen until the familiar notes of “Have I Told You Lately” began to play, and after putting the phone down on the railing, he came to me.

“Dance with me.”

Oh, God, help me. “W-why?” I asked, feigning cluelessness while my heart beat in my throat, knowing exactly why.

“Because,” he said, taking my hand in his and wrapping his arm firmly around my waist, “I haven’t danced with anybody in fourteen years, and I want to see if I still got it.”

I laughed gently. “I’m not sure you ever really had it.”  

“You used to think so. Let’s see if you still do.”  

I had officially agreed to his one-night deal, I reminded myself. So, with nervous jitters traveling through my veins, I succumbed to the music, the song that wasn’t quite ours. I reached a hand up to grip his sturdy shoulder and I tipped my head forward, resting against his chest.

And somewhere between the moment when he relaxed his chin on the top of my head and the moment I closed my eyes, I was overtaken by the lyrics playing through the tiny speaker, and my mind drifted again …

 

❧

 

We had our first dance when we were eighteen.

Patrick and I had always been good, easy kids. Never a headache for our parents, never the type to give them a reason to complain to their friends about their out-of-control teenagers in love. I always blamed the God-loving upbringing, but then, it also could have been that our parents just simply allowed us to be ourselves, and never gave us a reason to rebel recklessly.

They didn’t care that I wanted to dye my hair fire engine red, as long as I did my homework. They didn’t care that Patrick went through a mohawk phase, as long as he took out the trash. They didn’t care that I wanted my navel pierced, as long as I came to work at the deli when asked. They didn’t care that Patrick wanted his lip pierced, as long as he kept good grades.

It was a perfect compromise between parent and teen, a bit of give-and-take on both ends, and the compromises extended to our relationship. They didn’t care that we spent every spare moment together, as long as they knew where we were, as long as we checked in. They trusted us to do the right thing, they trusted us to take care of each other, and we always did.

Until we didn’t.

Prom wasn’t ever a big deal to us, but to our mothers, it was. They had to beg and bargain to make it happen, but in the end, they won.

“You can see the Chili Peppers this summer,” they said, “if you give us the lame obligatory prom picture for the scrapbook.”

Not an exact quote, but close enough.

So, I got the dress, and had an enjoyable bonding experience with my mom and Kate. Patrick got a tux and didn’t kill his younger brothers, as they teased him every step of the way. Mom made me the hair appointment, and Kate agreed to do my makeup. Patrick’s dad did us the honor of renting a limo for the night, and for all intents and purposes, everything was set.

Hell, we were even given an hour of dancing lessons from the sing-songy Mrs. Kinney to the tune of her favorite Van Morrison album.

We were ready for our one and only school dance, and despite my occasional eye rolls and dramatic groans, I might have been just a little excited to get dressed up, to get pretty, and to see him in a tuxedo.

And then, we screwed it all up.

The weekend before prom, a friend from school had himself a birthday party, and as clichés would have it, we found out his parents weren’t home the moment we arrived and noticed the bottles of liquor open on the coffee table. It was a foreign sight for the two of us, watching kids our age knocking back shots and doing things we hadn’t done yet on the couch. We knew what a potentially bad situation we had walked in on, and we eyed each other with the same wide-eyed panic as when he broke the lamp in his parents’ living room during a heated make-out session on the Magical Couch.

But, we were still kids dealing with the cruel repercussions of peer pressure. Running out of there would have resulted in teasing and torment, a miserable way to end our last year in high school, and with an exchanged look, we made the mutual decision to stay.

And so, we found an empty chair. Patrick sat, and I climbed onto his lap, and that was where we stayed. He didn’t get drunk, and neither did I. In fact, we didn’t drink at all, despite the beers we were handed and held onto all night. Because despite the fire engine red hair, the mohawk, and the short-lived piercings, we were good, easy kids.

But still, as clichés would have it, the neighbors called the cops. The cops showed up, and they called parents—our parents.

After a car ride of deafening silence, we were ordered to sit down at the kitchen table in Patrick’s house, both sets of parents looming over us like the threatening figures of authority they suddenly appeared to be.

“I don’t get it,” Mom said. “I don’t get either of you right now. You’re not like this.”

“We didn’t do anything, Mrs. McKenna,” Patrick insisted, shaking his head profusely.

“Don’t ya think that’s part o’ the trouble?” His father scowled down at us.

“What were we supposed to do?” I asked, as though I didn’t already know the answer to that stupid, stupid question.

“Kinsey, y’were supposed to call us, so we could come and get ya. That’s what y’were supposed to do.” It was impossible for Mrs. Kinney to sound mad, but her frown said otherwise. “Y’both did a foolish thing t’night, and frankly, I’m disappointed in the both of ya.”

Dad’s job was to singlehandedly dole out our punishment. “You’re both grounded.”

“Grounded?” Patrick snapped, standing up from the table. “Ya’ve gotta be kiddin’ me! For what?!”

Mr. Kinney pointed a menacing finger at the son that had grown to be taller than him, and Patrick threw himself back in his chair. “You’re grounded because ya’ve clearly forgotten what the right thing to do is. Now, ya both can think about that for the next week.”

My bottom lip quivered; Patrick’s hands rounded to the back of his head. The truth was, neither one of us had ever been grounded before. We hardly knew the meaning of the word, and had no idea what the punishment entailed, what we would suffer at the command of our parents’ word.

Because, really, how could you punish kids who didn’t really do anything to begin with?

So, they hit us right where it hurt the most, and forbid us from seeing each other outside of school for a week.

“What!” I turned to stare at Patrick, as though he had some kind of leverage in the stupid, stupid situation we had found ourselves in.

“Ya can’t do that,” Patrick growled up at his parents.

Mrs. Kinney crossed her arms over her chest, looking down from her parental high horse. “We can, Paddy, and we just did.”

“That means no prom,” Mom tacked on.  

I had taken the stubborn approach in response to that part of the sentencing, stating that I “never wanted to go in the first place.” But the truth was, underneath it all, I was heartbroken, and while I couldn’t speak for Patrick, I know I cried along to my Sad Song Mix for a solid hour.

It was a week of silent treatments and sour pusses. A slice of teenage despair at what was supposed to be the pinnacle of our youth. We clung to each other as much as we could during the school days, walking home with hands clasping hands, and slamming the doors to our respective houses before stomping upstairs to our bedrooms.

For five painstakingly endless days, that was the way things were—angry, spiteful. But then, the night of prom, there was a knock on my bedroom door.

Imagine my surprise when I threw the door open in a violent huff to find Patrick standing there, dimples ablaze.

I threw myself into his arms in all my teenage drama, as though I hadn’t seen him the day before in school. Those twenty-four hours had been brutal, though, and we kissed in my doorway, warranting a groan from a passing Kate.

So much older, so much more single.

“What are you doing here?” I gripped his face, stroking my fingers over soft adolescent skin.

“Mam talked to your mom, and I think they kinda feel bad. We’re off the hook as of tonight.”

“Are you KIDDING me?” I nearly screamed, and shook my head. “No way. I can’t go to prom like this!” I gestured down at the pajamas I had been wearing for the last week, apart from school.

“We’re not goin’ to prom,” he said with an even bigger grin. “We’re allowed to go out for a couple hours until curfew, but we can’t go anywhere near the little arseholes from school, Mam said.”

“Your mom did not say ‘arsehole.’”

“She definitely did.”

I laughed, finding it hard to believe Patrick’s mom would ever curse, and hurried to throw some jeans and Chucks on, not wanting to waste a moment of those permitted hours.

We were dropped off at Harry’s Hot Diggity Dogs for dinner. We ate them on our bench at the pier, my head on his shoulder and his arm wrapped around me, and when the hot dogs were eaten, we wasted no time making out.

His hands in my hair, my arms around his neck. We kissed with deprivation, not caring about our hot dog breath or precision or where our hands landed, when our teeth crashed. It had been five days, and in our young lives, that had been an eternity, and we stayed like that, until Harry cleared his throat.

“Alright, alright. That’s enough,” he scolded lightly, shaking his head with the beginnings of a wistful smile.

“Sorry, Harry,” Patrick apologized for the both of us, while I smoothed my hair down with the flush of embarrassment creeping up from the collar of my t-shirt.

Patrick threw our plates out, eyeing the familiar old garbage can next to our bench. He glanced at me, then over at Harry, while his lips pursed and his tongue poked at his inner cheek. And then, wordlessly, he pulled out the army knife from his pocket, and went to work on the rusted metal.

My eyes widened at his sudden stint with vandalism. “What are—”

“Shh,” he shushed me, keeping his eyes on his sloppy masterpiece. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Metal on metal for all of three minutes, and then, finally, “Okay, done.”

I took a quick gander at the garbage can, not wanting to stare and look more suspicious than we already did. But when I saw our names—Patrick & Kinsey—carved into that garbage can, I couldn’t do anything but stare.

“You’re so lame,” I chided, but I held a hand to my heart, wondering if it was at all possible to love him more than I did in that moment.

“Maybe, but you love it.”

I did. I do.

He pulled me up from the bench, and we walked hand-in-hand over to the park, where Patrick pulled the Discman out of his pocket, along with a portable speaker.

“What are you doing?” I asked with an exasperated sigh, as he led me to the gazebo.

“I’m dancin’ with you tonight.”

“Why?”

He pressed play, and skipped through the songs until he found the one he was looking for. The piano notes of Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately” played through the tinny little speaker, and I groaned, rolling my eyes at the cheesy pick.

“Why?” he echoed, taking my hand in his, wrapping his arm around my waist.

“Yes!”

“Because I didn’t spend an hour learnin’ to do this shite for nothin’, that’s why.”

He played it off like he was so tough, so cool, but his chin found a comfortable spot on the top of my head, and he held me close.

The music, that dance, acted as the closing credits to our high school days, the last moments of our youth. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but shit, those tiny moments of teen-hood were whizzing by us at lightning speed. And I wish he had chosen a longer song, I wish he had insisted on a second one. I wish he had done something, anything, just to prevent us from closing the door on childhood, being grounded, and simple problems. To prevent us from stepping into adulthood, leaving home, and difficult issues. For just a little while longer.

But looking back, I don’t think it could have ever lasted long enough.

 

❧

 

I don’t know when, but the song had ended, and my arms held onto his neck. His arms were still around my waist, and we swayed to the sound of crickets and creaking floorboards. Almost as though it were a do-over; a second chance at a longer dance, at prying that door to our childhood open again. To live there forever, in an innocent world before mistakes and kids and failed marriages.

“The music stopped,” he finally said, his voice muffled by the top of my head.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay.” He tightened his grip on my waist, pressing my stomach against his strained groin, and just like that, it was too much. A sharp inhale, and I pulled away, knowing my cheeks had flushed and my pulse had quickened, palpitating rapidly in the base of my throat. I coughed, and my stomach did a few awkward somersaults at the knowledge that he was visibly turned on. I touched the ends of my hair, smoothing them over and over, just to keep my hands from reaching out and touching him.

“So?” I asked, looking up at him and his eyes, fixated entirely on me.

Christ, those eyes.

“So, what?”

“Do you still like dancing?”

He nodded slowly, his eyes revealing a glimmer of lust and sadness under the twinkle-lights. I thought he would say something that would bring forward the emotions I was struggling to fight, and to keep that from happening, I forced a smile.

“So, how did you get out of dancing at your own wedding?”

Patrick chuckled at that. “There was no dancing.”

“What do you mean?”

I sat down on the bench that wrapped around the inner perimeter of the gazebo, and taking that as an invitation, he sat beside me. He leaned forward, setting his elbows on his knees, and wrapped his hands around the back of his head. I knew that stance. It was the Difficult Topic stance.

I hated it.

“We were married at Town Hall by the feckin’ Mayor, Kins.”

“Okay, but you didn’t have, I don’t know, a reception?”

He shook his head. “Nah, it was all about gettin’ it done quick before anybody could say anything about the, ehm, situation, as Mam and Da liked to so lovingly call it.”

“Oh.” I picked at my fingernails. “I had no idea.”

His hands dropped to dangle between his knees. “Of course ya had no idea, Kinsey. You ran away so feckin’ fast, ya didn’t have a chance to find out.”

His voice was deep and rough, choked with ancient emotion. I tried remembering when his voice had gone from boyish to manly, and I couldn’t. I had known him during the pinnacle of puberty and changing voices, but I couldn’t remember.

Other things were just more important, I guess. More important than voices.