The Dance of Souls
Winter formal senior year was the highlight of our life together.
Not only did Callum ask me to the dance when I least expected it, but he also broke up with his then-girlfriend, well-known high school heartbreaker Kelly Gruber. The girl who was known for breaking her boyfriends and playing with them. The girl who had cheated on her jock boyfriend twice, the one she dated before Callum. The jock boyfriend wasn’t too happy about it and there were rumors he had tried to hurt the boys Kelly had used and thrown away, but then someone had helped him come to his senses. Well, whatever senses a guy like Rick could have. To me, all of this might as well have been happening in another world, a reality so different from my own existence, it had a soundtrack.
The only reason that reality bothered me, was because Callum was frequently in it. He was lost to us poor mortals; he had been for years and now he only hung out with the popular kids. Well, we still hung out but that was mostly because we lived right across the street from one another. Our families were friends and our mothers had potlucks together. His family moved here when he was about six and I’ve lived here my whole life. I think his parents needed a change. They wanted the quaint life of a small town, and they were enjoying everything that came with it. Callum, not so much. He hated that he was uprooted from his previous school and he hated it here. But because his parents were not going anywhere, I guess he was stuck. But even as kids, Callum constantly talked about the time in the future when he would be able to leave this town.
I didn’t blame him.
Blizzard, VA was about as end-of-the-world as it got.
Anyway, back to the high school story. Kelly was so pissed when Callum broke up with her, she promptly found another date in the form of Matt Olsen, the same guy with whom she had cheated on Callum and things were extremely awkward, when she kept trying to show-off her new, hunky, quarterback date in front of the entire school and especially in front of Callum and me. Several times, I caught Callum being distressed and annoyed, I wasn’t sure which but he kept trying to avoid them. Me, I was just confused. I had no idea why in the world Callum would ask someone like me to go out with him on a Winter Formal? I guess neither did the rest of the school, because they kept staring at us the whole time. Callum was probably used to that kind of attention and this wasn’t bothering him so much, but it was bothering me. I felt like I was in a movie where Kelly was the main lead, and I was merely playing a bit part. Any time now, the writers would change conflict, and I would be thrown out of the story.
“Don’t worry about her,” Callum said. “She’s just jealous.” Kelly Gruber being jealous of me, I never thought I’d see the day. I could barely keep my excitement. I like to think of myself as someone who doesn’t get smug, but when it comes to people like Kelly who act like the whole world owes them, I couldn’t help feeling a little complacent. Something about her made me feel anger instead of sympathy. I knew for a fact she was cheating on Callum. I saw her making out with the same quarterback not long ago, and I’d been meaning to tell Callum about it, but I wasn’t sure if disturbing their world would be the right move. Now, though it didn’t matter. He seemed to be over her. I knew Callum and I knew when he was hung up on a girl. Right now, he wanted nothing at all to do with Kelly. I’d seen him go through his various breakups, some of them he took months to recover, but not this time. I was always the one supporting him through those times, so I knew this wasn’t it. He didn’t want Kelly. Of course, I wasn’t going to believe it so soon. Maybe he’s over her now, but the minute he goes back home they kiss and makeup…the thought made me insanely jealous but I had to keep it in the back of my mind if I was going to avoid trouble.
“You seem oddly okay with this,” I tried to keep it light.
“I’ve been meaning to break up with her,” Callum confessed.
“Why’d you wait this long to do it?”
“I wanted to wait until formal.”
“Then why didn’t you wait?”
His eyes were gazing directly into mine, making me nervous. “I realized the dance was too important to go with someone I don’t even like.”
“But you two seemed fine!”
“I know she was cheating on me, Jess. And I know you know.”
“How did you—”
“The whole school knew but me,” he looked devastated for a moment. She did betray him. It wasn’t the first time this was happening either. I don’t understand why people like Kelly seemed to think they could play with someone’s heart like they did. “Look, I’ll be honest. I went out with her because it seemed like the thing to do. We’re both popular, so we were supposed to hit it off, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t even like her. Kept waiting for things to change but I knew it wasn’t going to happen with her. Regardless, I would never cheat. I kept waiting for the right moment to tell her it was over, so I could ask you out. But then, I found out about her and Matt Olsen, and I couldn’t stand it any longer, she had to go.”
“Still, you shouldn’t have broken up with her so close to the formal.”
“Do you really care about her that much? She’s horrible to you!”
How does he even know that?
“She’s fine,” I tried to make it sound like it was nothing but he wasn’t about to let it go. “Please, Jess. You forget that I’ve been dating her all this time! I’m aware of her antics. Honestly, that’s one more thing about her that ticked me off. Her sense of entitlement is through the roof. I couldn’t stand it.”
“Whatever happened between you two, it’s none of my business. It doesn’t really matter to me.”
“Jess, we used to be best friends.”
“I’d like to think we still are.”
“We are but there’s something different.”
I wanted to tell him we had hormones now, that were making everything different and unbelievably confusing, but I wasn’t sure that would be the right answer. I didn’t want to give this thing between us any sexual undertones. Not yet anyway. But thinking about sexual undertones gave me serious perspiration breakouts. I know. Not the most romantic thing that could happen to your body, but there I was, a nervous wreck, and hoping he wasn’t going to notice. What was it about him that always made me so conscious of my own body? I needed to relax. But the more I tried to calm down, the more active my brain seemed to become. “Jess, what’s wrong?”
So, he noticed something was up.
Was the nervousness showing on my face?
Sometimes I hate being me.
“It’s nothing,” I blurted out the words, barely, and then plastered a smile on my face at the end of the sentence. The smile was just as forged as my response, but I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
“Hey, I have an idea,” he grabbed my hand. “How about a dance?”
I felt like Cinderella at the ball. No clue what the hell she was wearing, no idea what people were going to say about me and dreading it. Cinderella at least didn’t make a joke of herself when she danced. Me, I was famous for messing up. Not only did I suck at conversing with men I had a major crush on, I was also a bad dancer and couldn’t move my feet to a steady rhythm to save my life. But because it seemed important to Callum, I couldn’t say no. “I suck at dancing, you know that, right?”
“I know but I love seeing you uncomfortable.”
“Sadist.”
He laughed.
If I was crushing on him before, that laughter made it worse. Now, I was falling, stumbling at every step, trying to hold on to him; I didn’t even know how I was still vertical. It seemed to me superhuman behavior that my body was exhibiting. “Come on,” he said, keeping his tone light. “I’ll teach you how not to step on my toes. It’s about time you learn, Jess.”
I wasn’t used to being the one hot men danced with at formals; I was the one they thought of when their actual dates turned them down, the one with the ‘good personality.’ I don’t think I’m ugly; but I’m not beautiful either. Not like Kelly and her cheerleader friends, and I could never have her suave personality. There was Kelly, with her tiny skirts and her long legs and her Manolos and then there was me, with the dress sense of a fourteen-year-old boy.
He seemed to be completely unaware of what his mere touch was doing to me. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
He touched my face, gently.
He smiled.
It was enough to assuage my fears.
I let him take my hand.
He led me to the floor and we slow-danced, and I realized how bad I was at dancing and how good he had become. But even though I was clumsy, he didn’t seem to care. He was patient and wouldn’t let go of me. After harboring a crush on him secretly all these years, I finally found out what it felt like to be touched by him in that way. And it wasn’t the Callum I usually encountered, it was a completely different version of him. Callum 2.0. He looked a lot like the Callum Matheson who had been my neighbor and friend for the past decade, but this Callum gazed into my eyes a lot and smiled a lot. No wonder the women he dated were falling for him, they saw this version of him. “Can I tell you a secret, Jess?”
My heart thrummed.
Its careless beat reverberated in my ears.
I was unsure if it was anticipation or dread.
Possibly both.
“What secret?”
In one smooth move, he swayed me and then brought me back, closer to him than ever before. My body almost slammed into his, my nerve endings were on fire. I could feel every inch of him, touching me and I couldn’t think straight.
“I’ve always felt some unrequited feelings toward you.”
Looking up in his eyes would have been impossible, so I chose to be a coward and buried my head in his chest, which was solid against me. “What kind of feelings?”
“What I’m about to tell you,” his breath whispered softly. “You might hate me for it. But I don’t know if I can keep it to myself any longer. I don’t know if that’s wise.”
“Tell me,” I could barely speak.
“I want you to promise you won’t hate me. And if you don’t like what I say, then we will simply forget about it, and go on as we were going. It won’t ruin what we have. Can you promise me?”
It was time to break away from him.
I looked up, and his face was unfathomably sincere.
“I promise.”
It took him a while to come out with the next words but when he did say it, he sounded so sure of himself. “I think I love you, Jess.” He paused. “I always have.”
The words touch me in a way, nothing’s ever touched me before.
Wasn’t that the same I felt for him?
The whole thing sounded so much like something out of a movie, I had to pinch myself to see if I was awake.
“Jess,” he said. “Did you just pinch yourself?”
“This is really happening,” I said, dumbfounded. “Oh God, this is really happening, isn’t it?” I said this, and ran. I kept running until I reached the parking lot without looking back once, even though I knew he was following me.
“Jess!”
I stopped, completely out of breath.
As I tried to get my wits together, I felt him come up behind me.
“You promised what I say won’t mess up what we have.”
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
Blinked several times.
Nothing changed.
This was reality and I had to face it.
“But you already changed it,” I said, and turned to face him. “What you just said, there’s no going back from it.”
The hurt in his gray eyes was monumental.
I could see past his soul.
Peek into his heart.
He had opened himself up to me.
I could see how afraid he was of being shut down.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “I knew it. I shouldn’t have… anyway, I assumed you liked me, Jess, I don’t know. I guess I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not wrong, you idiot!”
“What?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“But—?”
“Why now? Why today? When you haven’t even broken up with Kelly for a whole week?”
“Because I’m a coward.”
“Callum…”
“Every time I tried to say something to you, something would stop me. I know it’s my own fault, for not telling you sooner, but to be honest, I didn’t even know what I felt was real until a while back. I mean, I knew but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to be sure, before I did this, because Jess you’re not like other girls. I couldn’t date you casually the way I dated them, there was so much history between us. I just… I wasn’t ready to lose you.”
My heart must have been going at something like a million beats-per-second. There was a fog in front of my eyes, a haze that wouldn’t let up and that made it impossible for me to see anything but the two of us. I lost control of my feelings. I knew how much he must have had to suffer through to say this to me. I knew because I had gone through the same. I understood the fear, the longing, the lovesick hopefulness. There are some things beyond our control, and this was one. For so long, I had thought of myself as the only one going through it but now I knew that wasn’t the case.
“I’m not ready to lose you either,” the words came from my throat but they sounded like a stranger’s words.
His eyes were fixed on me, and I finally looked up and faced them. “Callum, I’m scared.”
He cupped my face with both his hands. Even in the cold his touch was warm. He kissed my forehead. “I’ll do anything for you, Jess.”
“I know.”
When had I crossed the boundaries of trepidation and stepped into firm faith? Why did I believe every word he said like it was gospel? Because he was right. We had a history. We weren’t just any other couple; we were Jess and Callum. We always would be. Star-crossed lovers destined to cross paths again and again. I didn’t know what the future held then, I don’t know now, but all I know is that the night of the winter formal, I was more alive than I had ever been before.
But, I still had my doubts. “What makes you think we’re going to survive?”
Callum leaned in and his mouth briefly touched mine, a little awkward at first, but then he was kissing me, his lips were soft and his mouth tasted of mint gum. His tongue grazed mine, and we fell into a rhythm as though we had been doing it for centuries.
“You asked me why I think we’ll survive?” Callum said. He tucked a lock of my hair, behind my ear and the simple movement made me shiver. “Because we’re Jess and Callum. That’s why. We were always meant to be.”