I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T be here with Lauren while her parents aren’t in the house. Her mom offered me casserole, but I doubt she anticipated that I would be sitting here alone with her daughter. I should stand and take my dinner back to my apartment, but I’m already half done and it’s too good to stop now. It’s been a while since I’ve had a grilled cheese, forever since I’ve had one like this.
I feel Lauren watching me as I eat. More than that, I can feel her nervous energy. She can’t just sit still. She’s jittery, unsure of herself. She might as well be wearing a neon sign that reads: PLEASE VALIDATE ME. I wonder if I was like that at her age too.
When I first walked in earlier, she was crying quietly. Her head was tipped against the refrigerator and her shoulders shook from the weight of whatever shitty day she had. Truthfully, I could have turned back for my apartment and she never would have realized I was there. But, it could have been something serious, and my mom raised me better than to slink away.
So here I am, sitting across from a girl who is a total mystery to me.
She plays with her food, picking at it more than anything. I’m so hungry a part of me wants to reach across and finish it for her, but she needs to eat. Unfortunately, I know she won’t be able to until she finishes digesting the big ball of sadness in the pit of her stomach.
I finish my sandwich and scoot back, telling myself it’s not my business if she’s sad or not. I checked to make sure she wasn’t hurt, and now it’s time for me to go.
Lauren hears my chair screech against the wood floor and her head snaps up, blonde curls spilling over her shoulder.
“Oh! You’re done already.” She glances down at her mostly uneaten sandwich. “Do you even chew, or just unhinge your jaw like a snake?”
I smile and tip back the last of the lemonade, mourning the fact that it’s gone before I take my dishes to the sink and rinse them off so I can load them in the dishwasher.
“Thank you for dinner. It was delicious,” I say with a quick tip of my head before I walk around the island toward the back door.
All business.
Her broad smile lights up the room. “Sure. Yeah. No problem!”
Then she turns back and continues picking at her sandwich. The smile disappears.
My hand is on the knob. I tell myself to leave, and then I cave and turn back. So much for boundaries.
“Do you want to talk about what’s wrong?”
Her gaze whips back to me, full of surprise and wonder, and then she looks past me, toward my apartment. Her brows furrow. “Don’t you have law school stuff to do?”
Yes, I do. In fact, I’ll be up most of the night.
I rock back on my heels and tuck my hands back in my pockets. “Nothing that can’t wait.”
Her bottom lip quivers. “Wow. Thanks…that’s”—she looks back at her plate—“really nice of you.”
So she’s not going to open up right away. That’s fine. I’ll treat her like a tight-lipped witness.
“So it’s not about your parents—is it about school?”
“No. School is easy. This is, well…” She shrugs. “A matter of the heart. A crush, I guess.”
Oh Jesus.
Warning bells blare in my head.
Apparently she hears them too because she jumps up and laughs. “Not on you! Oh my god…”
I laugh, relief flooding my veins. I rub the back of my neck and feel safe taking another step back into the kitchen.
“It’s this boy who goes to St. Thomas.” She tips her head to the side like a little bird. “That’s the all-boys—”
I nod and cut her off. “I’m familiar with it.”
Another prep school that probably costs more than my law school tuition.
“Yeah, right, well, Preston goes there…Preston Westcott.”
She hangs his name out on the line like I’ll take the bait, but law school has prepared me for situations like this. Even if I don’t want to practice law after graduating, I’ve still worked to perfect my courtroom persona. Preston Westcott is the mayor’s son and I know she wants me to be impressed with the revelation, but I just nod for her to continue.
And continue she does.
Minutes pass as she spills the details of her afternoon without coming up for air, details like waltzing, dance partners, humiliation. Words are spilling out so quickly, it’s like I broke the floodgate.
The entire time she talks, I push down my instinct to brush her off. This is nothing. She’s not even going to remember it in five years. High school feels like forever, but it’s not. It’s hardly a blip. I want to nudge her shoulder with my fist, tell her to grow a thicker skin and move on, forget about the prick and focus on school.
I know better than that though. She doesn’t need tough love at the moment. She needs to make it through the night, get some rest, and wake up with hope for the next day. So, hope is what I’ll give her.
“You guys were practicing the waltz?” I ask, rounding the island toward her.
She drops her chin on her hand and sighs. “Yes, but I kept stepping on Lincoln’s feet. I’m sure he’s going to tell Preston how bad I was, and worse, I have to go back in two weeks and do it all over again. I should just call in sick, say I have a broken foot or something.”
“Come on,” I say, holding my hand out for her to take. “We’ll practice—if you’re comfortable with it.”
Her mouth drops open. “Really?”
“Yeah. If I can do it, anyone can. You were just flustered because of all the silly drama.”
She clamps her mouth shut and turns away with furrowed brows. “It’s not silly.”
Perspective is everything—another law school lesson.
“You’re right. It’s not.” I step forward, keeping my hand extended. “I can’t fix the Preston stuff, but I can teach you how to dance. That should help a little, right?”
I tip down so I’m almost level with her eyes. She looks up at me and the evening light filtering in from the garden catches on her hazel eyes. She’s wearing an expression of gratitude so genuine, I’m caught off guard.
“I know the steps already,” she says. “So you don’t have to start from the beginning. I guess I just get tripped up when it’s sped up.”
“Okay, then we’ll start slow.”
She swallows, lets her gaze drop to my hand, and then she stands, accepting my invitation. Her right hand falls into my left, and I’m surprised to find it shaking. I squeeze it lightly as my right hand wraps around to rest on her shoulder blade. She’s trembling as she places her fingertips lightly on my arm, as if she’s scared to touch me. If we were out on the dance floor at a formal event, I would step closer, but I don’t close the gap between us. Arm’s length is better. I barely touch her.
“There’s no music,” she points out with a laugh.
I shake my head. “We don’t need it. Just follow my lead and listen to the count. The waltz uses a three-count measure: 1-2-3, 1-2-3.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Good. Are you ready?”
She nods so I start with my left foot and step forward, then to the side with my right foot, and then together. Right foot forward, left foot to the side, together. It’s been a while since I last waltzed, but it’s second nature to me, like riding a bike. I keep counting until we’ve found the rhythm.
Lauren’s brows rise with shock as we wrap around the kitchen island. “You’re really good, way better than the boys I dance with. Did you do cotillion when you were my age?”
I smile. “No. My mom taught me how to dance.”
“Huh.”
We keep moving slowly. Lauren’s movements are robotic and tense, like she doesn’t quite trust me to lead her.
“She thought it was important for me to know, even if I wasn’t able to do the cotillion thing. Relax your shoulders and let me lead. You’re fighting me for it.”
She laughs and looks down at her feet like they’re the offending body part. “I am?”
I tighten my hold on her right hand. “Yes. Relax.”
No doubt half her problem is the fact that the boys she’s dancing with are terrible dancers themselves. She’s been forced to learn how to lead because they’ve failed so miserably at it.
She heaves in a deep breath and the tension in her shoulders releases by degrees.
We continue moving for a few three-counts and then she smiles tentatively. “Better?”
“Marginally. You know, I’m half-tempted to teach you how to lead and let you take control during cotillion practice.”
She laughs, and the sound is pure innocence. “I don’t think Preston would like that.”
Who cares what Preston thinks? I’d forgotten how much stock teenagers put in perceived judgment.
“Would you have liked that when you were 17?” she continues. “If a girl knew how to lead?”
I want to laugh at her question. When I was 17, my public school dances featured styles less like waltzing and more like having sex with clothes on. The girls I dated weren’t wearing poofy dresses and kitten heels.
The life I’ve lived taught me to be a leader. Sooner or later, she needs to learn to be one too. She needs to toughen up. The hardest lesson for most kids her age is that you can’t let shitheads from St. Thomas (or anywhere) dictate your happiness. I tell her I’d have been impressed back then if a girl knew how to dance, if she was confident and bold.
She lights up at my encouragement and soon, she loosens up her footwork and moves with a newfound freedom. We glide around her parents’ kitchen until she’s smiling and laughing, all traces of her bad day left behind.
It’s hard for me to pull away once I see that she’s got the hang of it. My original intention was to help make her feel better, but the dancing has been good for me too. It’s been a while since I’ve let loose.
Her cheeks are flushed when we finish dancing and I drop her hand. She bows in an exaggerated curtsy. I offer a little bow.
“Feel better?” I ask with a gentle smile.
She nods enthusiastically. “Loads. Thank you.” Then her eyes catch mine. “Seriously.”
I shrug it off like it’s nothing, but really, it wasn’t.
She pours some water and hands it to me. I finish in a few short swallows and am about to leave when she speaks up.
“I was wondering…if you didn’t do cotillion and you didn’t have to go to dances like this, why did your mom think it was important for you to know how to waltz?”
“She just did. Manners, etiquette, dance—all that meant something to her, so she insisted on teaching me.”
I set my cup down in the sink and turn around to see her worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “My dad mentioned the other day that you—well, the Fortiers used to own the house across the street.”
I know what she’s hinting at.
“My family did, yes.”
“But not anymore?”
“No. My grandfather sold the house.”
She frowns. “That was silly of him. My parents say it’s really hard to buy property in this area. If he’d held on to it—”
“It wasn’t really by choice,” I say, my tone biting.
“Oh.”
I glance away, annoyed that I’m having to explain this to her, a girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth, all because her grandpa was better with money.
“Well it’s a good thing your mom taught you that stuff anyway. Even if you didn’t grow up in New Orleans society, my dad says the Fortier name still carries weight, and…well, he thinks you can build it back up again if you work hard enough.”
I’m having déjà vu, except not really, because even though I’ve heard those words before, they’ve never come from Lauren. That sentiment was hammered home throughout my childhood. My mother set the table in our double-wide trailer with cloth napkins and three types of forks. She taught me table manners, drilled them into me so much so that I could sit down to eat at Buckingham fucking Palace without breaking a sweat. I was enrolled in every honors class my high school offered, taught that education came before all else, but not education for the joy of learning. No, it was education for the sake of equipping myself with the tools needed for climbing social ladders.
It was the very definition of faking it until I made it, because even though she couldn’t keep up with the Joneses, she had dreams of raising me to be one. It probably sounds a bit brainwashy, but the fact is that I want that now too. Sometime between my childhood and now, her dreams became my dreams, except my plans are a little bigger.