Three Dances

The Jazz Festival

The Jazz Festival came to town every year.

It was kind of a big deal. I lived in a pretty small place growing up, smushed between the mountains and the plains, an hour away from everywhere, but an hour away from anywhere, if you know what I mean. And when you can’t drive, an hour is an age.

The Festival happened every August, right on the border between summer and school, when anything still seems possible because you have a little time left, just a little time. The days last almost forever, and the twilights are warm and vermilion and star-speckled, and the clouds float behind the mountains like kingdoms just waiting for a king.

The Jazz Festival came to town every year, but it only mattered once.

Usually, I cared about the Jazz Festival about as much as I did feeding the cat. It was a thing my parents dragged me to, a little bit of forced family togetherness. And if everybody else had to go too, it didn’t make it any easier. My sisters whined and complained, my friends and I did our best to steal as much time sulking together as we could, the cat got left behind, and my parents bought ice cream and pizza for us and wine and cocktails for themselves and wondered why we never had as good a time as they did.

But when I was thirteen, I cared about the Jazz Festival because I had a plan. There was this girl. Her name was Marion Flute, and when I was thirteen, I was in love with her like I’d never been in love before and never have been since. She had eyes the color of pondwater, brown hair that wrapped around her neck like a shawl, dim freckles, and a tiny gap between two of her teeth that somehow the braces had missed. Nobody else thought she was particularly special. She didn’t have much in the way of a chest yet, and she never wore makeup or low-cut shirts or miniskirts. She just sort of blended into the crowd, another face among the many.

I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

She had this glow—the kind almost everybody has when they’re thirteen but almost nobody has by the time they’re twenty. The kind that pregnant women sometimes get, if they’re happy about what’s happening to them and they’re taking care of themselves. When she smiled anywhere even close to me, I felt like a million bucks.

And she could dance. Man, could she dance.

I never saw her do it except at the Jazz Festival, but when she did, she was like a firefly—moving back and forth between a dozen people three times her age like the music was all that mattered in the world.

So I hatched this plan. There was always a cotton candy vendor at the Jazz Festival. One year, I’d spent my whole allowance on the stuff and gotten so sick I’d spent most of the night sitting with my head between my knees trying not to throw up. On the year the Festival mattered, I was going to buy two sticks of cotton candy, and I was going to wait at the edge of the fake wooden dance floor they threw down across Main Street in front of the jazz stage. When the music was done and Marion was coming off the floor, all sweaty and breathless and amazing, I was going to give her a stick of cotton candy and tell her that I thought she was beautiful.

It was a pretty good plan for a thirteen-year-old, I think.

My friends laughed at me, and I took that to be a good sign. Marion’s older sister Belle smiled when I told her what I was planning, then told me I should buy the blue raspberry flavored cotton candy.

Belle was my swim coach. Or rather, she had been my swim coach until she’d gotten pregnant and they’d fired her. She’d given birth at seventeen to a dark-haired little boy with brown eyes she’d named Jonathan. The town loved him. He was cute and precocious, and he treated everyone like a parent—smiling, crawling into laps, and tugging on the skirts or pantlegs of complete strangers.