I watched a boy in a pink polo shirt, walking red-faced down the aisle. Encased on both sides by rows of cheering families, I watched him squeeze his hands to his sides and leave them there, the palms of his short-nailed hands sharing their nervous sweat with the seems of his khaki pants. I looked up as he walked past me, at his face, and he gave me a slight smile of wax between his flushed fuchsia cheeks. They matched his shirt but had more splotches. I searched for his endless blue eyes but they were cast down, towards the metallic fallen streamers, skipping like a hastily thrown rock. He stopped in the back row, hidden unintentionally behind the rest of his class and sat, legs crossed, next to a nervous-looking girl in a strapless white dress. I watched them smile at each other in a way that was not excessively formal, but tinged with many emotions and many secrets.
I watched the boy sitting and twitching. I could not see his hands, but I assumed they were tapping and tapping on his thighs as they always had. He sat there until he was no longer sitting and his hands were no longer tapping and he was up and moving, quickly, towards the platform in front of his class where he and four girls assembled in an almost-straight line. They looked painfully nervous. He didn’t. The group belted out a hideously off-key version of “For Good” from the musical Wicked that I had seen, unintentionally, three separate times. When he sang, his voice only wavered for an instant before settling into a rich, smooth pitch that somehow overpowered the baby crying up in the bleachers and the echoing coughs and sneezes.
The whole room clapped when they were finished, mostly out of pity I’m sure, but I looked to my left and saw my grandma, wide smile protruding from the puddle of sweat she had been reduced to in the agonizing early-summer heat. I looked to the right and saw my dad, slowly and secretly dabbing his eyes with a used tissue. Then I looked forward and saw the entire eighth grade class moving towards me, diplomas in hand, smiles on faces . We drove home in silence.
I watched a girl in a hideously patterned jump suit and red Converse sneakers. Her messy pigtails and her easy smile bounced as she jumped from foot to foot – her ridiculous idea of dancing. It was the opening night for the play she had spent the whole summer working on, so the audience was relatively packed with siblings, parents, and grandparents. The stage itself was packed – packed with jumping, jostling, singing teenagers. I watched and thought that they were too enthusiastic for their own good.
I listened as well-rehearsed lines were thrown from curtain to curtain. No voices shook except for in soft, rolling laughter. Towards the middle, I watched her shuffle to center stage, hands whirring hopelessly by her sides. The girl smiled into the audience and began her song, the one I had heard her practicing for weeks in the shower. To me, it sounded flawless. To my grandma, snoring softly beside me in her ridged pink sweater, it sounded like a soothing lullaby. I clapped softly as the girl exited the stage to a room full of applause then returned moments later, following a girl much shorter than her.[IL6]
A painfully choreographed group dance was executed, skinny arms and combat boots flailing in the sticky air. I watched, and I saw her, cheeks flushed a deep attention-grabbing red, knees bent, torso jerking wildly front to back, left to right. I watched her until I could watch no more, until the curtains were drawn and then I watched her bow, arms entwined in those of her perspiring friends, a chain of linked wrists and linked smiles. Each actor and actress got a similar amount of applause.
I sat in the front on the way home and listened to the indecipherable screams in the back seat. We stopped at the Sherwood Diner in the dark, and I looked back to see three indecipherable silhouettes slide smoothly from the car. I searched for her eyes, but it was just too dark. I sighed as the automatic door closed behind her and I trailed her bouncing footsteps with my gaze.
