I nodded. She handed me an egg and I took it. We stood there, chewing, until our first customers pulled up.
Chick Night, I thought. Another first for me. I didn’t quite know what to expect.
But I would find out soon enough.
We could hear the music from the end of Mira’s driveway. I was carrying the tray with the few eggs that were left; I myself had eaten six and was trying not to look at them.
“Ah,” Morgan said, as we came closer, the music getting louder and louder. “Disco.”
“What?”
She nodded towards the little house. All the lights were on and the door was open. “Disco,” she explained, “is great for healing. Not to mention dancing.”
At this I froze, my fingers tightening on the egg tray. No one had mentioned anything about dancing.
“I don’t dance,” I said.
Morgan looked at me. “What?”
“I said I don’t dance.”
“Everyone dances,” Morgan said simply.
“Not me.”
She pulled open the door, letting out a burst of music: Sister Sledge, singing “We are Family”; a standard on Kiki’s Disco Years Workout tape. On it my mother wore a purple leotard and bell-bottoms, doing the Hustle, while three rows of overweight people huffed and puffed behind her.
“You will,” she said. And she reached behind her, holding the door open, the music spilling out to greet me.
I didn’t dance. And I had my reasons.
As a fat girl, I’d experienced a wide range of humiliations. Add in the fact that I was almost always new, too, and I hit trouble everywhere I went.
Once, in elementary school, I came home after a particularly bad day and gorged myself on Oreos. I sat down with a full package and a half-gallon of milk to drown my sorrows, twisting off the tops and licking out the white insides, one after another.
Thirty minutes later I was in the bathroom, kneeling before the toilet and throwing up black stuff, which swirled away only to be replaced by more black stuff, and more black stuff, for what seemed like an eternity.
I never touched an Oreo again. I honestly cannot even be in the room with one.
I feel the same way about dancing.
It was the Fall Harvest Dance. My first dance. As usual, I was at a new school: Central Middle, in some small suburb of Maryland. My mother was working at a dentist’s office; it was the first time in my life I’d had clean, well-inspected teeth.
Maybe this made me feel confident enough to go to the Harvest Dance. Or maybe it was my mother, who never let her extra pounds get in the way of having a little fun. Either way, when I was only two months into a new school, fat with no friends (other fat kids wouldn’t hang out with me because I was new, part of the complex stratification even among the losers at Central Middle), my mother spent all the grocery money to buy me a new pair of Misses Plus jeans and a cute top.
The top was long-sleeved, with green and pink stripes. I wore my white Keds and a pair of heart-shaped earrings my mom had given me for my birthday. We spent a lot of time selecting this combination, and she even let me wear some of her makeup. She dropped me off on the other side of the football field, the cool thing to do, so I appeared to have just walked out of the woods.
“Have fun,” she called after me. I’d gotten the sense, through all the shopping and preparation, that she would have gladly traded places and gone herself. I was more than ready to let her.
The engine of the Volaré rattled as she drove off. “You look great!” she yelled as I stepped through the brush and started across the field. I could already hear the music, could see the lights in the cafeteria, and despite myself I felt a little flutter of excitement.
I paid my three bucks and went inside, passing clumps of kids along the hallway; no one seemed to be dancing yet. The fat girls were all in a far corner. One of them had brought a book and was reading it.
I went to the bathroom and checked my makeup under the glaring fluorescent lights, to see if I looked different. Then I washed my hands twice and went back to the cafeteria.
By then some people were dancing. I went inside and stood against the wall, watching as the most popular kids took the floor, the girls shaking their hips and hair, the boys all doing that same white-guy shuffle with their eyes somewhere else, their faces bored.
It wasn’t bad, all of a sudden, being there. Everyone around me was moving to the loud music, even the other fat kids. So I did, too.
No one ever really teaches you how to dance. I was kind of moving back and forth, looking down like everyone else. I couldn’t even find myself in the crowd reflected in the cafeteria windows. That was nice.
There was a girl standing next to me with glasses and long hair, and when I looked over she smiled shyly. The music was good and I relaxed, letting myself move a little bit more, copying some of the moves I saw other people making. Maybe this would be different, this school. Maybe I would make friends.
I kept dancing, thinking this, and I realized suddenly why people liked to dance; it did feel good. Fun, even.
Then I heard it. Someone laughing. The noise started off quietly, but as the music was dying down, the song changing, it got louder. I looked up, still dancing, to see a boy across the cafeteria with his cheeks puffed out, moving like a hippopotamus, his legs straight and locked, rocking back and forth. Everyone was standing around watching him, giggling. The more they laughed, the more pronounced he became; sticking out his tongue, rolling his eyes back in his head.
It took a few seconds to realize that he was imitating me. And by that point everyone was staring.