The Telling by Melissa Fraterrigo

The week of the Turnabout dance, I kept the dress on a hanger, displayed it in front of my closet like a black beacon. It was a simple black velvet cocktail dress with long sleeves and a deep V in the front and back. I’d ordered it from a catalogue and when I lifted it from its box, the soft panels of the skirt unfolded like wings and the tissue paper surrounding it make a shivery sound, like a secret whispered between hands. I put all my faith in the dress, because the few times I called Gideon, reading from questions I’d jotted in advance on a piece of paper, Gideon burned through every get-to-know you query in a matter of minutes and he never asked me anything in response. When I sauntered over to his locker clutching my books and smiling, he just looked at me as if he had no idea who I was, but then his friends would punch him in the shoulder and he would tip his head to the side as if it were too heavy. A senior, he was a year older than me and was a starter on our school basketball team. I asked him to be my date for Turnabout, a dance where the girls invite the boys, because of his height, the fact I thought he was cute, and most important, didn’t have a girlfriend.

The night of the dance, I wasn’t sure he would arrive.

I made an appointment to get my hair done. We had a swim invitational that day, which wouldn’t leave much time to get ready. Plus, I was too nervous to fix my own hair. As the stylist’s fingers pulled and twisted at my hair, I found myself relaxing into the beauty routine and by the time she handed me a mirror to see the back of my head, the transformation into someone beautiful had begun.

As I dressed, I listened to New Order. “How does it feel/To treat me like you do?” With each move, my fears and insecurities blurred into the background. My friends would be there and if nothing else, we would dance. Still, I worried about Gideon and how little we’d talked. I thought about creating another list of questions I could use during the drive, just like Teen advised, but there wasn’t time. I listened to my music, let it distract me as I put on makeup, then sat on the edge of my bed and pushed a fist through a new pair of black pantyhose before inserting my foot and easing the material over my leg. Maybe the whole idea of asking a guy I didn’t know to a dance had been a mistake.

“I know you don’t know who I am, but I wondered if you wanted to go to Turnabout,” I had said that January night weeks ago, standing outside the doors the boys exited after basketball practice. I squinted in the hard glare of the parking lot lights. I smiled. I’d put on blush and lip gloss. We didn’t have swim practice that night, so I’d told my parents I was studying at Emily’s house and would be back before ten.

Gideon mumbled, “Sure,” and I breathed in the winter air and blew it back, swift, even clouds rising. Even now, I feel the stiffness of his look as if he were waiting for me to criticize him. But I was shiny and peppy: I would make him like me.

“Cool! I’m Melissa!” I said, turned on my heel, and forced myself not to run back to my car.

I couldn’t wait to tell my friends. At that time, I believed the telling was more important than the lived experience, how seeing it unfold in another person’s face, it became real.

Finally, I slipped the dress off its hanger and stepped into it. Lined in silky fabric, the dress felt like zipping myself into a small body of water. I ran a hand along the velvet bodice, the plushness powerful and enthralling.

I was in my room when the doorbell rang. Mom was away that day and I froze at the idea of Gideon chatting with Dad in his olive-green sweater with the oil stain on the chest. I hurried to our living room where Gideon stood holding a clear plastic box with a pink lily, my least favorite flower with its thick, funereal scent. He held the box toward me and after what seemed like minutes, I took it, as if in doing so I was entering into some silent agreement.

I slipped the elastic over my wrist, then reached up to pin the rose boutonniere to his lapel. I hadn’t stood this close to him before and felt the hot slap of my heart inside my dress. Dad picked up his camera. Usually, I smiled and showed my teeth in photos, only in the picture Dad took that night my mouth is closed, face arranged in uncertainty as if someone had not just fixed my hair, but rearranged my features. I took a breath, willed myself to relax.

“Have fun, be careful!” Dad said, shutting the front door behind us.

The stairs were slicked with ice from a storm earlier that week and my nylons whooshed together; I held tight to the metal banister as Gideon marched ahead. I let myself in the passenger side. Imprisoned by the hard chill of the seat, Gideon backed out of our drive.

As we drove, I watched the neighbors’ houses blur past like my own life were being shown to me. Gideon changed the radio station from classic rock to 97.9, where Steve Tyler crooned, “Janie’s got a gun.” Salt plunked underneath the car tires; heat blasted my black bowed pumps; I thought they might melt, but wasn’t about to move them: the warmth a comfort.

The dance was held at a restaurant that doubled as a banquet hall, set back along a series of strip malls on Cicero Avenue; overhead, planes zoomed to Midway Airport. Gideon turned into the parking lot. Other friends were getting out of their cars, and we waved our tiny beaded purses at one another, complimented each other’s dresses and hair. A whole group of us swooped into the hall at the same time; heat gushed around us. No one wore a coat or jacket and we opened and closed our hands to warm them. Chaperones stood in the vestibule, welcoming us, directing us toward the ballroom with its dim lights and chandelier. The DJ stood at a table in the front of the dance floor, nodding his head along to U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. Gideon and I entered the room together, but then we floated off in separate directions. I strolled to the buffet with friends, where we filled plates with baby quiche and squares of white cheese, crackers. Across the room, Gideon stood in a clump with his basketball friends.

We’d only exchanged a handful of words since we arrived and when “Nothing Compares 2 U” blasted from the speakers, nearly every couple flooded the dance floor and I found myself next to Gideon. I didn’t want to look at him, to see the confirmation I knew would be there: He didn’t want anything to do with me. The truth pierced, and with every interaction, air inside me further dribbled out.

As we swayed, I lifted a hand from the back of Gideon’s button-down shirt to smooth the velvet at my waist, smooth as a baby’s skin. Beside me, a girl tucked her head beneath her boyfriend’s chin. I didn’t have the boyfriend, but I had the dress.

When the dance was over, a whole group of us shuffled out of the hall, the crunch of taffeta and lace, the click clack of heels. Some people were talking about an afterparty at a hotel in Harvey, and as we worked on plans, my anxieties returning, I replayed the asking.

You mean you didn’t even know him? I can’t believe you! That’s hilarious!

I saw myself smiling, standing in the school parking lot, saying, You don’t know me, but do you want to go to Turnabout?

I felt a small fist of pride in my boldness, only the story wasn’t enough to absorb the hollowness that permeated the inside of Gideon’s car, some long-leaned thing that after the dance ended drove me to a hotel in Harvey, the one right off I-80/94. Someone rented several rooms and filled a bathtub with cans of beer and ice. One room held a keg and the guys took turns filling red tumblers, handing out foamy cups. After arriving at the hotel, I lost track of him, which relieved me in some ways. I stood in a circle with my friends from the swim team and had to tip my cup nearly all the way back before tasting beer. So many of us from the dance were jammed together in that room, side stepping the beds. Several of the girls discarded their heels in a corner pile. I kept mine on, afraid of snagging my new nylons.

Gideon appeared. Did I seek him out, or had he come up to me, spied me from across the room, maybe ready to finally talk? What classes do you like in school? Are you having a good time? Do you want another beer?

The alcohol loosened the unease in my belly and I grinned at him without willing myself to do so and then it was just the two of us and we were in an altogether different place, the hotel room as quiet as a can of soup.

In that space, alone with Gideon standing in front of me, I tried to smile, but it was as if the muscles in my mouth had stopped working. Gideon leaned down and kissed me, only it was more braces than lips and then I was falling, his hands pushing me on the bed. I put my arms around him, like the magazines instructed, the bed beneath me liquid. Each kiss exposed his braces. My mouth hurt. I wanted to tell him. I drew back one time to touch my lips but then we were kissing again. Maybe I was his first?

Each kiss sliced into me like a paper cut, but the dress draped over me, even on the bed, and I sensed its presence, a soft circle of fabric holding me in its soothing embrace. I’d kept the box and tissue paper the dress arrived in, pushing it beneath my bed, this place where mom once tucked me in at night and sometimes still crept in the room before dawn to wake me. I liked to sit in my bed with the pillows stacked behind me and read or write in my journal; sometimes at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d split the blinds with my fingers and watch light skitter from my wrist to my bedroom wall.

But then Gideon—he was still here, and I was alone with him—took the shoulders of my dress in his hands and yanked it down, ripping the velvet at the V. He’s trying to take it off, I thought, and grabbed the fabric at my chest, tried to push the ends together, to make them whole, the threads popping up as if electrified.

And then the lips and braces returned, tiny slashes that burned my face for days afterwards. I let him kiss me. Hadn’t I been the one to ask him? Hadn’t he been the one to accept my invitation?

He ripped my dress. My beautiful dress.

Someone knocked on the door and I jumped to answer it. Welcoming the chilled blast, the smear of lights and billboards on the distant expressway. It was Eric, the boy who had given me a tin of Hershey kisses and a mix tape for my birthday freshman year.

“Why is your mouth bleeding?” he asked.

His breath rose above him as he talked and time seemed to slow. It was like he was visiting me from another country. I patted my lips and the skin around it, then looked down at my pinked palm. I crossed my arms, held myself. “I don’t know,” I said. My mouth hurt. I disguised the rip of my dress behind a hand.

And then it came to me: Gideon thinks I’m pretty.

Gideon slunk to the door with disheveled hair, his shirt wrinkled. He was a solid head taller than Eric. “Hey man,” they shook hands, “What’s up?” Standing up in the fresh air, seeing the metal door wide open, I remembered my friends. As Eric and Gideon talked, I located my shoes inside the doorway. When I bent down to slip them on, my head pounded. Get out, get out, I thought. Any ease I’d felt from the beer had disappeared. A numbness settled in. I heard the screech of the dress’s tear again; the noise lingered, an echo of blame.

I strode away on the concrete walkway that lined the hotel perimeter, my eyes tearing in the wind. I imagined a line before me and concentrated on positioning the toes of my heels directly on it. I placed one foot, then followed with the other.

Back in the room with the keg, surrounded by friends, I sipped another cup of foam.

“Where were you?” someone asked. I gestured vaguely at the space on the other side of the door.

I slanted the cup so the bubbles tickled against the cuts on my mouth and crossed my other arm over my chest. When someone said something funny, I laughed. When no one was looking, I turned away.

Emily and her date blasted Pink Floyd as they drove me home. Outside my house, Emily hugged me goodbye, then got back in the car. As they drove off, tires crackling on frosted pavement, I stood beneath the trees’ icy skeletons and breathed in the black night. Swift, even clouds ascending.

There was no way I was going to tell my friends what happened to me. Not Emily or anyone else from the swim team. Definitely not my mom who, the next day, asked if I’d had fun. Gideon and I never spoke again and, when we passed in the halls, he did not look my way. When anyone brought up the dance, I listened to their stories, nodded, and smiled, the whole time thinking of the dress in the back of my closet in its plastic shroud.

But the night after the dance, safe inside my bedroom, I was still caught between the story I wanted to tell myself, and what had actually happened. When I unzipped the dress and hung it on the front of the closet door, the panels of the skirt drooped. I examined the tear. I told myself it wasn’t that bad.There were splotches on the fabric where I’d spilled beer. They weren’t wet, but they’d left an odd sheen, like a mirage that could only be seen if I tilted the fabric in a certain light.