To start with, the band really sucked. I think they were called Dumpster Fyre, with a y. I can’t be sure because whoever wrote the name on the front of the bass drum must have been like totally gouged. They played a lot of music that I kind of recognised from my dad playing it at home, all miserable and like, I don’t know, grinding? They were louder than anything I’d ever heard. They wore stuff that would have gotten them sent home if they’d shown up at actual school in it —greasy jeans with the knees ripped out (not like intentionally, like the ones you can buy at like Target and even Walmart), and like lumberjack shirts, the kind Daddy wears if it ever cools down enough. They had the longest hair I’ve ever seen, except for the one whose hair looks like an explosion at the frizz factory or something. Daddy pulls what hair he has left into a ponytail, but Dumpster Fyre had theirs tied up on top of their heads in that kind of Japanesey way.
For a while everybody just sort of stood there like gaping at them, unable to believe how bad they sucked, or how loud they were. Marty Collins, the class clown, made a big point of standing right in front of one of the big speakers to either side of the band, grinning. I wondered if he’d ever hear again. After a while, everybody seemed to like resign themselves to either liking Dumpter Fyre or lumping them, and kids began to dance.
i didn’t expect to be asked. I never am. Marty told me just before Xmas vacation that I’m one of the four least hot girls at my school, and two of the other three have gone since then. Kirsten Morales might be the only girl who gets like ridiculed more than me, and she weighs like 300 pounds. She doesn’t come to dances because she’s so like self-conscious, and hasn’t learned the cell phone trick. Lissa Feldman's dad, who owns three dry cleaning places here and in Castor, I guess is making a fortune laundering money now, and moved his family to a house in Coates that I hear is humongous. I haven’t been invited. Me and Lissa had a falling out at the end of last year and don’t speak any more. Sissy Tomlinson was even lower than me and Lissa on the hotness scale, but I don’t count her because she got killed in February when Joey Dasilva’s tweaker uncle like barged into English with a machete. Mrs. Stover shot Sissy dead before she finally hit Joey’s uncle.
So it’s maybe 15 minutes before 11, when the chaperones will realize their dream of being able to take their fingers out of their ears and tell Dumpster Fyre the party’s over, and I’m standing alone, as I’ve been standing there all night, trying to pretend I’m getting a lot of texts on my phone. I notice Joey Dasilva — speak of the devil! — looking at me. There's something like 360 boys in 11th grade with me, and Joey’s maybe 10th or so from the bottom. It’s not that he smells or eats his own boogers like some of my male classmates, or that he’s like deformed. It’s that he had his personality surgically removed or something. He’s probably the shyest boy at my school, He eats alone every day, with his face like buried in a book. I like that he reads.
Maybe he’s had something to drink or smoke. We make eye contact and he doesn’t immediately look away. In fact, he actually smiles at me. He’s got braces, and not the expensive invisible kind. I never realized. Who’s ever seen him smile? I do something really stupid, something I know much better than to do, and smile back. I think he might come over and ask me to dance, or at least like talk to me. Or maybe smiling at him wasn’t so stupid after all. Maybe the stupid thing was always to expect the worst, and keep myself like isolated. He’s still smiling, and coming toward me.
it’s happening! He asks me how I’m doing. He smells like a distillery, and if he smelled 1000 times worse at this moment, I’d still be just about peeing myself with like excitement and delight. I tell him I’m doing good and ask how he’s doing. We’re conversing, the second least-hot girl at school and the shyest boy! At this rate, I’ll be dancing any minute now.
Or not. He thinks me and Kirsten Morales are friends, and wonders if I’d be willing to ask her if she’d like to chill with him some time. I don’t know how, but I manage not to burst into tears. and not to try to break my cell phone in Joey’s ugly face.
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