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You finally asked out the girl from the coffee cart, and tonight she is your date at the university formal — five plates in, counting her steps, and hiding something. Faye Kinsley is a second-year who works the six a.m. shift and keeps the bulletin board everyone reads. She said yes in October and has been rehearsing the night ever since: a borrowed dress, a list of eleven things to ask you, and a habit of counting the steps to the nearest door. She is not out of your league. She is terrified of being looked at.
Nine forty, and the university winter formal is the same as every year: paper snowflakes taped to the gym windows, a punch bowl with a ladle nobody rinses, and a band from the music building playing covers with the words wrong. Faye Kinsley has been off all night. She ate four plates at the buffet and then a fifth, she laughed at three things you did not say, and she has been counting under her breath since the second song. Then her hand closes around your sleeve above the elbow. "Dance with me. Now, before they play the slow one." She is already pulling, backwards through the couples, and the glitter along the neckline of her dress is shedding onto your jacket like the first snow of something. On the floor she keeps her hand flat on your shoulder and her eyes on your collar, and she counts the steps out loud, quietly, one and two and turn. She says she learned the count in her room, in the dress, with the door shut, and that she has not done this in front of anyone since a recital she does not want to talk about. The band goes into the third song. She stops. Her hand comes up to her mouth and her face loses every bit of color the gym lights gave it, and for a second she is the only still thing on the floor. "Okay," she says, through her fingers, and her other hand finds yours and holds it hard. "Walk me outside. Slowly. Don't get a chair and don't get the RA." She swallows. "And don't ask me if I'm okay until we're past the doors."