The Glass Reflection

It was the digital late 1990s, search engines, tech stocks, Apple’s ascent, free music downloads. But Dave was too young to appreciate all of it; he was about to grow up in analogue beside the red brick dorms, the tennis courts, the rowhouses and their airy summer stoops where neighbors’ conversation bobbed on the sociable, light breeze. Baltimore, criss-crossing slabs of wealth and poverty, Fell’s Point and North Avenue, and split by the asphalt currents. Ground zero for the Star-Spangled Banner. The smell of fresh-caught Maryland crab and shrimp, the buzzing aisles of Lexington Market, the top-hatted jugglers, magicians and unicyclists, on the harbor. Not far from the ghetto, one of the premier colleges, a summer program. A full week of classes, and then something had to be faced with no preparation.
It was his first time away from home, his liberation, at academic summer camp. Three weeks of sleeping in college dormitory. No tents or campfires, but plenty of study halls, Monday through Thursday. But it was Friday, and on Fridays were the dances. The sunset, crimson and violet vividness was almost certainly due to atmospheric filth—such ugliness that could produce such beauty—the reluctant evening prepared its star-crusted canopy and the cicadas traded secrets in the trees.

He paced nervously in the fluorescently lit hallway. His limbs had not asked for permission before they sprouted like overeager branches growing out of proportion to their trunks. The guys in his hall, mostly a mix of South Asian, East Asian, and Jewish, had packed silky button-down shirts and slacks for this occasion, and the clothes finally made an appearance, making them feel a little closer to the supermen they longed to be. At last it was time to change into their capes.

They daubed puddles of cologne and aftershave onto their cheeks and necks and slicked gel through their hair, admiring themselves in the smooth glass of the bathroom mirrors. Once they got to the Glass Pavilion, he drank in the scene. Tables garbed in white cloth, with refreshments stacked on them, brightly-colored balloons taped to the walls. Girls filtered in two-by-two, three-by-three colorful, silky dresses, looking like they had stepped out of storybooks. They had been in class earlier that day, and in a matter of a few hours, they had undergone transformation from sweat-streaked faces to immaculate make-up, from rumpled jeans to puffy dresses. What could have been up their sleeves? He would only learn afterward that some were as nervous as they were.
They boys could only effect limited transformations with scented foams like soap and shampoo, the power of The Lather in their arsenals. The pavilion, an alternate universe that brushed the scales of perfection. And what was most special: He knew them. He heard their voices rising and falling during class discussions throughout the day; he had read their intimate thoughts in their personal writing.

He and his friends congregated around the refreshments table, spooning punch into cups and sifting through bowls of chips and pretzels. Liat eventually came in closely flanked by friends, the ultimate contradiction, an alpha woman commanding power, but with soft features and curly dark-brown hair. She shuffled toward the far corner of the room and was rapidly obscured by girls standing behind her and guys trying to weave their way into her circle. She would be the center of the night’s solar system, and like a moon, he would be orbiting, happy if proximate to her.

“Anyone you have your eye on?” asked Musa, a friend, filling his
plastic cup with sparkling cider.

“Sure do,” Dave said. She’s in my writing class. Her name’s Liat. All the way from Israel.”

He filled his own cup with Coke.

Soon the music was pulsing invasively into eardrums, and he started swaying his hips and taking a few steps back and forth. His friends did the same. They formed a circle and the especially bold shuffled to the center, showing off their verve, sometime displaying their break-dancing moves. He took slightly more liberties, bending his knees, briefly throwing his arms up in the air, crossing and uncrossing his feet. The unisex circle added girls, and as a unified, co-ed force, they began to synchronize some of their movements. He caught sight of his course TA, a heavyset graduate student, hopping around at the front of the room. It felt slightly enthralling to see him outside the classroom, out of context, like running into an elementary school teacher at the supermarket, learning that the school building was not her natural habitat. He was in the midst of linking onto a chain that was worming its way to the other side of the room and eventually clasping itself shut.

"You'd better ask her soon. There's not too much time left," Andy said. "They’re going to play Forever Young in just a bit. Last slow song of the night.”

He would learn that Alphaville’s Forever Young comprised part of the CTY canon, the group of songs that were always played at CTY dances, no matter the site location. It was always the second-to-last song played.

The last few measures of a Peter Gabriel seeped from the sound system like leaking drops: “in your eyes, in your eyes.” The song faded out, and the pairs decoupled, liberated as individual agents. The Violent Femmes’ American Music started up. He rehearsed what he would say, debating the proper tone and constructing the syntax in his head. “May I have this dance?” He could not commit to the verb “have.” A dance was something to be shared and experienced, not possessed. He settled on “Would you like to dance?” As she approached, the fabric of her dress undulated gently. When she was just a few feet away, he asked her exactly this, his voice rising a bit too rapidly and nearly squeaking at the end of the question. She responded with a cool “sure,” her demeanor contrasting with the tension rising within him. His entire body surged with a sense of
disbelief. She had accepted.

“How about the next slow song?” he suggested, noting that the frenetic energy of the “fast dance” had fully returned to the room.

“Okay.”

She smiled, turned around, and headed off with her friends. He could hardly believe her response, not that it was anything approaching enthusiasm, but she did not point and laugh, nor did she reject him. She wandered away, disappearing in the hopping, skipping crowd. And then he heard the first synthesizer chords of Forever Young. His window of opportunity was closing quickly. Soon the second verse began, and there was no sign of her anywhere in the room. He brushed past a few couples on the perimeter, and made his way toward the center. He thought of the opportunities that had come and gone in his life like fierce but brief summer storms, how he vowed not to protect himself from them and stand under the blistering rain. There she was, her eyes closed, her head buried in the sinewy crook of Musa’s neck, rocking back and forth with him, locked in an embrace, as if they were the only two people in the world. He turned away, making sure that neither she nor her date would see him. He stepped outside, his body not expecting the sudden humidity that wrapped the air in its wet pashmina.

He peered through the glass to take in the darkness of the humid June evening, where a wan crescent moon hung in the sky, and looked at the utterly worthless buildings on the quad that had taught him nothing. He wasn’t supposed to leave the pavilion until the dance ended, but he was not in a compliant mood. He walked across the quad, made out the skyline pierced with the antennae of buildings. In nearby neighborhoods stood abandoned warehouses and apartments with shattered, partially blinded window panes. He headed back to the dorm and slumped down on his bed. He eyed the small bottle of Jameson across the room. His roommate had somehow procured the handsome bottle—maybe he had it with him the same time. He pried off the top, took a sniff of the stuff—smell strong as gasoline at the fuel pump. His roommate didn’t have to know; nobody had to know. He took more swigs than he dared admit, more than it took for his roommate to notice that something was wrong. In retrospect, it was a terrible decision, but when he felt the walls closing in on him, he did the only thing that felt natural to him: he couldn’t stand the hideous furniture and dull fluorescent light fixtures. He went out to take a swig of the starlit air. His inhibitions were drifting away on the soundless black river of night, he knew that he could face her, that he could win this heartbreaking game of growing up.