The Dancing Plague
By: Jason Sattler
Tags: Fiction Friday, Education, Relationships, Fiction, Short Story

The Dancing Plague

All we had were rumors — and most of them had been started by me

Photo: Pascal/Flickr

When Ava Shapiro limped back into AP European History the day before prom, she’d been gone for almost two months, or 34.333 school days.

In that lifetime of a spring, everything went wrong. Cliques tightened, mutated, and dissolved. Mismatched couples flirted, exchanged bodily fluids, and parted. Even lunch sucked. Worst of all, my little brother sank into the dankest depths of puberty, and no one noticed until he interrupted my birthday dinner at the fanciest seafood place on Parthenia Street, the one near Skateland that always reeked of kelp and crotch, to insist we call him “Chadwick,” though his birth certificate read “Chad” and he hadn’t grown even one visible arm hair.

Still, everyone kept talking about Ava.

Some swore she’d snuck off before dawn the last Sunday in March to elope with a pizza deliveryman. The one with a half-totaled Toyota Supra and a full Lincoln beard. Others said she’d been busted selling pills in the junior college physics night class her counselor made her take because she kept humiliating Mr. Gustav Willard, the AP Physics teacher, by correcting his long division. My mother’s mahjong group swore that Ava’s parents had wised up and sent the girl to boarding school in Switzerland or Sweden. The drama kids — who both worshipped Ava because they saw her kill as Fantine in Les Misérables and feared her since they saw her whip a softball with a pitch that struck out two JV baseball starters on a dare — were sure that Ron Shapiro, Ava’s dad, had locked Ava in the mental hospital near Cambria after Ava caught him cheating on her mom with her mom’s sister’s bodybuilder fiancé.

But all we had were rumors, and most of them had been started by me.

Ava’s shoulders hiked up as she paused to sip some air and study the blackboard’s nimbostratus clouds of half-erased scribbles, timelines, and maps.

In the always-dim domain of Mr. Douglas Horace — the AP European History teacher beloved for his catchphrase, “Could one of you dears remind me what I was saying?” — life was as hazy as that black-and-white movie about a very literate British orphan that the same sub showed us twice the same week in eighth grade. Mr. Horace’s oblong lair was as far from the main office as it could be — nuzzled between the horticulture class’ garden/feral cat litter box and the football team’s shed.

Between two of her lean fingers, Ava held out her pink late pass as if it commanded more authority than any person would dare. The short, squat sub directed her to a seat in the first row, which she passed on her way to the back, where she wilted into the desk next to mine.

“Cocky,” I whispered.

She did not acknowledge me, just as she hadn’t acknowledged my nine midnight knocks on her window, my 41 increasingly distraught messages on her answering machine, or the custom postcard I’d sent her from Universal Studios — the one that showed Frankenstein’s monster strangling me with a word bubble that read, “Do my shoulders next, please!”

Instead, she fixed her gaze on the chalkboard. Her glare was coldhearted, but only about as coldhearted as usual. Her stillness, however, was new — new, aggressive, and horrifying. That’s when I knew Ava’s absence had not only been a nightmare for me.

I presumed Ava had enjoyed her disappearance because it gave her a vacation from me. We had not been apart for longer than a long weekend since we met inside the janitor’s closet of the girls’ locker room on the third day of seventh grade, hiding from a rainy-day game of gym dodgeball we’d both deemed likely to result in homicide. And perhaps she had appreciated the break from the monotony, but only in the way my uncle, Dr. Irwin Gold, PhD, enjoyed the first few weeks after his divorce.

Irwin was not suited for the confines and spare time of studio apartment living. With my cousins visiting every other weekend as his only social activity, Irwin invented hobbies, including sending registered mail to strangers, especially the Queen of England. When his letters turned from technical and flirty to vivid and violent, the FBI stopped by. He lost his job teaching advanced mathematics at CSUN. On the day we celebrated his 40th birthday at the Sizzler in Tampa, he got a letter stating he could see his kids only under court supervision. He kept passing the letter around, asking us to explain it to him “in English.” Finally, my brother said, “They think you’re a perv.” My mother jumped in and said, “No, no. I’m sure it’s just about hygiene.” After that, I never again saw him sit still for more than 20 seconds.

Whatever had happened to Irwin, the opposite happened to Ava. The Ava I knew — my Ava, the Ava of “Ava and Liesel,” as we’d been known since they could hide most of Reagan’s senility — twitched through class and life with a quivering that suggested she was cracking secret codes broadcast through her fillings.

Now she was still, soggy, and vague — like a dying ice sculpture, but with the impeccable complexion of full-fat milk.

The years I’d spent shielding my best friend from leering glances, half-erect penises, and girls who wanted her to waste her life cheering for boys and their leering glances and half-erect penises had only worn away her crust. My paranoia had doomed the person I loved most.

I was a myopic caterpillar or ungracious lark in a forgotten Aesop’s fable — unworthy of anything but judgment and a comic portrayal in a plain-brand cartoon. My fate was only useful as a lesson for children who were yet to learn obvious things like “slow and steady win the race” and “leeching your identity from Ava Shapiro won’t drown out your insecurities or help Ava Shapiro.”

For 34.333 school days, I clung to the hope that this nightmare would end with Ava emerging eager to admit she had missed me too and thus would do her very best to follow me to UC Davis instead of going to Michigan just because they had the best premed program she could find. Now it was clear. She had not missed me. And that realization only made me need her more.