Her arms and legs flail, at first. Out of step, out of time. But it feels glorious.
The bass pumps through her feet like she is a conduit, a lightning rod. She is in the speaker’s concussive thrall. She feels its hot breath against her bare skin.
Beddy dances for the dorks, for the blackest of sheep, for the square pegs, for the downtrodden. All of her tribe. She smiles. After what happened, who would’ve ever thought she’d show, and would be cutting a rug on top of the ocean?
It hits her that no one whom she wanted to see her persevere is here, and she stops dancing. The music turns into music again, not incantation. She doesn’t like the song. She’d been dancing to a song she hates. She’d been dancing to a song she heard in the drugstore that made her want to shove lip balms in her ears. She’s embarrassed.
Then she turns around from her nook near the speaker and back to the main floor, where she sees people, dozens of them, looking at her with a mixture of bafflement and disgust. She’s still the only one dancing. High school is all interactions with familiar strangers, people you see every day in class or in the cafeteria or on the bus whom you think you know but have never spoken to, but she knows what they’re thinking. How dare she dance with the tragedy that just happened outside?
And this helps her push on through. Her enemies’ surprise at her showing up would have been catnip, but the crowd’s derision, its horror, will do.
She’s here for her. She holds her head up high for her and no one else.
She shuts her eyes and begins to dance again.
Now the movement of her body is familiar, memorized.
Her eyes closed, she could be anything. Duffy was wrong. She’s not a whale. She’s something else.
Dancing as ardently as this, she feels herself growing taller. Her eyes closed, she is the tallest person in the room. She can feel the hair on top of her skull brush the ceiling. Her arms swish through the star trails like they are cobwebs. She nicks her elbow on a chandelier. Her whole life has been spent in a crouch, and now if she punched through the ceiling she could palm the moon.
This year in Biology she heard about two competing schools of thought. One, that species evolved gradually over time, changing very little over millions of years. The other, that there were periods of intense, rapid evolution, when environmental stresses combined to force species to evolve or perish. Ice ages, volcanic eruptions, droughts. Predators.
Feel it, dance it. If you have a central nervous system you can dance it.
She feels the sweat run down her bare legs, and it wicks off her feet. This is the cleanse. This is what she tried to purge into her wastebasket earlier. But that’s not how you get rid of these things. You have to bring on the fever. Sweat them out. You have to bundle up. Pile the blankets high. Soon they’ll be sweat on the floor, running into the drains, mixing with the fish corpses now wisps of salt inside the venue’s sewer pipes.
She kicks off her shoes one by one to the rhythm of the song, hoping without peeking that they’ve flown like projectiles into the crowd. Feels the tactile rush of the cold polished floor against her bare feet.
Dance Todd out.
Joints cry for mercy.
Dance Duffy out.
Heels like burrs.
Dance Kelsey out.
Shins like glass.
Dance Macht out.
Muscles licked with flame.
Dance those sorrows out.
Lungs puff puff puffing.
Dance ‘em all out.
Someday, scientists in stiff coats and stuffy rooms will study her. What she did here tonight, and what she’s been doing all her life. Everything is changeable. Everything is renewable. Where once stood a slaughterhouse is a ballroom, where once stood a victim is a bonfire.
Suddenly the music cuts out. The projection freezes. Beddy’s body continues to move as an echo. A murmur wells up through the crowd.
“Sorry, people,” DJ Quaranteen says into his microphone. “I got somebody who needs to say something to y’all.”
Beddy opens her eyes. She is normal size again. The crowd is all looking toward the stage, and she follows their gaze.