Fiction
The Dancing Plague
All we had were rumors — and most of them had been started by me
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…
