Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay Page B

sweating now. Someone in front of him was snickering. Mack didn’t dare look at Tilda to see her reaction.
    Madame Lipsky shook her head. “I’m sorry, did I miss something? Is there something someone forgot to tell me? Is there some new policy here?” She walked right up to Mack’s desk and said, “Since when does everyone get to go with the person they
want
to take?”
    When Mack didn’t say anything, she continued. “You are going to a dance. You are going to spend approximately eight hours in the company of a girl who for all I know you won’t speak to again after you graduate three weeks from now. There’s probably a perfectly nice and deserving girl in another classroom at this very minute just waiting for someone to take her. Since when does it have to be the love of your life?”
    Mack felt a trickle of sweat rolling down the side of his torso. He didn’t want to ask that perfectly nice and deserving girl. He didn’t want to take anyone but Tilda. This was so clear to him that he thought he might shout it.
    Instead he spoke in his usual, lax tone. “Why shouldn’t it be? If the person’s out there and wants to go with me, too, but happens to have already said yes to some dumbass who got to her first, then why can’t we shuffle things around? Why do we always have to be punished for our mistakes?”
    It wasn’t a terribly convincing argument, he knew, but, then, he had never done very well in any of his written essays, either.
    Madame Lipsky squinted at him from behind her purple-tinted glasses. “Sometimes we’re punished, and sometimes we aren’t. But you, young man, have a decision to make.”
    Mack, though, had made up his mind. He had decided to suffer. Because even suffering was easier than getting up and doing something about it.
    After class, when everyone was zipping backpacks and slamming lockers shut for the day, Tilda found him. Her cheeks were red from the heat, and her sweat gave her a healthy shine. “Did you really mean what you said in class today?”
    “Which part?”
    “The whole thing, I guess.”
    “Tilda, I’m just kicking myself for not asking you sooner. I know I was dumb. I’m sorry.”
    Tilda looked down shyly for a moment. In a soft, guilty voice, she said, “I think I might be able to get out of going with Carmine. I mean, I’m sure I can figure something out.”
    Mack felt his heart leap. He had made a mistake but had been saved. Wasn’t that the way it should be? Somehow he wasn’t surprised, and he realized that he had expected something like this. His whole life, it seemed, women had come to his rescue— his mother, his grandmother, his teachers. He was accustomed to having things work out.
    And so he took it as a matter of course when, that evening, Tilda called to say, in her best hit-man imitation, “Alright, boss, the deed’s been done.” She sounded jokey, but Mack heard something else behind her voice.
    “I’m really glad, Tilda.” Mack waited for her to say that she was glad, too, but she changed her tone completely and asked him about the math homework. When he had answered her question, she said a quick Thanks, see you tomorrow, as if the math, and not the prom, were her reason for calling in the first place.
    Mack told her goodbye. The feeling that had filled his stomach, that had made him want to burst, was gone.
    The next week at school, Mack saw Carmine everywhere. Ahead of him in the lunch line, in the hall between classes, in the parking lot at the end of the day. Always Carmine would look Mack in the eye, a flat, blank look that made Mack’s heart pause. He wondered what sort of lie Tilda had made up for Carmine. But when he finally asked her, at her locker one afternoon, she said, briskly, “The truth. You know what they say, honesty, the best policy, blah blah.”
    She had been this way with him for days now, quick and dismissive, as if she didn’t have much time and would rather not waste it on Mack.
    “And he was fine with