What She Saw... by Lucinda Rosenfeld Page B

friend—even if she was only trying to protect her. Rachel would claim so much if Phoebe challenged her motives. She’d say, “You should be glad someone cares!” (That’s what Rachel always said when Phoebe challenged her motives.) “Look,” said Phoebe, turning back to Rachel. “If you have a better idea of who to hang out with at this party, then go ahead.”
    â€œFine,” said Rachel, rising from the table, but not before she’d helped herself to another palmful of nuts. (Phoebe wanted to tell her to stop—Rachel was gaining weight at an astounding speed—but understood it wasn’t her job.) “Are you coming or not?”
    â€œFine,” said Phoebe, following her best friend onto the dance floor, where fifty or so of their classmates were jumping up and down to the kinetic beat of “Twist and Shout.”
    The two girls staked out a remote corner near the mime— well, maybe it wasn’t
that
remote. In truth, it was no accident that Phoebe positioned herself a mere two feet from where Jason Barry Gold was busy hamming it up for the party photographers. And still, upon discovering (two minutes into her own half-hearted shuffling) that the elbow nudging her spine belonged to Jason, she was startled enough to find her knees buckling beneath her.
    â€œWhoa, baby, careful,” said Jason, grabbing her around the waist as she fell toward him, into him. “Don’t want you lying down—yet.”
    â€œUhhhhhhhhh,” growled Phoebe, her eyes narrowed with evident disgust even as she made no effort to free herself from his grip. That must have been obvious to Rachel. Out of the corner of her eye, Phoebe watched her best friend stomp off in the direction of the buffet table. In that moment, however, antagonizing Rachel Plotz seemed like a risk worth taking. Indeed, experience suggested that tomorrow they would go to the mall, Phoebe would help Rachel spend her father’s money, and they would make up. In the meantime, “Twist and Shout” was winding down. Phoebe lifted her arms into the air for the last time, then shimmied her body down into a crouching position. The space between the songs seemed interminable. Her body frozen on the floor, she prayed that deejay Johnny Jamtastic was on her side.
    It turned out he was. The next song up was the midtempo pop ballad “No One Is to Blame.” A collective groan reverberated throughout the plasterboard walls of Parthenon West. Phoebe’s new dance partner had no part in it. Unique among his peers, Jason Barry Gold could exhibit enthusiasm for slow dancing without being taken for a wuss. That’s how cool he was. Rumor had it he’d slept with ten girls in the eleventh grade alone. “I love this song,” he told Phoebe, who told him, “Me, too,” before he opened his arms to her and she fell in between them, linked her own arms around his sweat-soaked neck and surveyed the scene for future recounting.
    Rachel had disappeared, but Jennifer Weinfelt was skulking back to Aimee’s table. She wasn’t the only one. Within seconds, the dance floor stood empty except for a handful of established couples, not including Jason and Phoebe, whose immediate concern was that Aimee, dancing with her endodontic-surgeon father not four feet away from where she and Jason swayed to the music, would object to the sight of someone dancing with her on-again, off-again boyfriend—at her own birthday party, no less!
    After Aimee offered her a perfunctory smile on her way around a fatherly spin, however, Phoebe concentrated her efforts on making sure that Jennifer Weinfelt saw her in her moment of glory. As she and Jason moved across the dance floor in slow, rocking circles, she tried in vain to catch her archenemy’s perpetually bloodshot eye. It was only after Jason pulled her closer—so close that she could see the individual pores on his face, and many were