dancin' with myself
 I had a crush on this girl named Krystee Clark in highschool. She was kind of an unusual girl. She drove a pink karmen ghia and she idolized Marilyn Monroe and she wanted to be a famous movie star more than anything in the whole world. Well, either that, or her mom did. I went to her house one time and saw all of these hundreds of photos of Krystee on the walls. Her mom had been taking Krystee to modeling shoots since she was 6 months old (starting with a Johnson and Johnson Shampoo magazine ad).
Well, anyway, I had this crush on Krystee Clark, but I wasn't so sure if she thought much of me. I knew her through some mutual friends and we talked and stuff but she didn't seem to obviously like me in that way.
But when the homecoming dance rolled around my senior year I figured I would take a chance and ask Krystee Clark to go with me.
"Okay," she said, with that blank, blinking expression she had. Krystee didn't seem very excited about it, but she didn't say no. And I figured the romance of the evening would probably heat things up between us.
So anyway, I did all the things you're supposed to do for homecoming. I got a nice suit and I bought the flower doo-hickey for Krystee's dress and vacuumed out my parents car before picking her up.
But when I got Krystee alone with me that evening she seemed just as distinterested in me as ever. She kept plenty of distance between me and her in the car and always had her arms crossed, or hands folded in her lap.
When we got to the homecoming dance she would break away from me everytime she saw a friend and leave me standing by myself with my hands in my pockets.
Maybe, she was just as nervous as me, I thought, and this was just her way of dealing with it.
Finally, they played a slow dance and I figured I would finally get close and intimate with Krystee. At last I could put my hand around her waist and feel her warm cheek next to mine. Maybe we would even kiss on the dance floor.
"You want to dance?" I asked Krystee. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question.
"Slow dances are so silly and boring," she said. "I can't stand that kind of BS."
Then Krystee Clark broke away and chatted with her friends again. So there I was standing by myself again with my hands in my pockets. I looked at all the other couples dancing and holding each other tenderly. It didn't look silly and boring to me.
I went to the refreshment table and grabbed a coke and handful of chips. Finally, mercifully, the slow dance ended, and a Billy Idol song came on. It was "Dancin' With Myself"--one of his big hits that year.
I didn't bother to ask Krystee to dance anymore that night and I never asked her out on a date again.
I was kind of curious if she would go on to be a famous movie star after highschool. A couple years after we graduated I heard rumours that she was in a potato chip commercial.
5:04:32 PM 
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