Chapter 35 : THE DANCE
The gymnasium had been transformed again.
Paper lanterns hung from the ceiling in overlapping colors — blue and gold, Greendale's official palette, though the school had never quite settled on what those colors meant. A disco ball rotated slowly in the center, casting fractured light across the dance floor where students in various degrees of formal wear shuffled awkwardly or moved with genuine rhythm.
The Transfer Formal. The Tranny Dance, as everyone unfortunately called it.
I'd stocked the catering table with finger foods and punch that I knew from experience would be spiked within the hour. My position near the refreshments gave me a view of the entire room — the dancers, the wallflowers, and the three people whose hearts were about to collide.
Jeff stood near the entrance in a suit that probably cost more than my monthly rent. His aura was a catastrophe — the split I'd noticed weeks ago had widened into a genuine fracture, two competing attractions pulling him in directions that couldn't coexist.
Professor Slater approached from the left. Confident violet, her usual color, but with edges I hadn't seen before. Desperation threading through the confidence. Tonight was the night she'd decided to force the issue.
Britta came from the right. Defiant orange intensified into something that looked almost like need. She'd dressed up — actually dressed up — in a way that made her look uncomfortable and beautiful and absolutely determined.
The geometry is collapsing.
I gripped the edge of the catering table and watched the detonation begin.
Slater reached Jeff first.
"We need to talk." Her voice carried across the dance floor, loud enough to draw attention. Deliberate. She was making this public on purpose.
Jeff's aura spiked with panic. "Michelle, maybe not here—"
"No, HERE." Slater stepped closer. "I'm tired of waiting, Jeff. I'm tired of watching you dance around whatever you feel. I want to know where this is going."
Britta arrived before Jeff could respond.
"Am I interrupting something?" Her tone was light, but her aura was volcanic. Orange with streaks of red, the color of someone who'd been holding back for too long and had finally decided to stop.
"We were having a private conversation," Slater said coolly.
"In the middle of a dance floor?"
"The location is symbolic."
"Of what? Your inability to handle rejection gracefully?"
The crowd was watching now. The disco ball's fractured light made everyone look like participants in a slow-motion disaster.
Jeff stood between them, his aura tearing wider with every word. Desperation. Confusion. The specific color of a man who'd been running from this moment for months and had finally been cornered.
"Look," he said, raising his hands, "can we just—"
"I love you." Britta said it like she was throwing a punch. Loud. Public. Irrevocable.
The gymnasium went silent.
Slater's confident violet cracked. Genuine shock — she hadn't expected Britta to say it first, to say it at all, to turn this into something that couldn't be walked back.
"I love him more," Slater said, and her voice was steady but her aura was screaming.
Jeff looked like a man watching a car accident in slow motion while standing in the middle of the road.
I stayed at the catering table. My hands were steady. My heart rate was not.
Let it happen. Let it play out. The timeline needs this.
The math was correct. The math had always been correct.
The math didn't account for how it felt to watch people you cared about tear themselves apart over emotions they couldn't control.
Annie's aura shifted across the room.
I'd been tracking her all night — peripheral awareness, trying not to look too often, failing at both. She'd arrived in a dress that made my chest tight and had spent most of the evening orbiting the dance floor, talking to people, avoiding the love triangle that was consuming everyone's attention.
But now she was moving. Walking toward the gymnasium doors.
The lavender Jeff-crush energy in her aura had flared into something desperate and electric. She was going to follow him outside. She was going to be in that parking lot when the moment happened.
Every cell in my body screamed at me to move.
Talk to her. Say something. ANYTHING. Change the trajectory.
I could tell her how I felt. I could ask her to stay inside. I could manufacture a crisis, a distraction, a reason for her to be anywhere except that parking lot when Jeff made his impulsive, desperate, canonical decision.
My fingers whitened on the table's edge.
If I intervene now, the timeline shifts into unknown territory. The kiss launches six seasons of romantic tension that eventually resolves. The group survives it. Annie grows from it. Changing this creates ripples I can't predict.
Logic. Cold, correct logic.
But I care about her. I want things that don't fit the timeline. I'm not a calculator, I'm a person who has to WATCH this happen.
Annie reached the doors.
I let go of the table. My hands were shaking.
She pushed through and disappeared into the warm May night, and I stayed behind because I'd already made my choice weeks ago, when I mapped the love triangle and calculated the optimal path and decided to let the timeline run.
Strategic thinking. Long-term planning. The transmigrator's burden.
God, I hate being right.
The gymnasium continued around me.
Britta and Slater had devolved into a heated argument that Jeff had escaped by mumbling something about needing air. The irony of his exit strategy — running from two women who loved him to a parking lot where a third woman waited — was not lost on me.
Shirley found me at the catering table.
"You look like someone stole your puppy."
"I don't have a puppy."
"That's not a denial." She studied me with those sharp eyes that never missed anything. "You've been staring at those doors for five minutes."
"I was watching the drama."
"The drama is inside. With Britta and Professor Slater." She paused. "You were watching Annie leave."
I didn't have the energy to lie convincingly. "Yeah."
"Ethan." Shirley's voice softened. "What's going on with you two?"
"Nothing."
"That's a very specific kind of nothing."
I finally looked at her. Her aura was concerned and curious and warm, the specific shade of someone who cared about you and was worried they'd care harder soon.
"Some things," I said carefully, "are harder to navigate than they look."
"Mm-hmm." She reached out and squeezed my arm. "Whatever it is, don't wait too long to sort it out. Time doesn't stop just because you're not ready."
She walked away to check on Britta, leaving me alone with the catering spread and the knowledge that outside, in a parking lot, under a streetlight, something was happening that would change everything.
I grabbed a canapé from my own table.
It tasted like sawdust.
The dance ended eventually.
Students filtered out. The decorations sagged. The disco ball stopped spinning and the fractured light settled into ordinary gymnasium fluorescents.
Annie hadn't come back inside.
Neither had Jeff.
I helped the cleanup crew fold tables and stack chairs, focusing on physical tasks because thinking made everything worse. By the time the gymnasium was empty, it was nearly midnight, and the parking lot outside was quiet.
I walked through the doors Annie had pushed through hours ago and stood in the warm May air, looking for something I didn't want to find.
The streetlight at the lot's far end illuminated an empty space.
They were already gone.
The kiss happened. I let it happen. This is what I chose.
I got in my car and drove home with my hands steady on the steering wheel and nothing in my chest but the hollow certainty of being exactly, precisely, catastrophically right.
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