Chapter 9: The Contra Dance

I sat up so fast the tank clanked on the rock.

"Did you hear that?"

Jet's face had gone white under the moon.

"What did she say?"

"That she knows my taste. That she had it nine years ago."

Margie looked from me to him.

"Nine years ago is when you drowned," she said.

"I know when I drowned, Margie."

Jet let go of my hand.

"She wants you afraid," he said. "That's what she does. Don't give it to her."

"What does it mean?"

"It means she's old and cruel and she lies."

He went into the water before I could ask again.

I lay awake until dawn with my father's watch on my pillow.

On Saturday the Grange held its spring contra dance.

Everyone went, from the babies to the selectmen.

"Lesson four," I told Jet on Margie's dock at sunset. "Dancing. In public."

He looked alarmed for the first time since I'd met him.

"With people watching?"

"That's the point. Everybody sees she said yes to you."

He went still at that.

"Everybody sees," he repeated.

"Hat," Margie said, and pulled a black knit cap down over his ears. "Nobody on this island has ears like that. They'll think you're from Vermont."

The Grange was hot and loud and smelled like cider and floor wax.

The fiddler and a woman on the piano were already going.

Forty people were lined up in two long rows, laughing, swinging, getting it wrong.

Jet stood in the door and stared.

"It's just walking," I said. "In patterns. Holding hands. Follow me."

The caller sang out the first figure, and I pulled him into the line.

For one round he went left when everybody went right.

He bowed to the wrong woman, who was eighty, and she patted his cheek.

Then something clicked behind his gray eyes, and he wasn't terrible at all.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.