All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher

As a girl, after the rheumatic fever, she’d been stricken with Sydenham’s chorea, also called Saint Vitus’ dance, her face and hands and feet taken over by occasional spasms. Her handwriting became broken and blocky, her face sometimes went rigid while her body squirmed restlessly. The romantic fever wouldn’t let her go, and she became shy, always scared her body would betray her somehow. But with Nick all of that old self-consciousness disappeared. She could remember, even now, the heat of Nick’s skin when he pulled her in for a slow song, the feel of his hand cupping the small of her back, the breadth of his collarbones. Sometimes falling in love is immediate, headlong, and permanent. She knew that he wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met before or would likely ever meet again. She didn’t believe in marriage, so could she believe in love? None of that mattered. The night wasn’t of this earth. All of the landmarks were blotted out by snow. This wasn’t Washington, DC. This wasn’t even America.
    And she knew that even though she was falling in love, she could never keep him. He was too urgent about living. She could never hope to contain him. She knew it from the beginning.
    Sitting at a round skirted table, he said, “Jesus, it’s him.”
    Augusta followed his gaze to a man in a red blazer. In his midsixties, the man had a waxed mustache, a bulbed stomach, and short arms. He walked, chest-puffed, to the men’s room.
    “Excuse me a minute,” Nick said, standing up so quickly that his chair nearly kicked backward.
    Augusta grabbed his sleeve. They were both a good bit drunk by this point. She laughed and then regained her composure and said very seriously, “You’re not going to assassinate him, are you?”
    “It’s just a game,” he said. “I’ve got to get within five feet of my mark.”
    “A game?”
    “A club.” He leaned down, putting his cheek to hers, and whispered, “I’ve told you too much already.” Then he pulled away, winked, and followed his mark into the bathroom.
    Later, Augusta would come to understand the club. It was simple—overachieving law students challenged one another to mock assassinations. This was before Americans became so deeply and personally scarred by the word
assassination
—before the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby. They had no idea what was looming, how, one day, the club would feel Old World, cast over in darkness.
    A few minutes later, the old man walked out, as chest-puffed as ever, his short arms swinging at his sides, and Nick appeared next.
    He jogged over to her and grabbed her hand. “Let’s dance.”
    The band eventually played the last song. They walked back out into the snow. After four blocks, they found the very same bus. The passengers were quiet now. Many dozed against the windowpanes.
    After they boarded, they approached the Ellipse and saw, through the front windshield, a motorcade rocketing through the park, headlights cutting the darkness, spinning red lights churning the air.
    —
    Augusta imagined trying to explain this night to her daughters—and the months that followed, so passionate she felt devoured. Esme wouldn’t understand. She’d never accept that her mother was once—even briefly—a different kind of person. Liv might accept it. She lived a nonconventional life. And Ru? Ru would nod as if she already knew the truth. Ru was prescient this way.
    This was the night that changed Augusta’s life, and for a short time the world was a completely different place. It was impossible to explain, too close to something sexual, but it was more than sexual. It was a kind of desire that, once stirred, never left her.
    It was a costly desire, and her love for Nick Flemming would eventually exact great sacrifice.
    Was it time to tell her daughters the truth? Would they even believe her? There was a time—after the dissolution of The Personal Honesty Movement—when the girls had questioned whether she was