Come and Join the Dance by Joyce Johnson Page A

asked quietly. His face had collapsed into sadness now that he had stopped smiling.
    â€œI don’t know.” The lump in her throat was swelling larger and larger.
    â€œJust cry—you’re going to anyway.”
    â€œI don’t want to.” A bitter fluid had begun to run down her cheeks. If she cried, she would cry forever. “I don’t want to,” she wept, “I don’t want to.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    S HE DIDN’T WANT to think. The mornings were the worst times. For three mornings she woke up much earlier than she wanted to; the first morning it wasn’t even six. She would lie stunned on her bed, afraid to move, and it would only be for the moment of waking that she would not remember anything. The early light in her room would be white and sunless, and the room itself would not be quite familiar to her; it would look as though its space had been subtly altered during the night, as though the objects in it had lost their color, grown larger.
    She would not be able to go to sleep again, so she would tell herself that in only two hours it would be time for breakfast and that she could, if she wanted to, get up now and turn on her lamp and even take a shower and put on the dress she was going to wear that day—except that there would still be the problem of what to do before breakfast.
    But already she would have begun to remember. Already the scene in Peter’s kitchen would be playing itself over and over again, she weeping while Peter watched, the evidence of details accumulating—the color of Peter’s shirt, the four beer bottles on the window sill, the coldness of her fingertips when she had pressed them against her eyes. After a while Susan could see it all with such heightened clarity that she would no longer know how much she remembered, how much she imagined.
    I ought to get up, she would think—there was no comfort in the damp, twisted sheets of her bed—but her body would be as strengthless and limp as if it had spent the night wrestling a fever. She would not be able to recall what she had dreamed. Better not to know. Better to stop thinking before one knew too much. There was something about Peter that forced too much knowledge upon her. He was as dangerous, as compassionless as a mirror. She would not see him again before she went away. At first she told herself that it was for Kay’s sake, but she knew very well that that was not the reason.
    When she was leaving that night, he had followed her down the hall to the door. For a moment they had stood facing each other, and she had known that he was holding her there, forcing a dizzying closeness upon her as powerfully as if he had thrust his body against hers. “I’ll see you,” he had said to her, not in the casual way that people often said that, but somehow stating a fact. And she had felt—even remembering it she felt—as much joy as terror. She wished it had not been said at all.
    The afternoons were easier for her. It was easy to find ways of not being alone. She gave herself up to the college. If Peter called, she would tell him how busy she was now before graduation. The first day she was measured for her gown, and then there was the Class Sing and a speech by the Dean; the second day there was the Class Luncheon. The third day there would be the graduation rehearsal; the fourth, the graduation itself; the fifth, her departure.
    Peter didn’t call, of course. She knew that he wouldn’t; he would wait for her to find him. But she had no time to walk up and down Broadway looking for faces.
    Sometimes it amused her that with hardly any effort she could be such a convincing senior. Maybe all that was needed was sheer physical presence and a bland face. Strangers never looked at you hard enough to see that you were sleepwalking. When she went to the Class Sing, only someone listening to her with particular interest would have noticed how few of the songs she knew,