Love and Other Foreign Words by Erin McCahan

to suit me, “So, did you and Stefan get in a fight on the way here?”
    â€œNo. He’s just thinking.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œI don’t know yet. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.”
    She looks at me the way Jen earlier looked at me—as if she knows something I do not.
    At the prom, Stefan and I chitchat comfortably, and he even laughs a little when I tell him how I grilled my mother about the sanitary standards of the Breathalyzer test required for entry here. Several years ago, the chaperones
finally
noticed that couples were showing up to the prom bombed, so the administration implemented the test at the doorway. I needed to know from my mother that I’d have my own plastic tube to blow into, or I’d have to refuse the test—I who have never had a drop of alcohol in my life outside of church. And part of me actually worried a little about taking the test. What if I didn’t blow hard enough? What if I blew too hard? Or for too long a time? Or not long enough? It’s a test, after all, and I wanted to get it right on the first try.
    â€œOnly you would want to get an A on a Breathalyzer,” Stefan says with a goofy smile, and it embarrasses me into the admission that, yes, I would.
    We dance, and he asks me, “What do you call people who have something weighing really heavy on their minds?”
    â€œDo you?” I ask, tilting my head to the left to look at him.
    â€œMaybe not weighing on it. But what’s a good word for just thinking?”
    â€œContemplative,” I say. “Or meditative. Pensive. Reflective.”
    â€œGeez, where were you last semester? You could have tutored me all through College Comp.” Then some seconds pass and we’re nearing the end of this song when he says, “You know I really like you, Josie.”
    â€œI really like you too.”
    â€œYeah?” he asks. “Good.”
    But this seems an unusual admission to me. I took it as a given in our relationship. If Person A agrees to go to the prom with Person B, who asked Person A in the first place, Persons A and B can be reasonably understood to like each other.
    I am about to say this to Stefan, but in his language, not mine, when I am distracted to the point of giggling—well, suppressed snickering, anyway—at the sight of Stu’s face, pained with boredom as he dances with a clinging Sarah Selman. She’s like an enormous pink dryer sheet stuck via static electricity to the front of Stu’s tux.
    I bury my face in Stefan’s neck to keep from laughing, and he startles me by tipping his head against mine. We finish the song this way and smile at each other when the music ends. I can’t interpret his smile, and I know he can’t interpret mine. It’s the one I reserve for Emmy when I have to speed-translate one of her snarkier remarks. It’s the one I use when I’m trying to figure out what she means.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    I do not want to attend the after-prom party but agree since it’s included in the price of the tickets. But I can only reasonably handle thirty minutes of the thing before I begin to fray at my mental health edges.
    Long before now I have had my fill of:
    loud music
    flashing lights
    constant motion
    constant noise
    shouting to talk
    straining to hear
    speaking Ohmig*d
    translating Ohmig*d
    I have overloaded my nervous system to its breaking point and now must go find peace, solitude, stillness, darkness, and quiet. And I need the entire world to stop touching me—friends grabbing my arm to talk, all of us squeezing past one another in crowds, even Stefan and I dancing. It is all too jarring.
    Stefan knew this about me beforehand. I even offered, when I explained my sensory limitations, to have my parents come pick me up so he could stay at the party, and I make the offer again tonight.
    â€œNo, it’s cool. I’m ready to go too,” he says, and for several