Page 92 of White Lights
“Really,” Dez says, “like a diary?”
“Like a diary, on audiobook,” Simon says. “You’d think it’d get boring, but it doesn’t. Anyway, recently, I started to sort of … open myself, to drift more into their voices. Something shifted. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Dez thinks she understands what he means. Something similar had happened to her today with the clouds inLazarus, though on asmaller scale. She’ll have a long way to go to catch up to where Simon’s at the rest of the term, but Dez doesn’t want to think about that yet.
Simon’s gaze is drifting past her, where the dance floor’s getting crowded.
“My goal tonight is to give Esther something to masturbate to when she goes home over break,” he says, making Dez crack up inside. “What’s your goal?”
Dez’s goal for the past month had been to finishLazarusand get it to her brother. Now that she’s done, she feels adrift.Shouldshe have a goal outside her work?
She looks around the room. In their skin-baring formal attire, Dez recognizes body parts of some of the last-years she’d seen publicly fucking at Villains on a couple of occasions. So far tonight, everyone’s keeping it in their pants, but barely. Dez gets the feeling things will loosen into depravity once everyone’s had a few drinks.
“Let’s dance,” Simon says, his eyes on the dance floor where Dez notices Esther raving sweetly alone.
She lets Simon pull her into the fray of dancing bodies. The song blasting through the speakers is a remix of “I Don’t Care” by Charli XCX, and before she knows it, Dez is swilling the rest of her champagne and jumping up and down, bouncing off Simon, bouncing off Esther, bouncing off last-years whose names she doesn’t know. She closes her eyes and lets the music and the champagne buzz and the sweet scent of the orchids everywhere dissolve her shame, her anxiety, her frustration—until she doesn’t feel it anymore. This is just a party. She can just have fun.
When the song fades into INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart,” Dez opens her eyes, reluctant to stop jumping. She catches Simon gingerly wrapping his arms around Esther’s waist for a slow dance. Then she feels a hand around her own.
“Hello, Dez,” the low voice says.
Her arms slip around his neck before her eyes register it’s Rafe. He looks incredible in his tuxedo, his golden scarf subtly visible under his jacket. How easily their bodies lock into place. How hard he makes everything else.
“Did you do it? Did you get my film to Mo?”
“I delivered it, yes.”
She wasn’t expecting him back so soon. She wonders how he got there. Did he fly in the obsidian jet, the way he’d brought her here?
“How is he?”
“I couldn’t stay, but I made sure he had it. He’s probably watching it right now.”
Dez closes her eyes and exhales. Mo will understand now where Dez went, why she left.
“Will you dance with me?” Rafe says.
“One dance,” she warns, pressing her pointer finger into his sternum.
“I’ll take what I can get.”
“I’m still mad at you.”
“Oh, Dez,” he says, sounding sadder than she expects. Why? She was only joking with him. Half joking.
“Four times, Rafe. It’s getting absurd.”
He looks into her eyes, brushes the hair back from her face. “I want you to get what you want.”
She’s never seen him look so grave. She touches the side of his face. “Hey. You okay?”
“Sure. Of course.”
She wonders if something’s going on with Mo, but Rafe would tell her if he had news. Before she can press further, every wall around them is lit up simultaneously by multiple projector screens.
The whole vast chamber has turned into a giant screening room, a Lens big enough to surround the entire student body.
“Watch,” Rafe murmurs, his fingers moving softly up and down her back. “I think you’re going to like this.”
