4. Sadie #3
I shoot all of it. The lighting in here is terrible, and the frames are going to be grainy, but I don't care at all. That's half the point of taking all the photos, this’ll be the real college life. They’re the ones I don’t touch, the ones I just put on my drive.
"Sadie." Juno takes me by the hand. "Come dance."
The front room is fuller now, the music louder, and I give the camera to Bree for safekeeping and let Juno pull me into the middle of it and just move.
No routine. No form. No Coach Pearce taking notes on what needs work.
Just the music, the room, and the easy, uncomplicated fact of a body that knows how to move when nobody's grading it.
This. This is also mine. This whole ridiculous, loud, spinning evening. I'm laughing at something Juno's doing with her arms when I feel it. It’s the same feeling as at the gym doorway. The back of my neck feels like someone is breathing on me, and I have an awareness of someone watching me.
I turn without meaning to. I see him across the room. He’s far enough that I have to look twice to be sure. He has a dark jacket on, with one hand in his pocket, and the other holding a drink. He's talking to his brother Mason, who is beside him.
Juno grabs both my hands and spins me, and the room goes with her. When I find my footing again and look back across the space, he's turned away, mid-conversation.
I reach for my camera from Bree. I frame the room, the lights and the crowd. I shoot everything except the far corner where I can still feel, without looking, exactly where he's standing.
I press the shutter, and move away from the dance floor.
Juno moves so she stands in front of me. "There's a beer pong table in the garden," she says.
"Okay," I reply, almost questioning why she’s telling me.
"We're playing."
"I've never played beer pong before."
She stares at me. "Sadie."
"I'm just telling you the truth so you can set your expectations accordingly." We will lose, so it’s best she knows now.
"You're a gymnast. You have spatial awareness and upper body control and you're going to be incredible." She's already pulling me by the wrist toward the back of the house. "Cara and Maya both already said no, so you have to be my partner."
"Why did they say no?"
"Maya said, and I quote, ‘I don't play games that conflate athletic skill with alcohol consumption.’"
I burst out laughing because she was the one who wanted to be here. "That's a very Maya sentence."
"It really is."
“Cara just said no,” Juno tells me.
The garden is smaller than the house deserves, strung with lights that someone's thrown over a fence at an angle that shouldn't work but does. The beer pong table is actually a door balanced on two sawhorses, and I respect the commitment to infrastructure.
The two guys standing on the other side are the typical jocks who think they’re the best at every sport. One of them cracks his knuckles, he actually cracks his knuckles before a game of beer pong.
Juno looks at me.
I look at Juno.
"Okay," she says sweetly to the knuckle-cracker. "You go first."
They're good, not exceptional, but good. Clearly, they’ve done this in every social situation for the last two years.
I am, as advertised, a complete beginner.
My first shot hits the rim and bounces off. My second goes wide by an embarrassing margin. Juno compensates with the focused intensity of someone who has decided this is now personal.
"Stop thinking about it," she tells me.
"I'm not thinking about it."
"You're absolutely thinking about it. You're doing your beam face."
"I don't have a beam face." I fight back, but now I’m wondering if I do.
"You go very still and look at the cups like they've personally offended you." She demonstrates, which is unfortunately accurate. "Just throw it."
I throw it. It goes in. Clean. Dead center. Juno makes a noise that probably carries to the next street and grabs my arm, and I'm laughing, actually laughing.
"BEGINNER," she shouts, at no one in particular.
"Lucky shot," the knuckle-cracker says.
"Throw again and find out," I tell him pleasantly.
I feel it then, the feeling of getting attention from somewhere that isn't the beer pong table. It’s different from the general noise of the garden, different from the people around us.
I deliberately don't turn around. I take my next shot instead, another cup, slightly less clean but it goes in and lets Juno lose her mind beside me, and I keep my eyes exactly where they are.
I bounce the next one deliberately off the rim, just to have something to complain about, and say something to Juno that makes her laugh. The garden keeps going around us, loud and bright and full of itself, and I don't turn around once.
We win.
The knuckle-cracker gives me a smile so polite I almost miss the irritation underneath it. I shake his hand anyway, and Juno does a small victory lap of the table that I photograph mid-stride, her arms are out, and she is completely committed to the moment.
I turn back to Juno.
"Rematch?" the knuckle-cracker asks.
"Obviously," I say.
I’m on a high from winning. I might as well see how far it takes me, plus I’m enjoying the night.