Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Guests crowd in too, clapping along, and then someone yells, “Dance, everyone, dance!”
Which is a cue, because suddenly half of the crowd—who are all Disciple people—scatter around, forming up, and start twirling, and stepping, and hopping. Their shoes and boots stomping loud on the wooden boardwalk to a feisty beat.
“Holy shit,” Collin mumbles. Then he looks at me. “What are they doing?”
He’s not asking because he doesn’t know what they’re doing. He’s asking because he does.
Because they’re doing the final dance that has ended the season every single year without fail, since it started almost a hundred years ago.
It’s a purely Revival way of dancing that combines the polka, the square dance, and the quadrille while adding in a little bit of local flavor to sweeten it up. It starts out with four pairs to a square, and you do different parts of the dance with each other’s partners for a good little while. But then everyone forms up in a line in a fast-paced modified quadrille as the watching crowd claps out a beat.
It’s chaos. Beautifully coordinated chaos. And this one dance, done by all the Disciple kids, is the whole reason people pay a pretty penny to attend the Christmas Eve show when the season ends. It’s been that way since before Collin and I were born.
So his question is not what dance are they doing, but why are they doing it now, on opening day?
And I don’t know.
That song ends and another child—a boy this time—starts singing ‘There’s Better Times A-Coming.’ A banjo joins in, then all the kids are dancing again.
“Come on, everyone!” Rosie yells. She’s standing on the elevated wooden porch that leads to the bakery, her arms waving in the air and her face lit up gold from the strings of lights hanging down from the tent ceiling. “Dance with us!”
And of course, when you invite people to do something, some will most certainly go ahead and do that. So people start dancing. It’s a very complicated dance, so they’re all Disciple people too. But when you look at the guests you can see it in their faces. How much they want to be a part of this. How much they want to feel this joy. And some of them don’t care that they have no clue what they’re doing. When they are invited in by an extended hand, they take it and do their best.
Collin comes out in front of me and offers me his hand as well.
I think I blush like a fucking teenager, because my whole face goes hot.
“Come on, Lowyn. If I remember how to do this dance, I know damn well you do too.”
He’s right. I’ve been doing this dance since I was four.
I give him my hand and suddenly I’m swept up in a wave of delight as he moves me around, and through, the dancing crowd. The next thing I know Rosie and Amon are in our group. And the pair of us join up with Jacob Wonder and April Laver. Then Bryn is there, dancing with Ethan Sardis, who runs the mechanic shop on Third and Maple, and we’ve got ourselves a square.
The dance is never-ending, that’s what makes it so fun. When the song ends, some other child in the choir starts singing ‘Can’t You Hear Me Callin’,’ and we just keep going. I don’t know even know how long it lasts. Half an hour? Two hours? A lifetime? All I know is that I haven’t danced this much, or smiled this much, or felt this good since before that one dark night when everything went wrong.
But eventually, it all slows down, and little Bethylynn Baptist is back crooning out ‘Down to the River to Pray’ in her angelic six-year-old voice, and we all slow too. Collin and I face each other and I rest my head on his shoulder as he holds me, just listening to the words echo inside him as he sings along. We all sing along. Even if most of us are just whispering or catching our breath.
When that’s over, it’s all over. People start clapping, all of us. It’s a familiar moment because it comes every year on Christmas Eve when the season ends. And even though we all complain about the work, and the stress, and the baking, and the fainting, and the crafting, and everything that comes along with being a part of this Broadway play of a town, we’re always sad when it ends.
Even Collin looks sad. And there’s not even a reason to be sad because this is opening day.
It’s just conditioning that we’re feeling.
Because that dancing we just did means somethin’s over.
We spend the afternoon with Amon, Ryan, Nash, and Bryn—who I guess is OK with me now, or at the very least is being polite, because she doesn’t even shoot me a dirty look. But right around three o’clock they all disappear, leaving Lowyn and I alone again.