“We were the wallflowers. The weeds. The throwaways.”

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Once again I was left standing alone against the wall while the pretty ones all around me were chosen and floated off as though they were helium balloons on streamers which never touched the ground. The girls’ giggles when the handsome boys’ hands caught theirs and led them off lingered in the air on either side of me, and the cracking voices of adolescent males murmuring inanities paved the way as the pairs stopped in the middle of the gym floor to prepare to dance. Funny how all the couples formed an indistinct blob of silhouettes as though like a school of fish they needed to huddle together. None wanted to attract the attention of the teachers patrolling the outskirts like sharks, ready to pounce on any couples without space between their bodies. Those dead-eyed predators came to life pretty quickly as they navigated the edges of the dance floor waiting to attack the school of young offenders before they engaged in indecent behavior.

Never was there a feeling more demeaning than standing in line with pretty girls on either side of me, seeing first one, and then another moving away from the wall, selected for their bright eyes or their blonde locks, their well-endowed feminine shapes, or their milky white complexions, none of which applied to me. Those few boys I wished would pick me, knowing they never would, gave me no glance, much less a moment of consideration. One by one, the chosen ones left blank spaces between me and the few others who shared my fate on every third Friday of the nine months of each junior high school year.

Knowing the sock hops were scheduled for that day, students took care to wear clean, unholey socks. Even us wallflowers, clinging to a little sliver of hope that maybe this time would be different. Ditching didn’t even enter our minds. The ones who did were those pitiful souls from the poor sides of the town. They found excuses to cut classes on those particular Fridays for obvious reasons. Too bad the teachers never put two and two together when scuffles or blown out fist fights occurred on the Mondays after those cursed dances. Or if they did, they did noting about it. The rich kids’ mouths could never hold their unkind comments back. And the poor kids would never back down from defending themselves.

Today’s sock hop was like every other. No music played yet from the record player at the front of the small middle school gymnasium, so the couples stood in an awkward silence, some moving from one socked foot to the other. Finally the static over the phonograph speaker signaled the needle touching the record, and the music soon followed.

Fast songs had everyone’s limbs moving in all directions. Heads swayed and hair followed. Elbows rose and fell, fingers snapped. Legs rose and knees bent as socked feet slid and glided over the waxed floor. The sharks were equally ready to curb over-enthusiastic rocking and rolling if the girls’ dresses flared out too widely and showed what they should have tried to keep hidden. Twisting to Chubby Checkers or la-bamba-ing to Richie Valenz, sometimes the boys’ gyrations earned a tapping reminder on the shoulder to tone down the hip movements or risk a biting reprimand intended to embarrass.

Since my usual stance was holding up the wall in the shadows where the lights didn’t hit, I betted with myself often how many dancers I would see in those awkward body movements when one sock slipped as if on a banana peel and the other went in the opposite direction. I cracked up by myself watching those who hit the floor with resounding slaps when the dancing became too exuberant. Feet slid right out from under those luckless few who embarrassed themselves by not holding back. Those were the dancers who provided me with enough entertainment that sometimes I was happy to be spectator and not participant.

If it was a slow number, I watched the awkward placement of male hands on female hips and the fingers of the free hands figuring out whether to clasp or intertwine. Then the hesitant first step as the boys began to lead and the girls to follow, a few stepping on the partners’ toes, while others looked as if they had taken lessons, so smoothly did they move in the white socks standing out against the dark wooden floor.

If it was a fast number where the boy and girl had no contact, I studied the girls in the unlikely event someone asked me to dance, and I had to move like they did. The last thing I wanted was to stand out for dancing differently from the rest. It was bad enough standing out now as I did against the wall with only a few other girls. We stood propped against that cold cinderblock as though forgotten or set aside for being too plain, too heavy, too thin, or too shapeless. It was junior high, for Pete’s sake, and many of us were late bloomers, flat-chested, pencil-thin and pencil-shaped. On the opposite side of the spectrum were the buxom girls, some still trying to lose baby fat, while others matured too soon and attracted attention for what the rest of us wished we had. Like fully bloomed carnations or dainty dandelions or long and lithe like irises or tulips, we came in every shape and size. We were the wallflowers. The weeds. The throwaways. Being overlooked and forgotten after a few dances, we gathered like a bouquet of nondescript blossoms as if by joining in a circle we were able to hide behind one another, and no one would notice we weren’t included in yet one more dance.

I think back now and wonder why we didn’t just grab one another and dance together in a circle that meant something. And then I remembered. It was bad enough to be one of the wallflowers, but to be considered a gay one would be worse. It was the ’60s. And so we stood there and talked about nothing and pretended we didn’t like dancing anyway. The popular girls, the pretty ones, they relished their positions in the spot light and cast sidelong glances our way, some with pity and others with a kind of defiance in their eyes. As if they said, “See me. You’ll never be like me.” The boys were different. I don’t remember any of them bothering to look at us, not once. We were dismissed as though we were merely shadows of ourselves against that wall and as such were as unfeeling as the cold cinderblock. But I know we all suffered inside, and we all wondered when junior high would be over and we could finally find a place for ourselves where we didn’t feel so outcast.

The dances at night were avoidable; I refused to attend. But those sock hops in the afternoons which were mandatory were hell. Since staff had to supervise, there was no ducking into my favorite teacher’s classroom to hide for the two hour event. So I suffered with my fellow wallflowers and have never forgotten how ugly those dances made me feel, how plain I was that no one would choose me to show off on that gym floor.

It would be years before I finally wholeheartedly jumped into the middle of a ballroom floor and danced with wild abandon and left the pain behind me. On my wedding night in the center of everyone’s attention, I didn’t allow the fact that I was still a wallflower on the outside diminish the happiness inside. I knew the joy of finally having been picked like the most lovely flower in the garden, led by the hand, into the dance of a lifetime.

By Carmen Baca

From: United States

Website: https://cbaca55.wixsite.com/books

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