The Leftovers

usefulness, but it was always accompanied by a slender hope that the group dynamic might shift in such a way that she’d find herself alone with Nick again and could remind him of how perfectly their bodies and minds fit together.
    Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to happen tonight. She got him on her fourth spin, felt the familiar jolt of excitement as his face moved toward hers, and the equally familiar letdown when they kissed. He wasn’t even pretending to be interested, his lips dry and only slightly parted, his tongue stubbornly passive in response to the eager, questioning flicks of her own. It was such a lethargic performance—way less hot than the kiss he’d given Zoe; Jill wasn’t even in second place anymore!—that nobody even bothered to suggest that they get a room. When it was over, he wiped his mouth, gave a languid nod of approval, and said, “Thanks, that was great,” but it was just good manners. They might as well have just shaken hands, or waved at each other from across the street. It made her wonder if their summer hookup had even happened, if the glorious hour and a half they’d spent on Mark’s parents’ bed wasn’t just a figment of her imagination, a bad case of wishful thinking.
    But it wasn’t—the sheets had been cool and white, with little blue flowers on them, really delicate and innocent-looking, and Nick had been really into it. The only thing that had changed since then was that he’d fallen in love with Aimee, the way every guy eventually did. You could see it in the way his face lit up when the arrow finally pointed in her direction, and in the slow, serious way he kissed her, as if there were no one else in the room, as if what they were sharing wasn’t part of a game at all. Aimee couldn’t match his sincerity—there was something inescapably theatrical about the way she melted onto the floor, pulling him on top of her and arching her back so she could grind her pelvis against his—but the combination of the two styles had a potent effect on the judges. When Jason suggested that they get a room, Zoe seconded the motion, and the vote in favor was unanimous, not a single abstention.
    *   *   *
    THE BARRIER that separated Nora from the people around her thinned and softened as she danced; the others didn’t seem as far away or strange as they often did when she passed them in the supermarket or on the bike path. When they bumped into her on the dance floor, the contact wasn’t intrusive or unpleasant. If someone smiled at her, she smiled back, and most of the time it felt okay, like something her face was meant to do.
    She took a break after a half hour and headed for the refreshment table, where she poured herself a plastic cup of chardonnay and downed it in two big gulps. The wine was lukewarm, a bit too sweet, but she thought it might be okay with ice and a little seltzer.
    “Excuse me, Mrs. Durst?”
    Nora turned toward the voice, which was soft and eerily familiar. For a long, blank moment, it felt like she’d lost the powers of thought and speech.
    “I’m sorry to bother you,” Kylie said. She’d cut her hair boyishly short, and it looked cute on her, a nice contrast to all that hipster ink on her arm, which Doug had apparently found so arousing. I luv ur tats, he’d told her in one of the text messages Reverend Jamison had published in his newsletter. I asked my wife to get one but she said no :(. “Can we talk for a minute?”
    Nora remained mute. The crazy thing was, she’d imagined a version of this moment so clearly that she knew it by heart. For the first couple of days after learning about Doug’s affair, she’d fantasized repeatedly, and in great detail, about barging into Little Sprouts in the middle of naptime and slapping Kylie across the face, really hard, with all the other teachers and kids looking on.
    Slut, she would say matter-of-factly, as if this were Kylie’s real name. (She’d experimented with an alternate scenario in which she screamed the word like a curse, but it was too melodramatic, not nearly as satisfying.) You are a disgusting person .
    And then she would slap her on the other side of her cheating face, the sound of the blow reverberating like a gunshot in the darkened playroom. There were a bunch of other things she planned to say after that, but the words weren’t really the point. The slaps were.
    “I totally understand if you don’t want to,” Kylie went on. “I know this is awkward.”
    Nora stared