"I'm so sorry, Paul," she said, looking like she might cry. "I understand if you don't want to talk to me."
    What was I going to say? I really didn't want to talk to her, simply because I was terrified that I might smell the vomit on her breath.
    "How are you feeling?" I asked, shifting my weight back a bit.
    "I feel terrible," she said, stepping forward to get close to me. "I've completely ruined the evening."
    I shifted my weight away from her again, inching my foot back discreetly. "No, it's not ruined. You just probably shouldn't have drank all that beer in the car."
    She sighed heavily. I held my breath, afraid of what I might smell. "You're right. God, it was so stupid. You don't even drink, I can tell." She looked into my eyes as if I were some kind of a wise man. Clearly, the girl was a mess. All I could do was stare at her mouth and wonder just how many times she had thrown up and whether her hands had gripped the sides of the toilet bowl as she did.
    "Do you want to dance?" she asked, doe-eyed.
    Good God, no, I thought. "Okay," I said.
    She took my hand, gave me a romantic smile, and led me into the dance. Her friend Sandy gave me a grateful smile, happy that I didn't care what had happened in the bathroom. I smiled back, trying to figure out exactly how the hell I could get out of the rest of this date.

    Cathy and I got on the dance floor. She put her arms around my neck and pulled me close, in the standard death-grip slow-dance position that we as teenagers in the late 1970s were required to perform. I gingerly put my hands on her waist and held her lightly, tilting my head back a bit, pretending to survey the room as I moved my nose out of breathing range.
    "Wow, there sure are a lot of people here," I said, in as non-romantic a tone as I could muster.
    "I wish there weren't," she said quietly. I wish it were just you and me."
    I had lain awake at night for years dreaming of having a girl say something like that to me. I looked into Cathy's eyes. She smiled coyly and exhaled. I smelled a trace of vomit on her breath. I felt like I was going to faint.
    "Oh yeah, well, too bad it's not." I delivered the line much like a clerk in a complaint department would tell a customer that he understood her grievance but there was nothing he could do about it.
    Cathy looked in to my eyes and moved her head forward, getting very close to my face. "I'm so glad you asked me to the dance," she said sweetly.
    "I'm glad you came with me," I said, contorting my neck in to a question-mark shape in order to put the maximum distance possible between her mouth and my nose.
    As the dance ended, I wondered if Cathy and Sandy would forget that we were all supposed to go out to dinner. It was tradition, I had been told, to go to the dance, then to take your date out for a nice meal in a fancy restaurant. When I say "fancy," I mean, of course, one of the several medieval-themed restaurants peppered between our fast-food chains and twenty-four-hour family restaurants that accounted for most of the eating-out experiences available to us noncoast dwellers. Within most small Midwestern communities, there is an equation that anything having to do with a king is somehow symbolic of the highest-quality meal a person can enjoy. Restaurants with names like Ye Olde King's Table and His Majesty's Court were places where you took dates, celebrated birthdays, or proposed. I had made the four of us a reservation at The Kings' Inn, a huge dark-wood restaurant that incongruously had a statue of a giant ten-foot-high steer out in front. Much like a lobster tank in a seafood establishment, I guess the sight of a beef heifer standing out in front of a restaurant was supposed to be the lure that would prove too tempting fro any hungry driver to pass up. But tonight, with the image of vomiting Cathy lodged in my head driving past the King's Inn and heading home was my only wish.
    Cathy, Sandy, Walter and I walked out of the dance toward Walter's car.
    "Man, I'm tired," I said, stretching my arms above my head in the most unsubtle portrayal of a sleepy guy ever attempted.
    "You're tired?" said Walter to me, as if the next thing out of his mouth was going to be an accusation of homosexuality. "I'm starving."
    "Me too," said Cathy. "I've been thinking about a steak all night."
    "Yeah, you must be hungry," said Sandy with a smirk. She then did an imitation of Cathy barfing. Cathy opened her mouth wide in shock, then punched Sandy on the arm.
    They were hungry. Cathy wanted a steak. This evening was not going to end.