Slam Dunk

The mic squealed when I set it back in the stand. That about summed up the night. Eleven poets, and I went seventh, right after the gal who did the one about her dad's truck. Tough slot. But that's not why I bombed. I bombed because the poem was gutless.

I slumped onto the barstool next to Candace and put my face in my hands.

"You bombed," she said. She was grinning. Twenty-three years old, park ranger, built like somebody who carries people out of ravines for a living, and grinning at me like I'd won a raffle.

"Thanks, Candace. Very supportive."

"I mean it as a compliment." She pushed my beer toward me. I'd barely touched it. "You always bomb when you're bored of yourself. I've watched you for nearly two years, Derrick. You only suck when you don't care."

"I cared."

"You phoned it in. That was a poem written by a man protecting himself." She sipped her cider. "Where's the guy who did the bus depot piece? That one scared you. I could see your hands shaking."

"That was two years ago. I was a different man. I was a man with a deadline and a chip on his shoulder."

"So get a chip on your shoulder."

The bartender, a big fella named Quentin who ran The Thistle like it was his living room, leaned over and rang up somebody down the bar. The slam crowd was thinning out. Somebody was stacking chairs. The lavender farm's event barn next door had emptied an hour ago and the whole property smelled like cold air and woodsmoke.

"Here's my dare," Candace said. She turned on her stool to face me. "Write a poem that scares you. Actually scares you. Not scary to the audience. Scary to you. Something you'd hate for your students to hear."

"That's a wide net."

"It's a real net. You've been teaching that community college class for a year and I haven't heard you write one true thing since fall."

Ouch. But fair.

"Fine," I said. "What does scary even look like? I'm twenty-four. My life is grading papers and dating a woman who could bench press me."

"Then write about that."

"Nobody wants to hear about my nice stable relationship, Candy."

"Then it's not scary, is it?" She finished her cider and set the glass down. "Scary means you don't know what comes out. You write something and you don't know yet if you're allowed to say it."

I stared at my beer. She had a way of doing this. Two years I'd known her, since that trailhead volunteer day where she reorganized the whole tool shed in forty minutes and I wrote a bad sonnet about her gloves. She was sensible the way a fence post is sensible. Straight up, no nonsense, and very hard to knock over.

"Okay," I said. "Fine. I'll write something that scares me. Though honestly the scariest version of me is the one in heels."

I was joking. Clear as day, joking.

Candace raised one eyebrow. Just the one. She did this thing where she didn't laugh, she just aimed the eyebrow at you like a flashlight.

"Say more about that," she said.

"Nope. That was a joke. Withdrawn."

"Uh huh."

"Quentin!" I called, way too loud. "Quentin, tell me about the pond."

Quentin came over wiping the bar. "Pond's frozen solid, my man. Skated it Sunday. Best ice in two years, they're saying. Folks been out there every evening after the farm closes."

"Is that right." I looked at Candace. She was still doing the eyebrow thing. "I've never skated. Ever. I'm from Windsor, we had parking lots, not ponds."

"You should go," Quentin said. "Rental skates at the lodge, couple bucks."

And that's how it started, I guess. Not with the dress. With the skates.

* * *

Candace owned two pairs of skates because of course she did. She'd grown up on this pond, out behind the lavender rows, before the owners turned the farm into an event space and started hosting weddings between the blooms.

The next Saturday she drove us out in her ancient Subaru. The fields were purple stubble under snow, all the summer lavender cut down, and the pond sat flat and white at the bottom of the slope with maybe a dozen people on it.

"Here." She handed me her spare pair, laces already loosened. She'd brought them without being asked, which meant she'd been planning this since the bar. Candace planned things. It was her whole deal.

I got the skates on sitting on the tailgate, feet freezing, and stood up as unsteady as a newborn deer.

"Oh no," she said, laughing now, honest laughing. "Oh, this is going to be great!"

"Shut up."

"Take my hands."

"I will fall on you."

"Then you'll fall on me."

So I took her hands and we went out onto the ice and I fell. Twice, in the first ten minutes. A man who looked about sixty lapped me twice while I was still on my first lap. My ankles screamed. My tailbone filed a grievance.

But I did not expect this. Somewhere around the fifteenth minute I stopped thinking about falling and just went. And it felt like writing used to feel. That lurch in the stomach when you stop controlling it.

"There it is," Candace said, skating backward in front of me, watching my face. "There's the look."

"What look?"

"The one you had when you read the bus depot poem. You look like you're about to find out something."

I pushed off and followed her around the pond, wobbly but going, wind in my teeth, and I thought, okay. This is what she's doing. She's not daring me to be embarrassed. She's daring me to be bad at something in public again. That was the actual dare. The poem was downstream of this.

* * *

Sunday evening she came over to my apartment with a canvas tote bag and set it on my kitchen table like she was delivering evidence.

"What's this."

"Open it."

Inside: a dress. A thrift-store dress, green with little white flowers, size generous. A pair of low heels, also green. And a small makeup kit, drugstore stuff, still in the packaging.

I looked at her. She looked at me, level, arms crossed, hip against the table.

"You said heels," she said. "So. I dare you. Wear it at the next slam. Read the scary poem in it."

"Candace."

"I bought everything for eleven bucks at the Value Bin. If you hate it, it goes back in the bag and we never speak of it. No harm."

"And if I don't hate it?"

"Then we've learned something about you, haven't we."

I picked up the dress. It was softer than I expected. The fabric had that washed-out secondhand smell, faint, like somebody's linen closet. I held it up against myself, which was ridiculous, and Candace's mouth twitched but she didn't laugh at me. She never laughed at the actual moment. Only after.

"I've never done anything like this," I said. "Not once. Not even close."

"I know. That's why it's the dare." She sat down at my table, pulled out a chair with her boot. "Derrick. Listen. You've been flat for months. I've watched you flatten. This is me throwing you in the pond, same as the skates. You went. You fell. You got up. Now the dress."

"What happens at the slam if somebody films it?"

"Nobody films at The Thistle. Quentin has a rule, phones in the basket by the door. It's on a sign and everything."

"Okay, but."

"But nothing. Say yes or say no. It's your call, one hundred percent. I'm not doing this to you. I'm offering it to you."

That's Candace. Consent king. She'd ask permission to hand you a coffee.

I stood there holding a green floral dress in my own kitchen, twenty-four years old, a grown man, a teacher, and I felt the lurch. The same lurch. The ice lurch.

"Yes," I said. "Okay. Yes!"

She smiled then. Full smile, the rare one.

"Good. Try it on now. I want to see if the hem's right before I do your makeup practice."

"Makeup practice?"

"Derrick. You can't do eyeliner for the first time in front of a room full of strangers. Sit down. We've got two weeks."

I sat down. I put the dress on in the bathroom and came out and she went quiet for a second, in a good way, in a way I decided to file away and think about later.

"Hem's fine," she said. "Sit. Let's talk about your eyebrows."

My eyebrows. Two weeks. Lord help me.

Two weeks went by fast. We practiced makeup three times. The first time I looked like a clown who'd lost a fight. The second time I looked like a tired clown. The third time Candace took the brush out of my hand and did it herself, slow, talking me through it.

"Close your eyes. Stop flinching. I'm not stabbing you."

"Feels like you're stabbing me."

"You're so dramatic. You teach poetry. You should be used to sharp things."

Blush, shadow, a line along the lashes. Lipstick the color of the lavender out back, which she found hilarious and I found suspicious. She held a mirror up at the end and I had to admit it. It worked. Not pretty exactly. But a face. A face with intent.

Slam night was cold and clear. The pond was frozen hard, and people were out on it when we drove past the rows, dark shapes sliding under the porch light.

Candace parked the Subaru behind the event barn. "Okay. The shed."

The storage shed sat at the edge of the farm lot. Old, wooden, smelled like oil and rope and dead lavender stalks. She'd hung a mirror on the inside of the door, an actual plan, which meant she'd been planning this longer than she admitted.

She set the dress on a nail, the heels under it, the makeup laid out on the workbench like surgery.

"I'll wait outside," she said. "Yell if you wreck the lipstick."

"Great pep talk."

"Go, Derrick."

So I changed in a freezing shed by myself, which is