Exile Hunter by Preston Fleming Page B

at the Hawken School. His dress for dance class was
typically an ill-fitting blue blazer, gray flannel trousers, and a
polka-dotted bow tie, along with the dweeby black-framed glasses and
spiky gel hairdo that were his trademark in those days.
    Not being physically
mature for his age, he was clueless about the female gender, a
situation made worse by his father’s aversion to raising the topic
of sex with his son for fear of encouraging him. Accordingly, Warren
had to pick it up for himself and didn’t make much headway. To his
credit, however, he knew a little about ballroom dancing because his
father was dance instructor at Hawken and at several other schools in
Cleveland’s affluent eastern suburbs and had tutored Warren from an
early age. In fact, Warren’s dancing prowess was the only reason
for including him in the class. He was not a Hawken student, but a
public-school ringer added to the roster at the last minute because
the class was short of boys and his father liked to use his son to
demonstrate new steps.
    To Warren’s delight,
the class at Hawken included many pretty girls from Cleveland’s
leading families, who had benefited from natural selection to bring
together the inherited traits of wealth, social standing,
intelligence, and good looks across multiple generations. None of the
girls had attracted Warren’s special notice, however, until the
third session in the yearlong course, by which time he had danced
with all of them. Such variety was guaranteed by his father’s
rotational system for selecting dance partners, which served the
multiple goals of breaking the ice, disrupting cliquishness, and
extending a safety net to wallflowers.
    Once or twice each
week, Warren’s father decreed a ladies’ choice dance, and on this
much-anticipated occasion, Warren was bowled over when a slender
dark-eyed girl wearing a beige chiffon tea dress, black Mary Jane
shoes, and a bouncing ponytail of mahogany hair approached him with a
playful smile and the magic words: “May I have this dance?” He so
appreciated this stroke of good fortune that he flashed her a broad
grin, took her outstretched hand in his and replied with the
all-purpose adolescent response when words failed: “Why not?”
    The dance was a fox
trot to Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” one of his father’s
favorites from a bygone era, and Warren led his young partner
skillfully through all the steps he knew, traversing the crowded room
repeatedly at varying angles and speeds to show that his dance moves
were not limited to slavish repetition of the box step. The first few
times they collided with other couples, her eyes met his and they
laughed in unison, confident in the other’s support. By the time
the song ended, Warren was happily short of breath and had come to
feel that this girl was somehow different from the others.
    Having been too shy to
introduce himself on their first dance, the next time the rotation
brought them together he wasted no time in asking her name.
    “Patricia,” she
answered. “Patricia Eaton.”
    “Great! I’m Warren
Linder.”
    “I know. Your father
introduced you to us the first day of class. You are a very polished
dancer, by the way,” she added with an approving smile.
    “If you practiced as
much as I’ve had to, I’m sure it would come just as easily,” he
replied.
    “I haven’t seen you
in any other classes here. Are you a transfer student?” Patricia
asked.
    “No, actually, I
don’t go to Hawken,” he responded without the self-consciousness
he might have felt if he had known more about the exclusive school.
“I’m in seventh grade at Patrick Henry Middle School in
Lyndhurst. I just come here for dance class.”
    “Oh, I see. I’ve
never met anyone from Lyndhurst before. Do you like it there?”
    “It’s nice enough.
But it’s the pits compared to this place. Hawken is awesome!”
    “You really think
so?” she challenged. “I think it’s boring. But then, I’ve
been here ever since