King of the dance floor, second telling

[Part 2. This is the story retold, as part of an attempt to win an essay-writing contest (I'll keep you posted). This is a far happier, more organized narrative, crafted with the editors of this particular contest in mind. The ending is definitely different; more touchy-feely, less the way it really happened. But who decides? I guess it's reality either way. Basically I just exaggerated on the positive side of things in order to manipulate my own past. Isn't it great? I think it's a wonderful thing we all can do, manipulate our personal history and kind of shape it our will. That can really come in handy, I tell you.]

I've been here before. It seems like long ago, when I was unprepared, unintentionally transitioning from a high school adolescent into a more ambitious, pre-college type. Two weeks were set aside in the summer between my junior and senior high school years, when I came to BYU with forty or so other students for a computer science scholarship program, lovingly referred to as computer camp.

It was surreal to me then and still seems so now, how at sixteen I came to be involved in such an experience, and was left to fend for myself for the first time. I was so shy and unsure, uncomfortable in my own skin. But over the course of those two weeks I happened upon new opportunities to grow, to bond and build new friendships, many that would persist even a year later when I would return to BYU as a freshman.

But the culminating moment in this experience, as trivial as it sounds, was a dance. The farewell dance. It took place on the south side of campus in the nondescript Knight Magnum building. And remember, it was a dance—for only forty people, mind you.

A DJ was set up on the small stage. Colored lights splayed embarrassingly across the empty dance floor, empty because most of us were inherently unable to participate in such a social gathering. We were at computer camp; we weren't the type that took to dancing with much natural candor. Plus, the boys outnumbered the girls two to one, and in this group of our peers, few friendships were beyond the platonic.

"Hey, let's go." Alex called out to me. He was the forward one, intimidated by nothing, always with a worry-free smile on his face. We'd become friends, and to our excitement would coincidentally end up on the same floor of Deseret Towers the next fall.

"No, you guys go ahead." I nodded and he and some of the others bounded off to finally start the dance. I paced the wall, had some punch. Watched Eric as he danced with Michelle—they were the only couple that had really seemed to come together during our stay.

There I was, stalling on the now less-empty dance floor. And then, even with all my public-dancing apprehension, and thanks partially to what the others had started, I began to loosen and started to dance, albeit by myself.

What followed was a direct result, I'm sure, of the style of dance I chose: an extremely odd, 1980s-helicopter-at-an-angle dance where I circled around and kept my head cocked while alternating the stomping of my feet, a dance that in retrospect is embarrassment enough just to confess.

The DJ had apparently seen me dancing alone, for moments later an older girl approached me and asked me to dance. She was his girlfriend. She declared to me that they'd seen me dancing from the stage and had determined that I was the best one there, and because of it she'd hoped to have a dance or two with me.

And she did. Fast, slow, it only lasted a few songs. But she would smile and laugh and look to her boyfriend onstage while he manned the midtempo dance tracks familiar to us all. He would smile back his approval. I caught some bewildered glimpses from my friends, and then she was gone, returned to likewise smile down on me from her position onstage.

As the dance came to a close and marked the end of our two premature weeks experiencing BYU, I walked out into the sobering nighttime air with my friends, feeling more excited and confident than I could remember having felt before. For I had been picked—chosen—at sixteen, to dance with the prettiest girl, and even though it may have been just an act of charity for a lonesome teenager, it perpetuated a feeling of kindness through me and sent me out into the world just a little more motivated, just a little more invigorated. And with the challenges that lay in wait, that spectrum of victory and disaster we had yet to encounter socially, scholastically and spiritually, we were prepared. We were ready to face anything.