There is a rumor that Laura Palmer is going to be at the dance. While you don’t know her personally, all you can think about is the exquisite mystique of her televised corpse, and how her voice, on a karmic loop, kept repeating—So you wanna fuck the prom queen? The idea that Laura Palmer might breeze into the school auditorium, and perhaps stand only ten feet away from where you are standing, you holding a plastic cup filled with cherry punch, dressed in a suit that was your brother’s, god rest his soul … Laura, can I get you a glass of punch? (Good, in your head, you didn’t stammer or stutter when propositioning Laura). You suddenly realize that cherry punch is leaking from a hole in the bottom of the cup, and onto your new shoes, as you tip the cup horizontally, which, unfortunately, spills the entirety of your cherry punch onto the tiled floor. The cherry punch now pooling around your black shoes reminds you of cartoon blood, and you remain transfixed by this grotesque effect, until out of  the corner of your eye, you spot a platinum-haired girl in a white ruffled blouse and tight-fitting blue denim jeans, walking backward through the doorway. She seems to be rewinding at a spasmodic, off-kilter-pace, in your direction. You cannot understand the words coming out of her mouth, as they sound like chunky globules being gargled, and are being spoken forward, away from you, with the girl continuing to rewind, and you, locked in a pause, awaiting her arrival. When she reaches you and wheels around, as if she were wearing roller skates, it is the smile that is hardest to bear, and how its yearbook majesty and rigged incandescence forces you to look down at the mess you’ve made, and please, god, tell me why anyone would serve cartoon blood at a high school dance?