I like her already.

I have barely settled myself on the stool when the woman hands me a—now gleaming—glass filled with champagne.

“Merci,” I say.

When I ask her how much I owe her, she glares at me and says, “We do not accept money here.” She returns to her vigorous inspection of the glassware.

“Come on you,” says Iris, materializing in front of me.

She grabs my hand. “You’re pulled.”

“What do you mean?”

“The band wants us to do an Irish dance,” she says, nodding towards the four musicians. The double bass player, now tuning a violin tucked under her chin, looks at me with great expectation.

My mouth runs dry. “Not... Riverdance?” I whisper.

“Fuck that shit,” says Iris. “They can play a reel, so I said we’d do the ‘Walls of Limerick’.”

“But I don’t know that.”

“’Course you do,” Iris tells me, taking my hand and hauling me from my refuge at the bar.

“No really, it’s true, I—”

“It’s easy,” says Iris. “I’ll show you.”

“But...” Iris furrows a path through the crowd, pulling me along behind her. “But I don’t dance,” I say, trying to weasel my hand out of her grip. “I can’t.”

“How do you know you can’t if you don’t?” Iris says.

This seems like a reasonable question and one I don’t have sufficient time to answer given our abrupt arrival at the center of the floor. Everybody is staring at us. And I don’t mean that nobody is staring, but I just feel like they are. No. Everybody is genuinely, really and truly, staring at us.

Iris points into the crowd, and Lucas and Isabelle appear beside us as if by magic, meekly allowing Iris to arrange them into our square of four. Iris lifts my hand and nods at Lucas, who does the same with Isabelle’s. Now Iris shows us how to do the one, two, threes, the ins, the outs, where to take your partner’s hand, how to hold it, when to twirl.

Yes.

There is twirling.

In front of strangers.

The band begins to play a reel and it sounds wonderful, as if they’ve been practicing this piece of music for years and years, hoping that Iris would show up someday. Waiting for her.

Iris arranges us upright, backs ramrod straight, our right toes affixed to the ground in a strict point. I get a sudden urge to laugh, which sometimes happens when I’m under extreme pressure.

Iris counts us in. We begin dancing.

Dancing might be overstating it. I am jumping up and down on the spot as my erstwhile companions—worry and concentration—jostle for position while jabbing me with pointed sticks and laughing their heads off.

Worry is winning. Worry drowns out the sound of the music. Worry about everything. Like injury for example, both to myself and others.

Concentration catches up, wrestles worry to the ground. I concentrate on the sequence of the steps, the position I’m supposed to be in. On not falling over my feet. Or falling over anyone else’s feet. Or stepping on someone’s foot. Isabelle is wearing open-toed sandals. That would smart.