At the 2006 junior high school dance that is pirate-themed, much to the dismay of the junior high schoolers themselves, Johnny H. goes missing.
It happens after he slow-dances with Kimya, but before Lizabeth kisses Arlo on the lips. So his disappearance is not noticed by his group of friends until his favorite song starts to play and his “boys” look around for him to join in the dance.
At the 2006 junior high school dance, Maria L. is stifling a laugh in the hallway near the bathroom while she waits for Anya to finish up her mermaid makeup because the new seventh-grade science teacher Mr. V., who has been assigned to chaperone, trips over his own feet on the way to the bathroom since he can’t see well with a pirate eyepatch. When the door to the boys’ room swings open, Maria L. catches a glimpse of the back of Johnny H. at a urinal, and she feels ashamed to have looked. She blushes and ducks into the girls’ room to watch Anya paint glitter over each eyelid. She can hear the bass from the music blaring from the gym, but her mind is snagged on what she is embarrassed to have seen. Boys still confuse her, and while her friends increasingly express interest in learning more about boys’ bodies, she finds herself receding into her own mind, preferring the familiarity of the bodies she has always known. She doesn’t know it, but she is the last kid to see Johnny H. at the 2006 junior high school dance.
At the pirate-themed 2006 junior high school dance, there is Mr. V., a 24-year-old seventh-grade science teacher who is desperately hoping to get off work early this Friday night, so that he can meet Julia at the sports bar across town. It’s a courtship he has been nursing for a few weeks, and as he unzips his pants at the urinal and removes his costume eyepatch only after he has already touched his junk, he thinks of Julia a little too much and is only vaguely aware of a student in his vicinity. He doesn’t know this kid, isn’t sure of his grade, but Mr. V. will be the last adult to see Johnny H. The school’s security cameras will have caught the order in which the boy and the man entered the bathroom; the cameras will see the man leave. The cameras will catch Maria L., and Anya with her glittered eyelids, singing along to Britney Spears as they make their way back to the gym with the dimmed lights, multi-colored streamers, stuffed parrots, and obligatory table of juice pouches and snack-sized baggies of corn chips. The school security cameras will show that Johnny H. never leaves the bathroom.
After Lizabeth kisses Arlo on the lips for the first time at the junior high school dance, she swears she can feel her pineapple-flavored glossed lips tingle for at least an hour. Her older sister taught her what to do, how to make eye contact and lean close. Her sister said she couldn’t go into high school without having kissed a boy, because only losers and lesbians went into high school without having kissed a boy, and Lizabeth was scared to be either.
She’s in the hallway near the girls’ room texting her sister when she hears a sound from inside the boys’ room. It’s a garbled noise, something high-pitched and animal—it reminds Lizabeth of goats she’s watched in an Internet video, their icky, oval mouths open to bleat, their stick legs holding them up on an uneven mountainside. She’s alone in the hall and Mr. V., who was checking people in at the front of the gym, is nowhere to be seen, and the DJ is transitioning from a beat to a slow jam, and the noise rings through her ears. She checks the girls’ room to see if anyone else is there, if someone else heard the noise, too.
But the stalls are empty.
The only movement is the water dripping from the leaky sink near the window. Before she can think about it more deeply, Lizabeth slides her phone into her pocket, rolls on more lip gloss, and heads back into the gym. She’ll tell the police later that she heard a sound and that it creeped her out, but she won’t know how to answer when they ask why she didn’t tell a chaperone.
Kimya has known that Johnny H. has had a crush on her for, like, a year now. He teased her, flirted with her, told his friend Enrique that he likes when Kimya pushes her hair behind her ear, which Enrique told his twin sister, who told her friend, who told Kimya at a fire pit over roasted marshmallows. Kimya has thought about Johnny H. a lot, and not because she necessarily likes him all that much, but because she is trying to pinpoint how it feels to be liked. To know that you are liked, and to know that everyone else knows you are liked. It’s new for her. As far as she knows, this is the first time she has ever been liked. Does it make her like herself more? Or does it make her feel more self-conscious? She can’t tell, but she is trying to work it out in her journal that she prays her younger brother isn’t reading behind her back.
After their slow dance, she noticed how Johnny H. smiled sweetly and said thanks. How his blond hair fell across his forehead, how he had freckles across the bridge of his nose and a twitch with his right eye. She hugged him, and he kept his hands up high on her back. She thought, “I would do that again,” before drifting off to her group of friends. Darcy squealed and Rosalita waggled her eyebrows and Katie G. said too loudly, “Tell me everything!” It’s a school dance Kimya will always remember as the night she first danced with the first boy who liked her, and the night the same boy went missing altogether.
It is the start of a town-wide mystery that will sink into tragedy, and then into lore. At school dances that are themed like blizzards and vampires and under-the-sea creatures, kids will hear phantom noises in bathroom stalls and other kids will scare their friends with screams. It will become generational knowledge that Johnny H. never left the bathroom stall in the hallway next to the small gym.
Maria L. will move out of state with her wife and only talk about the night of the pirate-themed dance and the ordeal of being questioned vehemently by the police in therapy, and never with her own children, whom she does not allow to attend sleepovers at friends’ homes.
Mr. V. will uncomfortably teach at the school for a couple more years until the looks from other teachers and parents on parent-teacher nights will finally get to him; he will think back on how things never worked out with Julia and how he never really wanted to be a teacher, anyway. He will quit and go back to school for journalism, where a woman he is dating will come across the old news article about the junior high school kid who went missing and the seventh-grade science teacher who was the last adult to have seen him in the last place the boy was known to be. That relationship will end, and so will many others.
Lizabeth and Arlo will become high school sweethearts, get married quickly after graduation, and go on to have five children who grow up in the same town and attend dances in the same school gym. One of their sons will be the kind of boy who scares his friends with screams in the bathroom stalls, and Lizabeth will always love him just a little less for it. She will feel sickened by the scent of pineapples until the day she dies.
Johnny H.’s portrait will hang on a placard near the entrance of the school, with his full name, Johnathan Hackett, and his birthdate in bold letters, until years later when the school, which was foolishly built atop marshlands, sinks enough into the hungry ground that it must be closed, and a new school erected in what was the original school’s parking lot. In the construction mess, under the bricks and plaster and wetlands and concrete rubble, which reveals things lost to generations of students like monogrammed pencil cases and charm bracelets and wiffle balls and library cards, construction workers will find Johnny H.’s tibia picked clean, and nothing else of his body.
Michele Zimmerman is a queer writer with an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work appears in Catapult's Tiny Nightmares anthology, Post Road, and Harpur Palate among others. She was a Finalist for North American Review's 2025 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize and she was a winner of the Fractured Lit Anthology II Prize and the 2021 Blood Orange Review Literary Contest. Find her at www.michelezimmerman.com and Instagram @m.l.zimmerman.