When my son was in junior high, and of his own volition, he went through two years of Jr Cotillion.  It was a choice that would have made his late Mimi proud, Cotillion being the epitome of high Southern culture.  Now, at sixteen, he can navigate a place setting at a formal restaurant, dance the foxtrot, and maintains impeccable manners with women.

Little did I know that from the mother’s side, the experience can make your heart burst with joy, and break it all at once.

His first Cotillion ball was, not coincidentally his first brush with the casual cruelty of teen-aged girls.

Harry looked fine in his blue slub-knit silk suitcoat, his navy trousers, and his striped tie, clean scrubbed and smelling of his first men’s cologne.  He was proud of his his image in the mirror in his businessman’s clothes. In this uniform of upper middle-class conformity, I had a hard time picking him out when he melted into the sea of young men waiting mortified to be pinned with boutonnieres and photographed by hovering mothers who fussed over crooked ties.  I tried to cause as little embarrassment as possible, snapping my picture almost perfunctorily and leaving him to commiserate with his similarly suffering friends.

As I passed, I glanced to the other side of the ballroom. To the girls.

Much taller and willowy, and definitively young women, perfectly polished in tea dresses and the occasional ball gown, helping each other with wrist-corsages and lip gloss.  They side-eyed the mob of boys on the opposite side of the room with cocked heads and arms crossed critically.  So sophisticated and so-very-not-little girls.

My son was young for a seventh grader and small even for his twelve years.  The signs of puberty had barely brushed him, and his interests still lay squarely in the boy side of adolescence.  He still played with Legos and chatted online during hour-long Minecraft sessions.  Girls were fine as humans go, but they carry no special interest in his world.  And he, well, he was invisible to them.

The children do not choose their partners for the Jr Cotillion balls.  They are assigned partners – one for each half of the evening, an arrangement I had initially thought of as a small mercy.  It spared my son the agony and fear of rejection associated with asking a girl, something I gave a 50-50 shot of success or mortifying failure.

But even without that opportunity to dish out that flavor of humiliation, teenaged girls will find a way.

Harry’s first partner was a tiny blonde thing, of his own stature, obviously chosen by the instructor to spare him from looking at the girl’s chest for the entire duration of the dance.  She was perfumed, and she was perfect, and while I didn’t know what standard she had for a ball partner, Harry did not meet muster.  She stood as far away from him as arm’s length would allow, her entire posture screaming that she would rather be anywhere else than standing in any proximity to my son.  As she passed the other girls on the dance floor, she mouthed “Help me!” in facial expressions exaggerated enough that the intent was painfully clear to any casual sideline observer.  It was deliberate, it was transparent and my heart bled for my son.

But Harry didn’t react.  He didn’t even appear to notice.  If he was embarrassed in any way, he gave no sign.  He finished the dance, escorted the young lady back to her waiting parents, and joined the other boys to wait for the next dance.

My face burned with humiliation for my son, and I only hope that girl’s mother had the decency to be similarly mortified.  I will never know.

On the ride home in the car, I casually asked my son how he thought the dance went and who he danced with, trying to feel him out without embarrassing him if he truly hadn’t noticed.

“Okay.”

“Did you know the girls you were dancing with?”

“Only one of them.  I didn’t know the first one.  She wasn’t very nice.”

“Oh.  What happened?”

“She just wasn’t very nice.”

 And that was that.

Or so I thought.

 Fast forward a few years, and that diminutive “small-for-his-age” boy is now a 5′ 9″ man, with a dusting of a mustache, deep in the sturm-und-drang of adolescence, with all of the feelings of awkwardness, loneliness, and alienation that go along with being no longer a child and yet not quite an adult. He struggles even now to find his place in the rarified atmosphere that is the American high school.  And he is going through all of this during the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic where everyone is just making things up as we go along.  I try to sit and listen to him and commiserate as a fellow HS-outsider who didn’t find my tribe until well into college.  And deep into one of these tearful conversations, my son announces that he doesn’t like girls much.

“They are mean to me.”

And immediately I was back beside the dancefloor watching that tiny boy being openly mocked, and my heart was broken all over again by the casual cruelty of little girls.