Page 135 of Spiced!

“Are you okay?” Chase said.

“I’m fine,” Finn wheezed.

“Your face is—”

“I’m fine,” Finn said, still that color.

“Is legitimate hockey term,” Erik said to Finn with completely earnest reassurance. “In hockey, the five hole is the most—”

“Erik,” Skyler said.

“I am providing context—”

“Oh, he has the context,” Skyler said through his own disbelieving laughter. “That’s why he looks like that.”

“Ah.” Erik looked at Finn. “I see.”

Then the disco kicked in properly, and Tyler began to move.

What followed was objectively, technically, artistically, the worst dancing anyone in the room had ever witnessed. It was also immediately and completely riveting, in the way that terrible accidents on the side of the road command complete attention. What made it even more hilarious was that Tyler had clearly practiced, had clearly looked in a mirror and seen something the mirror had not actually shown him, and was now deploying the result with the intensity of a professional athlete competing for gold.

His hips went left.

The rest of him followed two beats later, like a sentence where the subject arrives after the verb.

“Oh no,” Adrian said from beside me with the horror of a professional watching something he loved being processed through the wrong equipment like, say, a meat grinder.

“Is he—?” Jacks started.

“Yes,” Benji said.

“But the timing—”

“I know.”

“It’s not—”

“I know,” Benji said.

Tyler, entirely unbothered by the critical discussion happening around him, had moved into what appeared to be the burlesque-adjacent section of his performance. He was working the trench coat, which he had picked back up from the floor and was now using as a prop, draping it over one shoulder, sliding it down his arm, and offering it to the room with the tease of a man who had watched too many cabaret videos in preparation for this and had absorbed the aesthetic without the technique.

“He’s doing burlesque?” Chase asked with delighted disbelief.

“He’s doing something.” Finn snorted. “I’m not sure burlesque is the right word.”

“What’s the right word?” Chase said.

Finn watched Tyler execute a slow turn that accelerated unexpectedly in the middle and ended approximately forty degrees past where it was supposed to.

“I don’t think there is one,” he said.

“There is word in Swedish,” Erik said.

Everyone turned to him.

“I will not say it here,” Erik said.

“ERIK,” Tyler called from the spotlight, having apparently heard this. “WHAT’S THE SWEDISH WORD?”