Summary

The four, now outside in the rain, are “jumping around” and dancing with each other, not speaking (26). Mark holds the narrator’s hand, who holds Deb’s, who holds Lauren’s: since neither Mark nor Lauren can touch members of the opposite sex, even each other while in public, the narrator notes that they have made “a broken circle,” their “own kind of hora” (a traditional Jewish dance, performed by dancing in a circle with a large group) (26). The narrator describes how happy and free he feels, and how surprised he is that these sensations would accompany the visit of such “strict, suffocatingly austere people" (26).

Once again, Deb asks Lauren and Mark whether they are violating Jewish law by dancing together, since “mixed” dancing (between genders) is forbidden. Although Lauren says that they will “live with the consequences,” the narrator brings up an old...