There is no way I’m dancing with Howard Goldstein.

That’s the only thought running through my mind as I sit, alone, at the head table at my brother Ben’s bar mitzvah.

The bandleader has just launched into yet another excruciatingly slow song and is feebly encouraging everyone to get up on the dance floor. I am hiding at the table, picking over my salad, hoping no one will notice me.

So far, it’s working. My mom’s working the crowd for gift envelopes like a stripper stuffing her G-string; my dad’s micromanaging the maitre’D to make sure he’s not scrimping on the smorgasbord; and my brother and his prepubescent friends are picking partners for those prehistoric party games like Musical Chairs and Coke & Pepsi, the same ones played at bar mitzvahs since Babylonian times.

Hard to believe only two years ago, at age thirteen, I was up there, too, on the bimah, singing my heart out like a complete dork, marking my entry into “womanhood,” as is customary––no, make that mandatory––in my Jewish faith.

My own bat mitzvah was replete with painful memories. Bad hair. Bad skin. Questionable fashion judgment.

True to course, on Bat Mitzvah morn, I woke up with a huge red zit on my cheek that my mom vainly tried to cover up with Lancôme bronzing blush. As if that weren’t humiliating enough, later she insisted the photographer air brush it out of the pictures. 

Then there was my outfit. In a moment of temporary insanity, I chose to wear a frilly Snow White dress that better resembles one of the lace doilies sitting on my bubbe’s coffee table than a garment emoting, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” 

Now, of course, I don’t wear any color but black, to my mother’s constant chagrin. Brown, maybe, if I’m feeling cheerful.            

At least my voice didn’t crack during my reading, like most boys in my grade that year. But I still cringe when I think of myself at the reception, dancing away to the Chicken Dance, chin jutting, elbows flailing. What a nightmare. I’ve tried to block out the images, but even if I could, they’re all right there, recorded for posterity by the videographer my parents hired to immortalize the blessed event.

Naturally, my annoyingly perfect brother hasn’t had any of those issues. This morning, he’d stood before all his friends, our extended family and the temple’s entire congregation, flawlessly chanting the Hebrew blessings, then sailed through his Haftorah portion, no problemo.

And though he’s usually into freakishly-proportioned cyberchicks he controls with his thumb, I see he’s already making headway in the love department, teaming up with Sarah Sternlicht, the cutest girl in his 7th grade class, as the Coke to his Pepsi. Any minute now, she’ll be hurling herself into his arms each time the band leader calls out “Caffeine-Free Diet Lime Coke.”

For me personally, “becoming a woman” didn’t change a thing. I’m still flat as a flapjack, with no Curve Ahead in sight. There’s been no discernable transformation in my love life. And my parents still treat me like an infant. 

I’d naively thought things would be different once I hit high school. But my first year at Riverdale High was the same old, same old. Same kids from junior high. Same too-short guys and too-spoiled girls. My parents haven’t helped, with their ridiculous rules to monitor my every movement.

I may live in one of the five boroughs of New York City, the capital of cool, but honestly, my life is so sheltered, I may as well be in Hicksville, U.S.A. My parents don’t let me ride the subway after dark, which pretty much limits my nightlife options to hanging out aimlessly in front of the neighborhood ice cream shop or newsstand.

For the reception, I’ve resigned myself to nursing my (virgin, like me) banana daiquiri and avoiding getting cornered by any extended family, who will undoubtedly ask whether I enjoyed my summer at camp and am I psyched to begin my sophomore year in a few weeks. The answer was: not so much.

Too late. Shattering my tranquility, my Aunt Merle swoops in for the kill.

I barely need to turn my head to know she’s coming. I catch a strong whiff of her Chanel No. 5 long before she drapes her blinged-out hand on my shoulder.

“Darling,” she rasps in her hoarse voice, battered by decades of Virginia Slim Ultra Lites. “Why aren’t you up there dancing?”

“I don’t feel like it,” I shrug.

The truth is, who would I dance with? Aunt Merle doesn’t realize I’d scoped the guest list weeks ago, hoping for a potential love connection, and came up with a big fat zero. Aside from Howard, my annoying next-door neighbor, there’s no one remotely my own age here.

Sure, thanks to my mathematical brain, I’ve easily pegged the crowd’s average age at about thirty, but statistics can be highly misleading. In reality, there are two very different subgroups: the over-fifty set: geriatric relatives and friends of my parents. And, on the other end of the spectrum, the under-thirteen set: Ben and his seventh-grade buddies, who look like they’re playing dress up in their fathers’ Brooks Brothers suits and ties.

Impossible to fathom, I was once interested in boys this age. Now, they just look so…short.

Aunt Merle’s face lights up.

Please, please, I chant in my head, don’t let her suggest I dance with her son, Ira.

“I bet Ira would dance with you,” suggests Aunt Merle, a master of the Vulcan Mind Meld. My cousin Ira is an investment banker living in Hoboken, who used to torment me as a child by locking me in a closet. But he’s practically thirty, making him closer to my dad’s age than mine. 

She scans the crowd, looking for his already-balding head. All I can see is a sea of bobbing white yarmulkes. Inside of each one, my parents had printed “Stolen from Ben’s Bar Mitzvah”––just one example of their screwy sense of humor they’d like to tell you is “Jewish wit.”

“That’s all right,” I say weakly. Getting asked to dance doesn’t really count when your aunt has to play matchmaker.

Sadly, come to think of it, the last time I think I had officially slow danced with any guy was at my own bat mitzvah two years ago, when Marc Goodman asked me out a week beforehand and pursued me for the rest of the year. The rest of the year lasted all of two weeks until summer vacation, when I never heard from him again.

And if you want the honest truth, the only reason I think he asked me was because that last month of seventh grade, I was the momentary It girl, the Paris Hilton of J.H.S. 141, for having the last big blow-out bat mitzvah of the season. My social standing slipped back to neutral by the fall and hasn’t recovered since.

Sometimes, I wonder: is it possible to peak at thirteen?

Just then, my mother strides over to make sure no fun is being unhad. “So, what do you think?” she asks my aunt, nudging for a compliment.

But my aunt will not be thrown off course.

“I’m trying to find a nice boy for Rachel to dance with,” she says, as if I weren’t sitting right there.

I begin to tell them that there’s no one even remotely interesting to dance with, when my mother brightly chimes in, “Oh, well, what about Howard?”

I’d been praying she’d forgotten about Howard. I’ve been trying to forget him my whole life, without much luck.

Howard Goldstein’s been hanging around since forever. Literally. His family moved in next door to us before I was even born, and our parents still go gaga over this picture of us holding hands in the sandbox, when I was three and he was four.  Naturally, they’d love to see us hit it, “…Baby One More Time.” My parents are sure it could happen, given enough not-so-subtle nudging. 

But he’s soooo not my type. He’s got kinky brown hair, thin wire-rimmed glasses, and a total obsession with Yu-Gi-Oh! graphic novels. Plus, he always has a perpetual put-down when he sees me. 

We haven’t really been on good terms since I picked him to be my square dancing partner in fourth grade, and he threw up all over me during the dosie-do. His mother tried to blame it on the stomach flu, but I knew he did it on purpose.

Even worse was in sixth grade at his bar mitzvah when I heard him and his friends sniggering at my flat chest while I was doing the limbo. Things between us have never been the same.

I guess you could say that, today, we have a relationship based on mutual disrespect. Dancing with him would be unimaginably, incestuously gross––like having to French kiss my little brother, Ben.

Now my mom begins scanning the crowd for good ol’ Howard. Any second now, she’ll march up to the band and have him paged over the loudspeaker. Howard Goldstein, please report to the dance floor.

“Mom, really,” I say, nervously chewing my thumbnail. “It’s okay. I don’t want to dance with Howard.”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, pulling my fingernail away from my lips with one practiced swipe. “I know he’s dying to dance with you. I’ll go find him.”

She stalks off into the crowd as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said. As usual.

Hoping Howard has gone AWOL, I return to picking at my limp lettuce. A busboy circles our table, refilling our water glasses.

“More water?” a voice asks from above.

When I look up, a blond Adonis is standing before me. I try not to choke on my radicchio.

I nod and sneak another peek as he fills my glass. He looks about sixteen, his sun-streaked hair flapping over his soulful eyes, the bluest I’ve ever seen.  His lips are plump and hint at light-years of experience beyond my own virgin lips.

A most bussable busboy.

He is simply an angel, dropped down from the heavens above––if we believed in cherubs and the Pearly Gates and all that heavenly bliss stuff. Which, in my religion, we don’t. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll have to reconsider.

He catches me staring, and gives me a little smile. Or am I imagining that?

In the background, I can vaguely hear my aunt lamenting Ira’s latest travails in online dating at J-Date, a Web site for lonely-heart Jewish singles. But by the time I can steal another glance, he has moved on to the next table.

Why, I fume, can’t a guy like that show up as a guest, instead of Howard? The son of one of my parent’s friends, maybe, or a long, lost cousin, several times removed enough to be incest-free?

I toy with the fantasy of pulling him out onto the dance floor, certain of the instant whispering that would erupt among the gossip-starved yentas. Oy gevalt! Sylvia and Herb’s daughter is dancing with the hired help!

The band launches into the festive Jewish tune, “Hava Nagila.” The bandleader clears his throat and leans into the microphone. “Can I get everyone up on their feet?”

“Oooohhhh,” squeals my aunt. “Come on bubbulah, you don’t need a partner for this.” She grabs my wrist and practically pulls me out of my chair toward the dance floor.

I groan at her choice of words. Did the bussable busboy hear them? Perfect. Now he was going to think I was sitting there alone because I couldn’t get anyone to dance with me. My aunt clasps my hand firmly, and we are sucked into the vortex of the beast.

I hate to admit it––and if anyone ever mentioned it I’d deny it to my grave––but I actually don’t mind dancing the hora. It’s like a combination of ring-around-the-rosy and a country-western hoedown. Only geekier. You link hands and form a chain, and circle around until you’re dizzy. Every so often, you rush forward, giving the guest of honor in the center a giant group grope. To an outsider, it probably looks like some weird African tribal ritual. But it always gives me the warm fuzzies.

I try to sneak a peak at where the busboy has gone to, but the music is whipping everyone into a frenzy, and I keep getting yanked around too quickly.

Now I am in the center, spinning around with my mom and dad, as my brother Ben gets his turn to be lifted in the air, followed briefly by each of us.

That’s my favorite part of all time -- getting lifted in a chair while everyone dances around below. You know how when A-Rod makes a game-winning home run and all the Yankees sweep him onto their shoulders and carry him around the entire stadium? It’s just like that except–– as my dad says––as Jews, we figure, why should we be uncomfortable? So we use a chair. Of course, when it’s my turn, I have to rely on my scrawny cousins Ira and Zachary instead of studs like Johnny Damon and Derek Jeter to do the heavy lifting, so I nearly slide right off the seat and onto the floor. But still, I figure, given my athletic ineptitude, it’s the closest to a We-Are-The-Champions experience I’ll ever get.

Flushed, I catch my breath as the song ends and the band launches into a painful rendition of Usher’s latest ballad. Thank God no one from Riverdale High is here to witness this musical travesty. I had campaigned heavily for Degenerate Pumpkinheads, this amazing local rock band whose members graduated from my high school a few years ago. But what do you expect when your ‘rents have final say on the choice of tunes? Elevator Muzak Live!, that’s what.

Suddenly, I notice Howard across the room, lumbering toward me with that unmistakable glint of interest reflecting off his thin-lens glasses. My mother’s mission must have been a success. Oh no. Get me out of here.

I step backwards, inching against the wall. Without warning, it gives way to a swinging door, and I practically stumble on top of someone lurking on the other side.

It’s my blue-eyed, bussable busboy.