"Well, no, it's not bad, if you don't think it's bad," said Frank awkwardly. "But you had such responsibility from a young age, with your father... It's a shame you never had a high school prom or anything like that."
She probably didn't even know what a high school prom was. "It's... that's... just a school dance," he said by way of explanation. "Of course I didn't go to mine either, because I dropped out before my senior year. But I only had to go to work as a plumber's assistant, nothing like having to perform exorcisms."
And Judith had taken someone else to hers, because her parents were pretty upset about her dating a high school drop-out. It was funny that he still remembered being upset and jealous about that, though he had married Judith and now she'd been gone for thirty years.
But his life didn't compare to Alice's, and then she herself had passed away young, younger even than Judith. And yet here he was dancing with her.
He tried to push away these thoughts and smiled at Alice, hoping once again that he looked normal and not creepy, the word some of the tenants used to describe him when they thought he couldn't hear them.