Then Manda swung her imaginary lasso and yeehawed away from us.
Sara appeared untroubled by the fact that not a single Pineville Junior High student knew how to square-dance. As second-in-command, I felt duty bound to discuss the pitfalls of our situation.
“Manda has a valid point,” I said to Sara. “No one will come to a square dance if they don’t know how to square-dance.”
Sara removed a book from her backpack and held it up for me to see. Who knew our library had a copy of Square Dancing for Dummies?
“Oh, they’ll learn how to square-dance.”
As Sara already knew—and we would discover for ourselves in sixth period—that’s what gym class was for. And our gym teacher, Mr. Wall, was not happy about it.
Chapter Thirteen
I am not a big fan of Mr. Wall.
The first reason isn’t really his fault: I hate gym class no matter who teaches it. One kickball to the face in first grade was all it took for me to develop skepticism for all sports. (Upside to the trauma: A wiggly-but-stubborn tooth popped out on impact, and I got a fiver from the tooth fairy.) It hasn’t gotten much better as I’ve gotten older. As I’ve explained, with the exception of running, I’m not the most coordinated person. I feel like I’m put together wrong and weird like one of Hope’s Frankenplushies: all rubbery octopus arms and wobbly baby-giraffe legs with the head of a blind mole rat. Even the least dangerous activities like yoga or Ping-Pong become life-and-death situations.
Plus, it’s a hassle changing out of my regular clothes and into my regulation PJHS gym apparel. And the gymnasium is always hot and humid, like the planet’s sweatiest, stankiest rain forest. Worst of all, jocks like Scotty take gym class more seriously than all their other classes combined. They get all hyped up and gladiatorial and RRRRAWR!!! and it’s really, really unpleasant for the rest of us who are just trying to get through the next thirty minutes without becoming collateral damage in their BLOODY KICKBALL BATTLE TO THE DEATH.
But I suspect their over-the-top intensity has a lot to do with Mr. Wall’s teaching style. Teaching isn’t the right word. It’s more like bullying. As coach of the Pineville Junior High football team, he treats each gym-class activity as if it is the Super Bowl. And I mean every activity, including yoga and Ping-Pong. And, evidently, square dancing.
“PARTNER UP, YOU LAZYBONES!”
He reminded me of my sister yelling at the dance team. Up to that moment, I’d never noticed the similarities between Mr. Wall’s and Bethany’s insult-ridden motivational tactics.
“WHADDYA GOT, WAX IN YOUR EARS?”
Now that football season is over, he’s the coach of the wrestling team. Which brings me to the second reason I don’t like Mr. Wall: He totally tried to stop my friend Molly from going out for the team. He was all like, Oh, she’s just a little girl. She’ll get slaughtered, and her parents will sue the school, and blah blah blah. He obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with. Molly’s tiny but tough. And she’s a girl of few words, but when she speaks up, she makes them count. So she was like, Title IX, Mr. Wall. Supreme Court says I have the legal right to try out. And she did. And guess what? She totally pinned the little dude in her weight class, and it was a victory for girls everywhere, and hooray feminism!
“I SAID PARTNER UP, YOU.”
There are about thirty of us in this gym class. It’s mostly students from the Gifted & Talented classes, with a few randoms thrown in just to make things interesting. Partnering up is kind of standard. Like, one person does the sit-ups, and the other person holds her feet and counts. Or one gets her wobbly baby-giraffe legs pretzeled up in lotus pose, and the other gets her unstuck. Or one hits a Ping-Pong ball, and the other swings and misses with all eight of her rubbery octopus arms and takes it right in the blind eye.
You know. FOR EXAMPLE.
Usually I’m with Hope, but sometimes we’ll end up splitting Sara and Manda if they’re in a fight and refuse to partner with each other. With all of Manda’s giddyapping about the Down-Home Harvest Dance, it looked like today was one of those days. I acknowledged the situation with a simple nod to Hope. She returned the nod and sidled up to Manda as I approached Sara.
“Looks like it’s you and me,” I said as the rest of the class shifted around to stand next to their usual gym partners.
“Not so fast,” Sara said.
Mr. Wall was shaking his head in misery.
“Not THOSE types of partners,” he shouted. “PARTNERS partners!”
This still wasn’t making any sense to anyone but Sara.
“Boys with girls! Girls with boys!”
Because we weren’t getting the point, Mr. Wall grabbed the nearest boy by the back of his PJHS gym shirt and shoved him in the direction of the nearest girl.
“For square dancing!”
Sara smiled. But the rest of us didn’t move a muscle.
“Get moving! You’ve got thirty seconds to pick your partners, or I’ll pick them for you.” He clicked the stopwatch he always wears around his neck. “GO.”
The next thirty seconds were as harrowing as any I’ve ever experienced. And this is coming from someone who was once chased by a giant goose who wanted to make me his girlfriend. But that lovesick bird was nowhere near as terrifying as the person who came after me in the gym.
“You and me,” Scotty said, grabbing my hand.
I yanked it back and slapped him on the wrist.
“No way!”
“You’ve got to partner up with someone; it might as well be me,” he said. “And Dori isn’t in this gym class, so…”
And then he winked.
ACK. HE WINKED. WHAT’S WITH SCOTTY AND ALL THE WINKING?
All around me, couples were coming together: Mouth isn’t in our gym class, so Manda put aside her negative attitude about square dancing long enough to make a beeline for Scotty’s cute friend Vinnie. Sara targeted a quiet kid named Sam who wouldn’t even try to interrupt her endless chatter. Hope pointed at Mike, the tallest boy on the basketball team, who responded with a comic “Who, me?” pantomime, as if their pairing hadn’t been inevitable all along.
My options were running low with every second that ticked by. Pretty soon, it would be down to Scotty and this kid John-John, who always has a runny nose and always wipes it on the back of his hand. What would be worse? Being on the receiving end of Scotty’s winks or John-John’s snot? So help me, I went with the winks. But not without a stern warning.
“Don’t get any ideas,” I said.
“I never have any ideas,” Scotty replied.
I used to think that was true. That Scotty was one hundred percent pure jock and nothing else was going on in his head besides, like, fart jokes and RAWR!!! But I was discovering that Scotty has lots of ideas in his head. Many about me. AND I DON’T LIKE THOSE IDEAS ONE BIT.
“You’ve got ten seconds to find three other couples and make a square.” Mr. Wall pressed the stopwatch and blew the whistle. “GO.”
I assumed this would be easier. The obvious square was me and Scotty, Hope and Mike, Sara and Sam, Manda and Vinnie. But Sara was having no part of any square that included Manda as one of its sides.
“Omigod! No!” she said. “You don’t want this dance to happen! You will not sabotage my square!”
“Oh, puh-leeze. Like I even care enough to sabotage your square.”
“You do and you will,” Sara shot back. “And I won’t let that happen!”
“FIVE SECONDS,” warned Mr. Wall.
“Scouts!” Sara shouted at a pair nearby. “You’re with us!”
Everyone calls them the Scouts. I don’t even know their real names. He’s a Boy Scout and she’s a Girl Scout; they wear their full uniforms to school sometimes. This is something nobody—and I mean NOBODY—else does, which is ironic because wearing uniforms is usually, like, a sign of conformity. (I just imagined Hope saying, “You can’t spell conformity without uniform!” This isn’t accurate, but you get the idea, right?) I’ve often wondered if
the Scouts genuinely like each other or if they felt obligated to start a junior-high romance based solely on their matching uniforms. Either way, the Scouts joined our square without hesitation, because they’re used to following orders.
Manda was livid.
“Fine!” she shouted. “I’ll put my own square together!”
“No time for that,” Mr. Wall said. Then he steered her by the shoulders over to a triangle that needed a fourth pair to complete their square. Vinnie followed. I don’t like playing into Pineville Junior High’s popularity stereotypes, but there’s no question in my mind that Manda categorized those three couples as the nottiest of Nots.
“Oh no! We’re not going alone!” Manda dug in her heels. “Hope’s coming with us!”
Mr. Wall blew the whistle. Time was up. Hope looked at Manda and held up her hands in a way that was supposed to look like “sorry” but came closer to “whew.” She stayed put.
“The squares stand,” Mr. Wall pronounced, as if there were any question in the matter.
“Heeeeeey, everyone!” Sara called across the gym triumphantly, loud enough for the entire class to hear. “How can a square also be a circle?”
It was unlike Sara to pose a mathematical riddle. But it would be even more unlike me not to answer.
“It can’t,” I replied automatically. “In fact, the phrase squaring the circle is a metaphor for an impossible problem. It goes back to the ancient Greeks—”
“Gee, thanks, Einstein,” Sara said, cutting me off. “A square is a circle when—”
“Euclid,” I corrected. “As in Euclidian geometry.”
I honestly don’t even know how I know these things sometimes. I just do. I read a lot, I guess. And my dad is also a big nerd. THANKS, GENETICS!
“Omigod! Nerd alert! You’re killing the joke!”
Then Sara raised her hand in the air to deliver the punch line: She “zeroed” Manda’s square.
There’s no way everyone in the gym knew what it meant. And yet EVERYONE IN THE GYM KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANT.
If you know what I mean.
Manda’s response was furious and swift. She fought back with a defiant hand—or rather, finger—gesture of her own. One that definitely did not comply with the vulgarity rule.
“OMIGOD. MR. WALL, DID YOU SEE THAT?”
Of course Mr. Wall saw it. We all saw it. To make sure no one missed it, Manda did a full 360-degree rotation. Yes, a perfect circle within the square.
Chapter Fourteen
Manda spent the rest of the class in the principal’s office. Her absence loomed large over the gymnasium. Everyone was too busy buzzing about her obscene gesture to concentrate on the square-dance lesson our gym teacher didn’t care if we learned anyway. He was still shouting at us, but without his usual enthusiasm.
“Square up, slackers! Boys to the left, girls on the right!”
Simple enough. Scotty was already standing to my left. I quickly looked away before he could wink at me in congratulations of our superior square-formation skills. You think I’m joking. I’M NOT. This simple direction was apparently far too complicated for the rest of the class to handle because I swear about a bazillion years went by before every person in every square was standing in his or her proper spot.
Mr. Wall slumped on the sidelines, put his head in his hands, and moaned.
“This is not why I got a degree in exercise physiology.”
“She’s sabotaging the dance, and she isn’t even here!” Sara fumed.
It was true. With the flip of a finger, Manda had turned our do-si-dos into do-si-HECK-NOS. No doubt this is exactly what she’d had in mind. Sensing a crisis in the making, Sara took over.
“Listen up, numskulls,” Sara yelled. “You’re gonna learn how to promenade your partner OR ELSE.”
This was her own special interpretation of the rough-and-tough teaching technique favored by Mr. Wall and my sister. With Square Dancing for Dummies as her guide, Sara spent the rest of the time bossing us around while our gym teacher barely looked up from his issue of Sports Illustrated.
“Bow to your partner!”
Sara faced Sam and bowed. I faced Scotty and bowed. Everyone faced everyone and bowed.
“Bow to your corner!”
Sara turned right. All the girls turned right. Sam also turned right. All the boys turned right. This was WRONG.
“No, you dipsticks! Boys turn left! Boys’ corner is on the left!”
And then she forcibly grabbed and spun poor Sam so he faced left. All the girls forcibly grabbed and spun their poor partners so they faced left. Except me. Because Scotty looked all too eager to be grabbed by me.
“I think you can handle that move on your own, buddy.”
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the square, Hope cautiously tried to get Sara’s attention.
“Excuse me, Sara?” she asked politely. “I’m thinking that maybe it might be easier to learn the moves if we had some music.…”
Sara went off like a firecracker.
“Music? You two-left-footed nincompoops can’t handle music! I’ll tell you when you’re ready for music!” She pumped her copy of Square Dancing for Dummies into the air above her head. “Until then, the only music you clumsy nitwits need is the SWEET SOUND OF MY VOICE.”
At full volume, Sara can make the ceiling quake. Mr. Wall looked up briefly from his magazine, yawned, then went back to it.
“Where was I?” Sara scrunched her curls, smoothed out her shorts, and composed herself. “Oh yes! Swing your partners. Like this!”
Then Sara manipulated Sam like a mannequin into the proper arm-in-arm position and swung him around. So all the girls took the boys by the arms and swung them around.
The Scouts were naturals. Hope and Mike were a perfect match, too, but comically out of proportion with all other sides of the square. They practically bent themselves in half whenever a call required them to trade partners with any of the rest of us, a move Hope quickly dubbed the “Hunchback at the Hoedown.”
As for me and Scotty…
“OW!”
We bonked heads during the bow to your partner.
“Sorry!”
“OWW!”
I jammed an elbow into his rib during the allemande left.
“Sorry!”
“OWWW!”
I knuckled him in the chest during the right and left grand.
“Sorry!”
I was sorry, too. Mostly. I mean, I wasn’t hurting him on purpose. I really was the clumsiest nitwit in a gym full of clumsy nitwits. And yet I couldn’t help but think that maybe all this negative reinforcement might get him to see that I’m not the girl for him after all. If I caused him enough physical pain, maybe he’d come to associate me with emotional pain. If I’m crushable, it’s because I’m the crusher not the crushee.
“OWWWW!”
Um, literally.
“If this keeps up,” he said, rubbing his neck where I’d clipped him during a swing-around-and-round, “I’ll need my helmet and shoulder pads!”
I listened for a hint of annoyance in his voice, any sign that he was getting sick of me and wanted to trade me in for a less dangerous partner. But Scotty didn’t sound the least bit irritated. And when he laughed out loud, he was showing me—and everyone else in the gym—just what a good sport and a great guy he really was.
Ugh.
At the time, I thought that was the most annoying thing he could possibly do. But then he got even more annoying during lunch. I was hiding a few spots behind him and Dori on the cafeteria line, but I was just close enough to watch him show off all his square-dance injuries for his girlfriend.
“If I didn’t know any better,” he joked, “I’d think Jessica was trying to kill me.”
Dori’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“Jesssssica?” She really hissed those s’s. “Jessica was your partner?”
I opened my milk, popped in a straw, and took a sip. I thought this made me look more casual and less like I w
as hanging on to every word.
“Yeah,” Scotty replied, as unconcerned as could possibly be.
Dori glared. Crossed her arms. Tapped her foot. Waited. I’m totally clueless about crushability and boy/girl business, but even I could see what Dori wanted out of Scotty at that moment. I wanted to shout at him.
ASK HER.
“Tater Tots today?” Scotty asked. “Or fries?”
NOOOO! ASK HER WHO HER PARTNER WAS. DORI HAD GYM THIS MORNING, TOO. SHE WANTS YOU TO BE AS JEALOUS AS SHE IS.
“Don’t you want to know who my partner was? Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
Scotty paused, looking pensive.
“I can’t decide.”
“You can’t decide… what?”
After a second’s hesitation, Scotty put Tater Tots and fries on his tray. He grinned at his good decision, turned to Dori, and finally spoke.
“Um. What were you saying?”
Dori slammed her plastic tray on the metal counter.
“My partner was Marcus Flutie!”
Wait. What? Whoa. Seriously? Of all the boys in the entire school? It had to be Marcus Flutie aka Woodshop Aleck? WHAT THE HECK?
“And he’s a much better dancer than you are!”
As Dori stomped away, it was clear to me that her announcement had succeeded in triggering maybe, just maybe, the teeny-tiniest twinge of jealousy.
Just not in the intended target.
“Huh,” Scotty said, watching her go. Then he wordlessly pumped ketchup onto his tray full of fried potato products.
Meanwhile, my hands were shaking. The open carton rattled on my tray, spilling milk over the edge and splashing into a puddle at my feet.
What a mess, I thought.
Fortunately, I had a few minutes left in the lunch period to get myself together before Woodshop. The Top Secret Pineville Junior High Crushability Quiz had tricked me into confessing a secret crush on my demented Woodshop partner. But merely saying something doesn’t make it true. Duh. Look, I’ll prove it right now: My boobs are bigger than Manda’s.
Let’s check.
Nope. Still flat as a board.
So despite the truth about my nonexistent crush on Aleck, I still couldn’t explain why I had a physical reaction to Dori’s news. That is, until I heard Manda’s explanation for what happened in the gym.