The music stopped and I paused. I could hear elevated voices but was unable to make out anything said. Then the music resumed, accompanied by roaring laughter. More intrigued, I took a few steps again and saw where a homeless person had set up camp. I should turn back, but the ramshackle campsite was empty so I kept going.
When I reached the back corner of the four-story, brick building, I hesitated. The sun had dipped below the adjacent structure, leaving the alley in a gray haze and giving it a creepy vibe. My heart sped up as I replayed all the horror stories Mom had drilled into me. Though we tell everyone we’re from El Paso, the truth is we lived in a small suburb outside the city. So Mom filled my head with tales about the dangers of living downtown in a city the size of Houston—muggings, assaults, drug deals, she’d warned me repeatedly, and now those cautionary tales were hammering through me with every beat in the music spilling from behind the building.
Pressing my back against the bricks, I felt the heavy thump of the bass in my chest. The music issued out, echoing around me, like a rhythmic call to battle. I stood there long enough for one song to end and another to begin. Then, clutching my bag to my side, I peeked around the bend and was surprised to see a group of about a dozen people gathered in a loose circle. A mixture of ethnicities, some shuffled and shimmied, while others bounced and popped to the music’s time.
When their formation shifted, I could see into the ring of figures. A young African-American man danced there, arms snaking in and out and legs nimbly swirling. After several steps, he twitched his head toward someone in the surrounding group, and a woman laughed uproariously before jumping into the center as he sauntered out. She jiggled and jolted to the music in a way that was captivating. It was as if the music emanated from the dancer, rather than the big boom box sitting on the trunk of a car.
Their laughter was exhilarating, and I could see that taunting and bragging was a part of the performance. Completely engrossed, I became careless and before I knew it, I’d drifted from the safety of the building’s shadow to stand in the open. Then someone spoke, and I knew I’d made a horrible mistake.
Chapter Five
“Hey, check it!” The young man who’d been in the center of the circle had spotted me. “Looks like the dancer’s lost her way.”
The circle opened up then, as the group turned to see me.
“What’s the matter ballerina, can’t find your tutu?” he jibed.
My heart raced, leaving behind the rhythm of the music to create its own, and I froze there as the guy approached me.
“So what is it, ballerina, you lost?”
How’d he know I was a ballerina? Then it dawned on me—the warm-ups, my hair bun, and the leotard beneath my shrug. And if that weren’t enough, the slippers swinging from the strap of my dance bag clenched it.
He came closer then, dressed in an oversized red-and-black-striped polo and a pair of well-worn Nikes. His braids swished like a living creature as he cocked his head to study me, and suddenly, I was embarrassed by my pink, zebra-striped dance bag. It looked juvenile—it made me look juvenile.
“C’mon, Dionte, you’re scarin’ the girl.” I looked past the man to the woman who’d been in the center of the dance-off. She’d come up behind him. Breathing hard, she wiped sweat from her brow and said, “Don’t mind Dionte, he’s all bark.”
When I looked at him again, he did just that—barked. He and the others who’d gathered around me laughed when I jumped.
“Hey, it’s cool,” he teased. “I was only messin’ with you. You can dance—if you think you can hang.” Then he took a step back and snapped his shoulders a few times, making them appear liquid as they undulated beneath his shirt. Before I could blink, he executed a back flip that sent the others into a round of cheers.
“I’m Magdalena,” the woman said, ignoring Dionte’s display and offering me her hand.
Timidly, I took it and gave it a gentle shake. “I was—I heard your music.” I pointed stupidly to the boom box on the car.
“We were having a little fun. Wanna join us?” Smiling genuinely, she flicked a thumb over her shoulder, pointing to her friends. She was pretty, with creamy tan skin and chocolate curly-Qs that framed her face. Wearing skinny jeans, a multi-colored tunic, and gold bracelets that jangled at her wrist, she exuded confidence.
There was no moisture in my mouth, but I managed to say, “No, I can’t. I have to go.”
Retreating a few feet, my back connected with something solid. I spun around and came face to face with a grinning old man. He was toothless and when he spoke, he reeked of alcohol.
“I’ll dance with you, darlin’,” he slurred.
I shrieked and stumbled a few feet. When the group of dancers laughed at me again, I bolted down the alley and didn’t slow my pace until I’d reached the thoroughfare. I stopped long enough to snatch a glance backward. The old man was hobbling toward the makeshift camp, hesitating long enough to do a little jig to the music, and the dancers were returning to their concrete dance studio. My heart pounded and I was breathless. I couldn’t imagine what kind of an I-told-you-so Mom would have given me had I been mugged. It hadn’t been all bad, though. Something about the encounter excited me. This trumped Van’s ghost hunting by a mile.
My pulse had slowed to its normal rate by the time I reached our apartment building. Inside the elevator, I smiled at my own childish behavior. They must have thought me an idiot, running down the alley like I had.
To avoid the elevator music, I pulled my iPod from my bag again and thumbed through the playlist. The doors started to slide into place when suddenly an arm jabbed through the narrow opening and forced them apart once more. A man in a business suit stepped inside, followed by a blond-haired guy I recognized from a few months back when I’d seen him by the rooftop pool. We made eye contact as he reached for the button panel, and I averted my gaze, at once aware how small the elevator was.
When he’d pushed the button for his floor, he waved a hand in the air to get my attention. Then he pointed to the panel. I’d forgotten to choose my floor. Embarrassed, heat crept up my neck and I raised my hand, all five fingers spread apart. He smiled and pushed the fifth-floor button, and my stomach fluttered as I bit my lip to keep from smiling back at him.
In a few swaggering strides, the guy was across the elevator and leaning lazily against the handrail, stacking his suede chukkas one atop the other. After arranging his plaid over-shirt so that it hung loosely away from his tee, he clipped his thumbs casually into his jeans pockets.
For the second time in less than thirty minutes, I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. I seriously wished I’d changed into street clothes before leaving the studio. Fighting the desire to adjust the waistband of my sweats, I pretended to have great interest in my iPod. If only I’d taken my hair down, rather than leave it in the somber bun I wore for school every day.
The doors closed and the elevator lifted, gently gliding skyward, and I glanced at the boy. He was cute, really cute, and my stomach fluttered again when he caught me looking at him.
When we stopped at the third floor, the door opened and the man exited. Slowly, the younger one dragged himself from the handrail, taking a wide step that brought him close to me. A full head taller than me, he paused long enough to nod slightly as if telling me goodbye. I sucked in a ragged breath, pulling in the smell of cologne that no doubt had the word noir in its name. He was so close I could have touched the cleft in his chin, and my fingers itched to. I’d never seen such an impressive dimple. And his silver-blue eyes were out of this world. Images of a lone werewolf popped into my mind. I’d definitely read too many of the paranormal romances passed around the Academy.
At last, he stepped off the elevator, but I didn’t breathe again until the doors closed and the elevator resumed its upward trek. I had no idea who he was. I’d only seen him the one time last summer by the pool.
We hadn’t been in Houston long and Dad had left for Norway only two weeks earlier, leaving Mom and
me alone in a still unfamiliar city. The only people I’d met were my fellow dance-mates, so I was lonely and missing my friends back home. Lounging on the rooftop that day, I felt truly dismal. Then he showed up. I desperately wanted to go over and introduce myself. I spent probably an hour staring at a tattoo on his back, a snake with its mouth open and fangs bared. But I never worked up the courage. Plus, I doubted he even noticed me because he was with a couple of guys and a tall, leggy brunette whose two-piece would have kept him from noticing an elephant on the rooftop.
It was just as well. My demanding schedule didn’t allow much time for a personal life, and Mom would have frowned on me getting involved with anyone at this stage in my training. I was on the verge of making ballet my career. It was what we’d always wanted, and I knew she’d stop at nothing to get me there.
Chapter Six
I had homework to do, so after grabbing a banana and a bottle of water I sat down at my desk and booted up my laptop. Like most of my classmates, I took online high school correspondence courses. Full days at the studio left no time for regular school attendance. It sucked the life out of social life, but it was what I’d chosen.
Opening the English composition I’d been working on, I struggled to focus. The dancers in the alley kept popping into my head. Part of me wanted to go back there. I wanted to watch them dance, to pick apart their technique and learn how to turn my bones to quicksilver like that fellow Dionte had. His intense, fast-paced animation was so very different from the controlled, disciplined moves to which I was accustomed.
Again, I tried to wrap my mind around the comp paper, but the cute guy in the elevator replaced the dancers in my thoughts, and I really had no interest in school work then. Did he live in the building? If he did, surely I would have seen more of him by now. And short of going to the concierge downstairs and asking if they knew the tall, golden-haired hotty making an occasional appearance around the place, I didn’t know how to find out who he was.
Eventually, after staring at the blank document on my laptop screen until my sight blurred, I managed to wrangle my thoughts together and worked on the composition until I was interrupted by a text from Jenna.
Bring your helmet and shoulder pads tomorrow!
I’d completely forgotten about Ms. Zaborov’s arrangement. I was about to respond to the text when the video chat rang. It was Marisol, so I answered it instead.
“Hola, chica, what’s happening in the great city of El Pa…” I sputtered to a halt when I got a good look at her face. I pulled the laptop’s screen closer. “Whoa, what happened to you?”
The girl on the monitor smiled and I could see it pained her when she flinched and her hand flew to her swollen jaw and busted lip.
“You should see the other girl,” she said, obviously trying to make light.
“Marisol, please tell me you didn’t get into it with Guadalupe.”
She avoided the monitor for a moment. When she looked back, her face was wreathed in remorse. “I only meant to warn her.”
“Oh, Mar, you didn’t.”
“She’s the one who threw the first punch. She said I called her a skank.”
“Did you?”
“I didn’t call her a skank. I told her to keep her skanky hands off Carlos. It’s not my fault she read more into it.”
Marisol Mendoza, for all her wisecracking, tough-girl exterior, was the sweetest person I knew, and the one I most regretted leaving behind when we’d moved. She does have a short fuse when it comes to Carlos Vega, though. Unlike Jenna and her fascination with ambiguity, Marisol was an open book.
“What’d your parents say?” I asked.
Marisol grimaced and shrugged. “I haven’t told them yet. Mom was asleep when I got home, and Dad hasn’t come in from work.” Trying to appear nonplused, she put on a good front and added, “I got three days suspension.”
But I knew Marisol was worried. Her mother tended to sleep a lot —which was code for she was loaded again—and it made her dad overly protective of Marisol and her sister Inez.
“He’s gonna go nuts, you know that, right? You’ll be grounded so long you’ll forget what it’s like to see anything outside the four walls of your bedroom.”
“Yeah, but Carlos is his fishing buddy. I doubt he’d stop him from coming over. So that’s something.” She picked up an ice pack and gingerly pressed it to her cheek. “But I called you to get my mind off this crap, so what’s going on in H-town?”
In order to tell her about the football players, I had to start from the beginning with the ghost hunt in the theater and Ms. Z.’s retribution. I was about to share my encounter with the group of dancers in the alley when I heard Marisol’s father calling her name from somewhere in her house.
“Uh-oh, Dad’s home.” She sat up straight and slapped the ice pack down on the desk. “Time to face the music.”
“Keep your head low,” I advised. “Do your chores without being told, bake his favorite chocolate cake, and you’ll be back in his good graces in no time.” She nodded, but I could see I’d lost her as she girded herself for the conversation with her father. “Message me later,” I added. “And try to stay out of trouble.”
Setting my status to Offline after we’d hung up, I finished the comp paper. It was late by the time I typed the last sentence, and Mom still wasn’t home with dinner, so I strolled down the hall toward the studio, passing Dad’s theater room on the way there.
The home theater had been a deal he’d struck with Mom to get what we wanted in the new apartment. He’d agreed to let her decorate the entire place how she liked if we could turn the third bedroom into a dance studio for me and let him have the den for his big-screen TV. It hadn’t been that great a sacrifice on Mom’s part. She was on board with me having the practice studio, and she was more than happy to have the television out of the living room.
We’d been so excited then, eager to move to Houston and the new place. Having never lived in anything like it before, a high-rise apartment building, it was a new adventure. Back in El Paso, we’d lived in a simple wood, gable-front house where there was a yard to be mowed, trash to put on the curb, barking dogs in the neighborhood. Apartment living was novel and we’d been enthusiastic about the change. But something had gone wrong. We’d grown so far apart. I resisted blaming myself, but the truth was if we’d never moved—if I’d stayed in dance classes there—maybe Dad would still be with us.
At my studio door, I paused, kissed my fingertips, and pressed them to the laminated surface of a vintage New York City Ballet poster. It was a sort of good luck ritual. One wall of the studio had floor-to-ceiling mirrors, while the others were lined with various sized posters of Manhattan, Time Square, and panoramics of Lincoln Center. My oasis. And I never entered without a kiss for luck.
Moving to the heart of the room, I locked eyes on the Time Square poster, did a relevé onto the balls of my feet, and performed a series of chaînés, quick turns along an imaginary line on the floor. With sweat pants on it was impossible to see my form, so I gave it up and went to rifle through CDs for something to listen to. But rather than choose one of them, I turned on the satellite radio and scanned the channels until I found one playing hip-hop.
Every beat brought back the dancers’ high energy and free-style movements. How does a person teach that, let alone learn it. The baggy clothes obscured a dancer’s frame. How would you know if you screwed up wearing clothes like that? In ballet, you always knew. The instructor might never say so, but you knew. It was in the narrow slant of their eyes, lips pressed together dismally, or the impatient bellowing of again! You always knew.
Losing myself in the music, I faced the great mirror and began snapping my fingers to the throbbing bass. Then I added shoulder rolling, mimicking Magdalena’s gestures. I overrode the voice in my head that chided, “You look like a poser-white-girl,” and popped my upper body. It felt awkward and gawky, so I cranked up the music hoping the vibration would help. Technique was usually my strong suit. I sim
ply needed to find the right approach. I jerked and moved, but my undulating looked more like a worm squirming on hot pavement than hip-hop dancing.
“What are you doing?” someone yelled.
Startled, I spun around to see Mom in the doorway, her arms folded tightly across her chest.
“What is going on here?” she shouted.
Chapter Seven
Winded, I placed my hand on my stomach and wheezed, “I was messing around.”
She mouthed something I couldn’t make out, which annoyed her, so she stomped into the room and switched off the sound system.
“What are you doing?”
“I was street dancing.”
“Street dancing? Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought it would be fun.”
“You should be concentrating on your piece for the second company audition, rather than that foolishness. You don’t want to blow it again.”
She’d thrown a barb I elected to ignore, and said, “It’s not foolishness, Mother. It’s art.”
“Art?” she scoffed and turned to leave the room, obviously expecting me to follow. “Really, Christine, you can’t compare night club dancing to art. Ballet is art, dear.”
“Don’t be such a snob,” I replied as we entered the kitchen to unload bags of Chinese carry-out onto the counter.
“I’m not a snob. I believe there’s a place for that kind of dancing. It is called street dancing.”
“But don’t you think it takes as much ability and coordination as ballet?” I took paper plates from the cabinet and placed them before her. “Not to mention skill.”
“I suppose so. But it’s, well, it’s crass, honey. Uncouth. And I don’t like you doing it.”
With a tired sigh, she settled onto a stool at the breakfast bar, opened a Styrofoam container, and began spooning lo mein onto the plates. We’d been taking our meals this way since Dad left, no longer eating as a family in the dining room. It was the two of us now—paper plates and plastic cups.
“Speaking of crass and uncouth,” I said, sitting across from her and claiming a wonton. “We’re going to teach football players to dance.”