Bone Dance by Martha Brooks

and hoops. He danced like a gorgeous bird. Alex’s palms began to sweat.
    He came up to them later, flashing a bone white smile at Serena. Alex couldn’t breathe, her heart was pounding so. He won’t notice me, she thought at that very moment. He’ll only notice Serena because she’s so beautiful. Serena always has boyfriends. She doesn’t give a damn if she’s tall and big and powerful. She just looks them in the eye, and they fall like bricks.
    â€œYou have to act more confident,” Serena had told her back in the ninth grade. “When you’re made the way we are, it’s the only way you’re ever going to bepopular.” This remark was coming from the same person who had pretended to paint them both with invisible paint when they were five, so they wouldn’t be noticed on their first day of school.
    Well, Serena can have him, she then thought, looking at a point past Peter’s ear so she wouldn’t have to look directly at him again. He’s too good-looking anyway. He’s probably just a big snob.
    But, as it turned out, he wasn’t. And for the past six months they had been a constant threesome.
    It wasn’t that Alex never had sort-of boyfriends. You hung out. They kissed you, stuck their tongues in your mouth, grabbed you, played stupid mind games, power games, wanted you to come home with them when their parents weren’t there. It was all very boring. And they knew Alex was bored, and it scared them. She wasn’t small, and she didn’t want to stand around under somebody’s arm and be popular. Maybe there was something wrong with her. They never moved her. Nobody moved her until Peter. She would write his name in the pattern of a heart and draw an arrow through it. She would think about him as she lay in bed at night, a slow fire creeping up between her legs, into her belly. She wanted him to touch her here. And here. And here. She could never let on to anybody, especially Serena, how he made her feel.
    Serena and Peter walked together in the halls at school, and Serena’s eyes were shiny with light, and Peter drew her close every time someone was looking.
    â€œYou don’t even like her,” Alex said to Peter aweek after this had been going on. Heavyhearted, as weighted as a mountain to the earth, she added, “You’re just playing a big pretend game.”
    â€œI like her,” said Peter, a big-eyed liar.
    â€œShe’s not your type.”
    He folded his arms across his chest, shook his hair out of his eyes, stared hard at her, angry, proud, eyes glittering. “Since when do you get to tell me who I can go out with?”
    Peter left notes for Serena on her locker.
Meet me later. Love you madly
. Then he wouldn’t show up. Andrea Larkin told Alex, “Peter says you and Serena had a terrible fight. Are you okay?”
    She took refuge in sleep. Snow drifted across the cabin floor. Grandpa and some other spirit sat right there. Right in the kitchen. In yellow chairs. Grandpa slightly smaller. The other tall and thin and old, like a large and baggy raven. White hair flowing over the collar of a too-big black overcoat. Both of them as still as stone, snow resting in delicate drifts on their shoulders.
    In the waking world, Mom looked haggard and ashen. She was always upstairs in her office. She made tense phone calls. Tripped over boxes of waiting tax files. Dashed out to meet with clients. Drank too much coffee.
    One late afternoon, the sunset slanting through the window onto her computer, she sat, face practically absorbed by the screen, and Alex reached out one hand to unknot the tension at the back of her neck.
    â€œGod, that feels good,” said Mom, dropping her head. “You’ve got healing hands, kid.”
    Then, lifting her head, she pulled Alex down in the chair beside her, with a soft “C’mere.” Arms came around her, holding her in place in a firm hug. “I want to