Dancing on the Edge by Han Nolan Page A

butterflies flew overhead to greet me. Then they drifted down and settled about my shoulders and kept me warm and safe No words, no dirt balls, no teacher, no child—nobody could reach me there, except Dane. I talked to Dane in my special new place.
    I told him he was the first one to really see me dance, and he said my dance was beautiful. I told him about the dance recitals I could never be in because no one knew I took lessons. He said he understood, and the blanket of butterflies wrapped about me like a hug.
    I told him about the giant eraser that swept down the street behind me every afternoon erasing my lessons, and how the other kids in class laughed at me because I couldn’t remember the steps from one day to the next.
    Dane was very sorry, and the gnomes and fairies nodded their heads; they were sorry, too.
    â€œIt’s okay,” I told them, shrugging off the blanket of butterflies. “I stand in the back of the room and I become invisible, just like in school. Most of the time I’m invisible.”
    Dane said he knew all about being invisible, and I asked him when he was coming back. When would I see him again?
    â€œSoon,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.” And I heard my own voice saying aloud, “Soon. Soon.”

Chapter 6
    N O ONE EVER talked about Dane. Not Gigi. Not Grandaddy Opal. When I tried to bring him up, to remember something about him, Gigi would go into a trance and Grandaddy Opal would just say, “Hooey!” But whenever Gigi and Grandaddy Opal got together, they fought, and they fought about Dane. I knew it even though they never mentioned his name. Sometimes Gigi and Grandaddy Opal would head for the bathroom at the same time and they’d see each other coming and race to the bathroom door, both trying to get there first. Grandaddy Opal always won because he was skinny and springy while Gigi was heavy and didn’t like moving fast in the first place. It upset the karmic balance, she said. Grandaddy Opal would slam the door in her face and laugh a crazy man’s laugh, and Gigi would stand in the hallway, chanting one of her spells at him.
    They had other little wars, too. Gigi said Grandaddy Opal’s orange La-Z-Boy had to go because it was giving off a bad aura left over from when Grandaddy Opal sat in it. She and I dragged it out to the sidewalk, and she put a big FREE sign on it, and it was gone by the next morning. Grandaddy Opal had a fit and a half and retaliated by dumping all of Gigi’s fresh-bought macrobiotic food in the garbage. “I ain’t having all that yin-yang food in my house,” he said to her, the garbage truck rolling down the drive. “It gives off bad orals all over the durn place.”
    â€œIt’s aura,” Gigi said. “A-U-R-A.”
    â€œWell, the plural of aura is orals,” Grandaddy Opal shot back, embarrassed that Gigi caught him in a mistake.
    That’s the way it was. They tried to stay clear of each other, but when they couldn’t, it was war, and even though no one said Dane’s name, I knew somehow that’s what the fighting was all about, because every time they fought, Dane was there. I could feel him. Gigi and Grandaddy Opal faced each other and argued, and Dane was the air between them, the hot angry air each of them breathed out of their mouths when they spoke. And when they stopped fighting and went their separate ways, the Dane vapors remained behind, and I’d stand in the midst of them and close my eyes, waiting for him to speak to me, to tell me that he was coming soon, but soon seemed to be getting farther and farther away. So were my chances of becoming any kind of prodigy, and every day I needed Dane even more than the day before. I needed to sit with him in his candlelit cave again and hear him read to me in his mellow voice, and feel safe and warm and content, because it seemed nothing felt safe anymore. Fear, like a shadow, hung about me,