House of Dance by Beth Kephart Page A

which I had decided by then had come direct from Granddad, by way of my mom.
    You could say this idea I’d had was crazy—not sensible, not smart—but I’d made up my mind and come this far, and now I took a first step up, and then another, paused at the first landing, took the next step up. At the end of the stairs was another glass door that wouldn’t be budged without the say-so of a buzzer, and when I got there and hit the black box, it spluttered an answer. I pulled the handle of the door, and I was in.
    If Leisha could see me now.
    If Nick could.
    If only my mother.
    It was the colors of a foreign place—yellows, but not bright yellows, oranges mixed with twigs of brown, greens not like new greens but like rubbed-out, used-up ones. There was a couch, and there was a reception desk, and beyond that there were two ways to go: straight down the hall to the dance floor, or to the left, which led to rooms, a hall, a closet, and more dance floor. I could see, from where I stood, the blur-sway of dancing, mirrors on any wall that wasn’t windowed, fabric, and breeze.
    No one bothered to question me, so I watched: the zigzags of arms and fingers and necks and feet, the bursting-out bloom of a peony on a wrist, the frostinglike swirl of a purple hem, all swooshing by. I could hear talk, but it was just pieces of talk. I could, when I really worked at it, make out phrases: “Back rock, hold. Back rock, hold. Everything straight above your sensor.” I had no clue what a sensor was. It wasn’t aword used in health class.
    Now someone was laughing. Now someone stopped laughing. Now the music was swiped away and replaced with a song that was rising and then falling. The song was made of strings, and fisting up through the strings was piano. “One TWO three. One TWO three,” the voice was saying above it. “And not looking at me. And not dropping your shoulders. High on the TWOOOO, and three, and one, and again, this is the waltz. You are the queen. Aristocratic.” The queen, I thought, has a sensor.
    Nothing was being stopped for my sake. No one was asking my name. I walked the length of the hall, past a board of names, toward the mirrored walls. I crept closer to the wooden floor, the peony wrist, the elbow hinge, the voice that belonged to the black-haired man, who was all in black—his shoes, his pants, his shirt, each strand of his hair. He was the man I had seen through the window, the man on the poster, and he was steppingback, stepping sideways, stepping forward, turning, turning his partner under his arm, starting again. “TWO, three, and one,” he said, and when he said the “TWO,” his eyebrows went up and when he said the “three,” they fell, but he couldn’t have been speaking to his partner with his eyes because her face was pressed away from his. I hadn’t seen this one in the window before. She had bleached white-blond hair razored just above her ears. If I’d climbed all those steps thinking dance was romance, I had another lesson coming.
    “Give me your hands,” the man said, though he already had them. “More pressure. Yes. There it is. Heels first and feet parallel. You know this, Teenie. It’s in your muscle memory.” He had a square face and a big-screen smile. “Dancing isn’t torture,” he said.
    “It isn’t right,” she said, finally standing up straight and glaring up at him, then stomping off.
    “Closer than it was and getting there,” he said.
    “I should have it by now.”
    “It takes time.”
    “The competition’s in two weeks.”
    “Everything you need to know you know,” he said. “You have to trust the music now. You have to trust your partner. Me, Teenie. You have to trust me.” He stepped into the miniature room where the music machine was. When he reappeared, more music was playing. He bowed toward her. She came to him. He smiled. She didn’t. They began. They whirled. They disappeared from my view, and now it was the woman with the peony on her wrist