Read My Seventh-Grade Life in Tights Online
Authors: Brooks Benjamin
My Seventh-Grade Life in Tights
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Charles Brooks Benjamin
Cover art copyright © 2016 by The Little Friends of Printmaking
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon
is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benjamin, Brooks.
My seventh-grade life in tights / Brooks Benjamin. — First edition.
p. cm.
Summary: “All Dillon wants is to be a real dancer. And if he wins a summer scholarship at Dance-Splosion, he’s on his way. The problem? His dad wants him to play football. And Dillon’s freestyle crew, the Dizzee Freekz, says that dance studios are for sell-outs” — Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-553-51250-2 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-553-51251-9 (glb) — ISBN 978-0-553-51252-6 (ebook)
[1. Dance—Fiction. 2. Dance teams—Fiction. 3. Competition (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Middle schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.B4535My 2016
[Fic]—dc23
2014049045
eBook ISBN 9780553512526
Cover design by The Little Friends of Printmaking
Random House Children’s Books
supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v4.1
ep
Contents
For Jackie. For everything.
I
stared deep into the world of two-faced backstabbery.
And it was all inside my phone.
I never would’ve found the website on my own, but I’d set a Google alert about a month earlier for
become a real dancer.
I’d also set up one for
ninja movie audition
and
free concert in Sunnydale,
but those never gave me anything useful.
This alert was different. I leaned against the bathroom sink and scrolled down the page. Dance-Splosion, the biggest dance studio in east Tennessee, was giving away a three-week summer scholarship in June to one lucky dancer. And this was the last week they were taking submissions.
At the bottom was a picture showing a wall of their dancers, each one posing like the show had just ended and the crowd was cheering so hard the ceiling was about to cave in.
I imagined my name in a Broadway show program:
Introducing twelve-year-old Dillon Parker, dancing some awesome style and definitely not the lame ninja freestyle one he made up.
Below the picture was the Dance-Splosion slogan:
Where
real
dancers are made.
Those five little words had me trapped in a bathroom with my crew waiting for me outside.
A
real
dancer.
Every time I thought about it, my stomach twisted into a knot. But there was no way I could go through with it. Not without hating myself afterward.
“Dillon, you almost finished?” Kassie’s voice crept in through the door crack and yanked me back to earth.
I shoved the phone into my pocket. “Um, yeah. Just need to, um—flush.” I pushed the lever on the toilet, ran the water for a minute, and opened the door into my den.
“Dude, we thought you fell in or something,” Austin said, standing behind his camera, cleaning his glasses on his shirt. “Kassie was about to send Carson in to pull you out of the plumbing.”
Kassie laughed. “Okay, we’ve got time for one more run-through.” Her eyes landed on me. “You up for it?”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
She pulled her jet-black hair into a ponytail. One curl fell down over her forehead. It always did that. Like that one bit of hair refused to go along with the rest. That was totally Kassie. A rebel. Some of the kids had teased her when she first moved here from Haiti. But she’d never let them bother her.
“All right, we’re rolling,” Austin said, then glanced at the lights flickering above us. “Hold on.”
Carson let out a loud groan. “Perfect. Last practice before school starts and we’re going to look like we’re dancing in a lightning storm.” His entire body perked up. “Ooh, that might actually be cool. Let’s start before it turns normal again.”
“Trust me, it looks terrible,” Austin said. “We need to invest in some lights. This place is a cave. And don’t get me started on the smell. It’s like someone farted in an old shoe.”
“The lighting’s fine,” Kassie said.
Austin poked his head out from behind his camera. “Oh, sorry. I thought
I
was the director.” Carson opened his mouth, but Austin cut him off before he could speak. “Come on, guys. I already feel stupid recording these. It’s not like y’all can’t just do it yourselves. Let me at least make it look good.”
Austin was right. He recorded all of our routines even though we really didn’t need him to. But he said he’d let us all be zombies in a short film he was making next summer. That was enough to convince us he should help out.
“How long will it take before the light stops?” Kassie asked.
Austin grabbed a pillow and tossed it at the ceiling. It smacked against the clear plastic cover and the light instantly stopped flashing. Austin let out a quick laugh like he was surprised it had worked.
We got into our first position, squished together closer than we should’ve been. My den was pretty small, even with the furniture pushed out of the way. Austin hit play on Kassie’s phone and the room filled with a low, electronic bass groove.
Kassie moved first, flying into a perfect triple spin. She was a blur, twirling at sonic speed.
Next up was Carson. He jumped, his long, skinny legs stretched out into a perfect split. I couldn’t have drawn straighter lines with a ruler.
I was next.
I closed my eyes and let the song pour into my muscles. Just like Kassie had taught me. I pretended the top of my head opened up on a hinge and the music filled every empty space inside me. And then…
A deep breath.
Feel the music.
Become the music.
Let the lid snap shut.
And take off.
I did a spin-drop, landing on my knees and windmilling my arms. I used the momentum to pop right back up and unleash a set of moves I had pieced together from some of my favorite dance movies and kung fu flicks. Jumps, kicks, twists, punches, a little pop and lock—I tried it all. My dad always says it looks like I’m having a seizure when I dance, but what does he know? The most dancing I’d ever seen him do was when he dropped a paint can on his toe last year.
My karate action didn’t really seem out of place most of the time. They were the only moves I was good at, so Kassie always made sure our routines had some sort of fighting part to them. They had to, or I wouldn’t have had anything to do. I’d just have been a statue in the background while the other dancers did all the cool moves.
My first few punches and kicks felt great.
But that’s where the
epic
ended and the
epic fail
began.
The more I saw Kassie and Carson flow across the floor like a pair of dance swans, the more I felt like I was just flailing around, trying to keep up. So I threw my weight to the side, planting one hand on the floor for a one-handed cartwheel. I’d seen Kassie and Carson do it a million times. It couldn’t be that hard.
But my elbow buckled and I crashed to the floor, smacking Kassie’s shoulder with my foot.
“Ow!” Kassie’s hand flew to her arm.
“Cut!” Austin yelled, stopping the music. “Dude, what’re you doing?”
I scrambled to my feet. “I’m so sorry! Kass, are you okay?” Great. I finally muster up the courage to try an actual dance move and I end up breaking our best dancer.
“Everyone all right?” my mom called downstairs. “I heard a scream.”
“We’re fine, Mrs. Parker. Thanks,” Kassie yelled. She worked her shoulder around, then asked me, “What happened? Did you trip or something?”
“I think he was going for a roundoff.” Carson dragged his hand through his blond hair. He turned to Austin. “Or did he just fall again?”
Austin shrugged. “All I saw was a foot flying through the air. And not in a cool way.”
I sat on the back of the couch. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to do something besides punch and kick all over the place.”
“Why?” Kassie asked. “You’re awesome at punching and kicking.”
“Yeah, only because I don’t know how to do anything else.”
Carson took a drink from his water bottle. “But that’s sort of your thing.”
“I don’t want my thing to
just
be punches and kicks, though. I wanna be able to do moves like you two, but you won’t teach me.”
“Not again,” Austin mumbled, slapping the screen closed on his camera.
Kassie hopped up beside me. “I asked you to join us because you were doing all those karate moves, remember?”
I did. It was the first week of sixth grade. She’d found me after school practicing the kata I had to remember for my green belt. I’d told her I wasn’t dancing.
She’d told me I really was.
“The whole reason I started this crew was to make a statement,” she said now. “That dance isn’t about rules and technique. It’s about expression.”
“But I’ve gotta start learning some real moves eventually.” I looked up at Carson. “You’re not the only one who wants to go pro one day, you know.”
His eyes dropped. I hoped it was because he felt sort of bad for not helping me more and not because he knew no choreographer would hire someone with a fake dance style.
“I don’t even wear real dance clothes. I mean, why am I the one who has to dance in jeans? Can I at least wear my football pants or something?”
“Yeah, let him wear those,” Austin said. “It’s about time they saw some action.”
“You’re funny, Austin,” I replied. But he was right. The only action my football pants ever saw was when I got a splinter in my butt last year after I sat down on the bench. I wasn’t even sure why I stayed on the team.