My Seventh-Grade Life in Tights (7 page)

And then she lowered her leg and it all vanished.

POOF!

“I don’t know why you can’t do it. Didn’t Kassie or Carson see all of your mistakes?”

I shrugged. “They’re more about getting out there and having fun, I guess. If I couldn’t do a move, we’d just sort of scrap it.”

“Dance is about technique, not having fun. So if I say do a move, you do it. There is no move-scrapping in dance.”

“But what if it won’t fit?”

“ ‘Won’t fit’? What does that even mean?”

“Kassie always says—I mean
said
—that
I’m
the one who has to find the moves to fit
me.
She said dance is about expression, and if there’s a move that doesn’t help you tell a story and express yourself, then it doesn’t belong.”

Sarah’s eyes dropped to the floor for a second like something I’d said had stung her. She looked back at me, her face wrenched up in disapproval. “Well—that’s just stupid. If you expect to make it to the top three, then you need to forget everything Kassie ever told you about dance. Especially since she’s your competition now.”

There was no way Kassie could’ve been
that
wrong. She was the best dancer I’d ever seen.

“Now get up. Let’s try something easy. The walk.”

Walking? I was pretty sure I had that down. But not how she showed me. Apparently, in the dance world, walking meant swinging your feet out in front of you like your legs were frozen stiff.

I did my best to copy her moves. Each time, I heard Kassie’s voice in my head.

Copying someone will just strangle all your creativity.

But then why did it feel so good to do it? All the best dancers did the same moves.

“Toes, toes,
toes
!” Sarah yelled. “All you’re doing is walking, so point your toes!”

I reset. Heels together. Step. Toes forward. Heel in front. Step. Toes forward. Heel in front. After a few more, I found that clenching my butt helped. Like I’d just gotten a wedgie from Troy.

“Better,” Sarah said. “Sort of.”

I jumped, punching the air to celebrate. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought Sarah might’ve smiled. If she did, it was quick. “Back to first. Let’s try something else. I’m not even going to pretend you can do an arabesque, so we’ll start with what the first years do. A
retiré
.” She pronounced it “reh-tee-
ray
.” She pulled her left foot up, toe pointed, letting it touch her right knee. She stood there like a statue and nodded to me.

Piece of cake. I pulled my foot up, forcing my toes back toward my heel like she’d taught me, and touched my knee. I had to hold my arms out for balance, and I wiggled a little bit, but I was totally—

“GAH!”

It was like my leg got shut in a car door. On a cramp scale from one to ten, my calf was at a thirty. I grabbed my leg and fell straight back, yelling the entire way. I landed on my butt as the knot worked its way deeper into my muscle. “I think it’s getting worse!” I cried, and rolled on my back with my foot in the air.

I looked up at Sarah. My calf was collapsing into a black hole underneath my skin and she was laughing. I rolled back into a sitting position, still holding my foot as close to my chest as I could.

“It’s not funny! This seriously hurts!”

“I know.” She leaned down and forced my leg out straight. “I’ve just never seen someone get that freaked out over a cramp.” She put her hands on my foot and pushed it back, stretching my calf. Some of the pain instantly disappeared. I let out a sigh of relief, watching her work her magic. After a few more seconds of her pushing my toes back and forth, she got up and crossed her arms. “Better?”

I worked my leg around a little. “Yeah. Thanks.” I stood up, hopping on each leg to test it out.

“Good,” Sarah said. “Then back to first position.”

Whatever bit of
nice
or
pleasant
I thought I’d heard in her voice before was gone. Business-mode Sarah was in the house.

“I hope you’re not scared of pain. Because if you’re going to be a dancer—” Sarah took a deep breath and straightened her back. “There’s going to be a lot of it.”

S
arah wasn’t lying.

My butt cheeks felt like they had a pair of ninja stars lodged in them from all the pliés. But even as bad as they hurt, I couldn’t stop smiling. Because the throbbing was from the technique. Sarah told me if I was doing it right, I’d be sore. And I was definitely sore.

The only bad thing was that I had to learn it all from her. She yelled more than anyone I’d ever known. I got home with my head feeling like Troy had used it for a seat cushion.

And telling my parents I’d changed my mind about quitting football didn’t help.

“I had a feeling you would,” Dad said. “I remember how exciting it was to get out there on the field. Nothing beats the smell of a football field on game day.”

“Yeah. Nothing beats that sweaty-body-odor stench.” I opened the fridge to get some orange juice.

“Didn’t you say you were going to concentrate more on your dancing?” Mom asked me, staring at her laptop the entire time. “I thought you had that scholarship thing you were practicing for.”

I shrugged. “I guess I can do both.” Not like I had much of a choice, really. If I backed out of Kassie’s plan now, I’d be giving up a ton of free dance lessons with Sarah.

But at least I finally got to dance in something besides jeans. I went to my room and practiced pliés and retirés and développés until my legs were about to fall off. I kept my football pants on the whole time. They made awesome tights. Those suckers were made out of space-age stretchy fabric and had two layers to protect any rear end from exposure, no matter how beefy.

Of course, the poop-brown stain running down the back wouldn’t come out. No matter how many times Mom washed them.

At least the other football players didn’t seem to care. When the team met after school the next day for the first practice of the season, everyone huddled in their usual groups. First string all together, talking and laughing. Second string doing the same thing.

And the blue team. My team. We just sort of stood around, looking at each other like we weren’t really sure why we were even there.

“All right, men,” Coach Bear said, waving us into one big group. He crossed his arms. They were so hairy it made his gut look like it had a unibrow. He dragged one hand down his mustache and sighed. “Thursday’s our first game. Pine Ridge Middle.”

Coach Donnelly nodded. “Gotta watch their backfield.” He was basically a miniature version of Coach Bear.

“Yep. We’re five-and-oh against ’em but that don’t mean we ain’t gonna go out there and play like we’re oh-and-five, right?”

The team grunted out a round of cheers.

Coach Bear pulled his baseball cap down. I wasn’t sure how he ever saw with it covering ninety percent of his eyes. “That’s what I wanna hear! We’re gonna go undefeated, boys. I ain’t gonna accept a loss. Not with the offense we got this year.”

More cheers. Grunts.

“You know my favorite saying.
Second place is the first loser.
We gonna come in second Thursday?”

After a loud round of
NO
s, we took off for our warm-up jog.

Football practices would be so much better if they were like all the training montages I’d seen in the
Step Up
movies. The ones where the music starts and the hero gets a determined look on his face while he dances in front of the mirror, messes up, wipes the sweat off his face, and keeps going.

But they’re not.

Like…at all.

They’re more like getting chased by a whistle-blowing pit bull while you run through a trail of old tires and jump over cones with trip wires strung between them. Last year I almost passed out during our first few practices. I wasn’t used to all the running and jumping.

This year was different. My body stayed on the edge of exhausted all the time, but I kept going. Even Coach Bear noticed me a couple of times.

I won’t lie. It felt great.

I even got a “Not bad, Parker, now see if you can run like that with a ball in your hands” from him. He put me in on a play while Bobby Fleagle, the first-string running back, was getting some water. DeMarcus glanced back at me, giving me a
good job
nod.

My body buzzed with excitement. It made me want to push even harder. So I did. DeMarcus called, “Hike!” and rammed the ball into my stomach. I took off, remembering the way Bobby had gone the last few times he ran the play.

There had to be a trail of fire behind me, because I was a rocket and I wasn’t about to stop.

Except I did. I didn’t see who it was, but a pair of hands landed on my shoulders and shoved me over the sidelines. Our first practices were always padless, so we weren’t allowed to tackle. But apparently throwing someone halfway to China was okay.

Thankfully, I didn’t black out. However, I did land on my shoulder so hard the only sound I could make was a humming noise that sounded like a stray cat pushing out a litter of kittens.

The thud of footsteps filled my ears. My teammates’ heads popped into view one by one. The coaches shoved their way through the crowd. For a while nobody said anything. Which made it even worse. Like they were watching a cockroach on its back wiggling its way right side up. It was humiliating. My face felt red-hot and ten sizes bigger than usual. My hands were all sweaty, sliding over the bumpy covering of the—

The football! I yanked my head off the ground and looked at my hands. Yeah, I might’ve been tossed out of bounds by the Incredible Hulk, but I’d held on to the ball.

Coach Bear smiled. “Way to hustle, kid.”

DeMarcus grabbed my hand and yanked me to my feet. “Nice run, Dillon.” I did my best to play it cool, but trust me, inside, my stomach was dancing harder than the entire cast of
High School Musical.

Even though my spine was probably broken. And my feet. Maybe Dad was right about needing new cleats after all.

At dinner, I almost collapsed into my plate of spaghetti. I barely even noticed the business talk they were throwing back and forth. The only thing that caught my attention was when Dad mentioned someone named Alan Scapelli and Mom got really quiet all of a sudden.

“Don’t start on Alan again. He’s a good guy. He’s just got some weird business ideas,” Dad said, probably reading the look on Mom’s face.

“Like what?” I asked.

Mom pointed to Dad with her fork. “Your father thought it’d be a good idea to invest in a man who wants to buy up all the pennies in the southeast USA.”

I almost choked on a noodle. “Seriously? Dad, that’s just—weird.”

“It’s not weird. It’s forward thinking,” Dad said.

Mom mouthed,
No, weird.

“Carol, stop. And it’s not just pennies. It’s any older coin.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Well, a lot of old coins are made from copper or silver. And they’re worth more than their face value. So he’s using the money I—
we
—invested and buying as many as he can. Then reselling them to companies that are looking for those types of metals.”

I let it sit with me for a second. And then I shook my head and said, “Mom’s right, that’s weird.”

“This is why you’re my favorite child,” she said, pretending to pinch my cheek.

Dad huffed. “Fine. But I’ve already got my
I told you so
speech ready when Alan comes through.”

“Can’t wait to hear that one.” Mom smiled, but I could tell she was still irritated with him.

We spent the rest of dinner talking about anything we could except coins or money. I decided my feet could suffer through another season being cramped in a pair of slightly-too-small cleats.

By my first game on Thursday, I was having muscle pains in parts of my body I didn’t even know could
get
sore. Like the back of the knee. How does that even work?

Luckily, all I had to do was hold the bench down with my butt. My knee-rears got to rest all the way through the first half of the game. I even untied my cleats so my toes could breathe.

During halftime, the speakers belted out the same Lynyrd Skynyrd songs they always played, and a bunch of people got up for bathroom breaks and concession stand visits.

I limped to the fence to talk to Kassie, Carson, and Austin.

“Hey, guys.”

“Everyone, look! It’s Dillon Parker,” Kassie said, pretending to swoon.

“Think you’ll actually get to do something this year besides keep the bench warm?” Austin asked.

“Um, ouch. Good to see you’re feeling better,” I said.

“Oh, uh, yeah. I’m fine.” His eyes dropped to his feet.

“Was it the fries? Because those things gave me some serious gas.”

“Dude, I said I’m fine. It was nothing.” He smiled, but I could tell it was fake. There was something he wasn’t telling me.

I decided halftime during my first game wasn’t the best place to get into it. “Anyway, I’ve been getting to run plays every now and then during practice. Coach said I was pretty fast. Even got a slap on the butt from DeMarcus.”

Carson’s mouth fell open. “I hate you.”