Footloose (10 page)

Chapter 16

It was a tight squeeze, fitting four bodies into the VW Bug for the long ride out of town. And that was even without the oversize cowboy hat on Willard's head.

They survived the jam-packed ride to their mystery destination. All Ariel and Rusty had said was that they should wear their dancing shoes. The neon cowboy boots above the entrance to the country music club provided the remaining answers.

Ren was never a big fan of country music, but just seeing the bar full of people kicking up their heels in an energetic line dance was enough to convert him. They were miles from Bomont and light years away from the stupid law about dancing. Ariel and Rusty went straight for the dance floor, but Willard hung back along the edges.

“Aren't you going to dance?” Ren asked.

Willard waved him off. “Nah. I'll just watch you guys.”

“We drove all this way,” Rusty insisted. “You're just going to stand around like a dork the whole time?”

He flashed an uncomfortable smile. “Well, darlin', I'd rather be a dork than a dancing dork.”

Rusty's disappointment was obvious as Ariel pulled her onto the dance floor, but Ren wasn't about to let this go. His friend was missing a golden opportunity.

“What are you doing?” Ren asked once the girls were out of earshot.

Willard was embarrassed. “Look. I can't dance. At all. I mean
at all
. Not pretty.”

Ren pointed to the dance floor. “But it's line dancing. It's a white man's dream. Simple steps, man. Simple.”

Maybe there was a way to get Willard out there. Ren saw a woman teaching line dance steps to a small group of people off to the side of the dance floor. Probably an instructor the bar hired to help bring people in. It was the perfect solution.

“All right. Come over here.” Ren grabbed Willard and pulled him to the corner.

The instructor was ready for them with a smile on her face by the time Ren reached her. “Excuse me, miss?”

“Y'all need to learn some new steps?” she asked.

That was when Willard caught on to what was happening. “Aw, shit-howdy. You're gonna drop me off at the day care while you go boogie with the girls?”

Ren stood firm. “Learn a box step or two and meet us out there. I have faith in you.”

Ren joined the girls out on the dance floor. The song might be new to him, but the beat was universal. He and the girls fell in line with the other dancers, boots stomping, hands clapping. Every now and then a shout of “yee-haw” sprang from the crowd.

It felt great to move again. To just go wild, even with the tightly choreographed steps. Having a beautiful girl on each side of him didn't hurt, either. Willard didn't look like he was having nearly as much fun over with the beginners.

The music changed again and the lines of dancers broke up into a rowdy free-for-all. This was the kind of dancing that Ren liked. No structure. No rules.

He moved dangerously close to Ariel. As good as she was and as wild as she seemed, she was surprisingly inhibited when he turned to her. He shouted out some encouragement, moving suggestively, enticing her to join him. And she did. Slowly at first, but then she matched him move for move, twirling and gyrating, letting the music take control.

Ren saw Rusty leaving the dance floor out the corner of his eye. While they danced, Willard had quit his lessons and managed to get himself a beer.

“Come on! It's fun, Willard!” she shouted over the music, making a second attempt to coax him onto the dance floor.

He held up his beer. “I don't drink and dance. You go ahead.”

Rusty swiped his hat right off his head. She put it on and danced seductively, trying to sway him into following her.

Willard was not amused. “Hey, give that back. I got hat head, darlin'. Come on.”

His concern turned to something else entirely as her dance got more suggestive. She poured on the sexy, making that hat look better than it ever could on top of his head. Then suddenly, she jumped back into the group of dancers, leaving him behind.

“Hey, come on back!” he shouted after her.

Rusty was beside Ren and Ariel, but they barely noticed. They were too busy with each other. Hands roamed over their clothing as they moved to the music, forging a connection they didn't have the last time they danced.

Rusty was getting into it, too, dancing with some big cowboy. He couldn't move nearly as well as she did, but it didn't look like she minded very much. At first, she enjoyed the attention as he put his arm around her, but then his hand started creeping south.

“Aw, hell no!” Willard pushed his way through the crowd of dancers. “Hey, that's my girl you're groping.”

“Willard, we were just dancing,” Rusty protested.

Willard looked at her. “And what are you doin' dancing with another man while you're wearing my hat? That's bad form, Rus,” Willard said. “That's disrespect.”

The big cowboy grabbed Rusty's purse out of her hands and shoved it into Willard's gut. “Here, pal. Why don't you hold the girl's purse and go get me a beer?”

Willard's face turned red. “I got a better idea. Why don't I kick your teeth in and grin doin' it?”

“Willard,” Rusty said. “No fights. You don't even know this guy.”

But Willard wasn't listening. “If you can count this high, I'm giving you to the count of three to get out of my face. One …”

The cowboy decked Willard before he even reached two.

Rusty screamed. “Willard!”

The cowboy grabbed Rusty by the arm. “C'mon, darlin'. Ditch the hayseed and party with a real man.”

Rusty grabbed a bottle off the tray of a passing waitress and smashed it into the cowboy's head. “Animal!” she yelled as he went down hard.

Ren and Ariel had made their way toward their friends, and they realized they needed to get out of there before this little spat escalated. “You get Rusty,” Ren told Ariel. “I'll get the big softy.”

Ren helped his friend to his wobbly feet while Ariel pulled Rusty off the dance floor. Ariel had a hard time keeping hold of her friend. The girl was swearing up and down at the guy who hurt Willard. It was beginning to look like the shy flirtation she and Willard had going on had just turned into a full-blown romance.

They escaped to the parking lot, ready to make a break for it if the cowboy's friends came after them. After a minute or so, they seemed to be in the clear. Laughing, Rusty pulled a handkerchief out of her purse to staunch the blood flowing from Willard's nose. “I'm proud of you, Willard. You didn't fight.”

“Didn't get a chance to, with you fighting all my battles.” He took the handkerchief away from his face. “Shit-howdy, is this noticeable?”

Ren recoiled and the girls squealed. It took another five minutes for the nosebleed to stop, but by then it didn't look that bad, all things considered.

They squeezed back into the small car and headed toward home. All in all, it was for the best that their evening ended early. Ren didn't need another strike against him for bringing Ariel home after curfew again.

The ride back was full of silly conversations about the latest celebrity scandals. Ren enjoyed just talking about things that were crazy and wild and boring and normal. It was fun. But he noticed a sudden break in the chatter as they turned onto a bridge not far from Bomont.

“This bridge gives me the creeps,” Willard said as they crossed the river.

“Willard.” Rusty shushed him sharply under her breath, which just made it more noticeable.

“Oh,” Willard said. “Sorry.”

“What?” Ren asked.

“This is Crosby Bridge,” Ariel said softly.

Ren couldn't make the connection. He'd crossed this bridge coming into town on the bus a few months back, and a couple times since then. Nothing about it stood out to him.

“After a homecoming game a bunch of kids were out partying. Drinking and dancing.” Ariel had a catch in her voice. “Somehow, on their way home, they lost control and went head-on into a truck. Killed them all.”

Ren pieced it together. He never realized that accident had happened on this bridge.

“They were all seniors,” Willard continued for her. “Two of them were all-state. Ronnie Jamison and …”

“And my brother, Bobby.” Ariel finished his sentence. She looked at Ren. “You would have liked him,” she continued. “I looked up to him. He was my hero. But now whenever I think of him, I think about this bridge.”

They continued the rest of the way in silence.

Chapter 17

They were the youngest people in the room by at least two decades. Ren, Woody, and Willard felt noticeably out of place sitting in the back row of the city council chamber among the people requesting permits or petitioning to have potholes filled.

The meeting mostly focused on civic business—the kinds of things that Ren never really worried about, but knew someone had to be responsible for. Principal Dunbar was finishing up that official business with a decree that the cost of a dog license would now rise from ten to fifteen dollars. It was exciting stuff. He even banged a gavel.

Woody leaned over to Ren. “They just finished. If you were gonna make your move, this is when you'd do it.”

Principal Dunbar banged his gavel again. Ren could tell the man got a kick out of that part of the job. “It is at this time that we will take any new business or concerns. Just come down to the podium and state your name and address.”

Woody and Willard looked at Ren. This was going to be a bigger challenge than he'd anticipated. He hadn't expected there'd be an audience, that he'd have to stand up in front of a microphone and announce his intentions. He especially didn't like bringing Uncle Wes into it by giving his address. Not that everyone in the room didn't already know who Ren was.

“Anyone?” Principal Dunbar asked. “Anyone?”

Ren wasn't sure what he'd been thinking. It was one thing to take on the council, but he was also challenging Ariel's father. If he did that in front of everyone, it could ruin whatever was forming between him and Ariel. He wasn't so sure a dance was worth risking that.

The gavel decided for him. Principal Dunbar slammed it down on the desk one last time and called the meeting to an end.

Despite his misgivings, Ren knew what he had to do. He left Willard and Woody in the back of the room and hurried to catch up with the departing council members, stopping Principal Dunbar and Reverend Moore as they came down the stairs.

“Reverend Moore?”

They turned to face him. No going back now. “Ren McCormack,” he said, introducing himself. “Wesley's nephew.”

Reverend Moore extended his hand out of politeness. “Yes, Ren. I know who you are.”

“I'm sure you do,” Ren said as he shook the man's hand. “Wes told me you two had a talk.”

The statement made Reverend Moore uncomfortable. “That was a conversation between him and me,” the reverend said. “It wasn't meant for your ears.”

Which basically meant it was okay for the adults to talk about him behind his back.
Nice.
“Yeah. There's a lot of that going on in this town,” Ren said. “What's that saying? The one about children?”

Principal Dunbar jumped in. “That they're better seen than heard.”

Nice message from a man who made a living working with kids. Ren let it slide. “Well, I just wanted you to know that I'm starting a petition to challenge the ordinance prohibiting public dancing. I just wanted to …” He wanted to do a lot of things, actually, but none of them were right to say at the moment. “I just wanted to make myself clear.”

He handed Roger one the flyers he'd made. It read
OPPOSE THE DANCE BAN
in big letters that filled the page. Ren walked away before his nerves got the best of him. He heard the reverend tell Roger that they should just ignore him. “He's just one kid,” Reverend Moore added. “What can he do?”

It was a good question. Ren still didn't have an answer. It was nothing more than a petition, but Ren had started something he had to see through to the end, no matter what happened. No turning back.

“Showdown with the preacher man,” Woody said when Ren joined them.

Willard was suitably impressed, and let Ren know it with a “Shit-howdy.”

But Ren wasn't having any of it. “Listen to me,” he said, pointing a finger at Willard. “If I have to stand up in front of that city council and make my case, then you're going to learn how to dance.”

“Okay, okay,” Willard said. “You got me. We'll get together this weekend.”

Ren grabbed him by the collar. “Uh-uh. Now.” He and Woody marched Willard out of the council chambers and into the car to take them across town. Willard whined the entire way there about being abducted. Like a petulant child, he refused to even get out of the car when they pulled into Ren's garage. Ren had to coax his friend out by dangling an ice cream cone in front of him.

Willard firmly planted himself in the corner of the garage while Ren and Woody walked him through some basic moves to the sounds of the hip-hop emerging from the VW's speakers.

They started out with some easy stuff, nothing too fancy—just teaching him how to step to the beat. Willard nodded along out of rhythm while his ice cream dripped on the floor. “You all look so cute dancing together,” he said. “But shouldn't you be closer? Like hugging each other? Woody, just take Ren's hand and lead. Be the man.”

Ren stamped his foot. “Hey. No jokes. We're in school right now. We're schooling you.”

“That's right,” Woody agreed. “You go on and run your mouth, but this here is for your benefit. Not ours.”

Willard got up with his ice cream cone and did a vulgar shimmy, spraying drops of vanilla ice cream around.

Ren rolled his eyes. “All right. Watch my feet and try to do what they do.”

The beat pounded out of the speakers and Ren stomped his feet along with it. Just a simple right-left move. But when Willard tried it, he nearly took out a pile of car parts tripping over himself, giving Woody a case of the giggles.

“You're not being too helpful.” Willard sounded more upset than Ren imagined he would be. Maybe he was taking this more seriously than he let on.

“I think the key word here is
hopeless
,” Woody said to Ren.

But he wasn't about to give up. “If you can't learn to dance to
this
beat, then you can't learn to dance.” Ren moved his feet again, emphasizing each word along with the beat. “This is primal. It's basic four-four.”

Willard threw up his hands in defeat and left the garage. “Okay. Officially, I'm over this.”

Ren called after him. “You know we've got better things to do than give you dance lessons.”

“Why are you trying so hard?” Woody asked. “If he don't want to dance, you can't make him.”

“Being scared of something and not wanting to do it are two different things,” Ren said. He'd been scared of a lot of things in his life, but he didn't have much choice in whether or not he did them. He could tell Willard wanted to learn to dance. Especially with the way he watched Rusty at the club the other night. He just had to get over his fears.

The same way Ren was going to have to get up in front of the city council and make a presentation—something that would convince a bunch of old guys to see things from his point of view. To remember what it was like when they were his age and wanted to go out and have some fun. If he couldn't even convince his friend to have a good time, he didn't have a chance with the council.

Ren turned off his iPod, but music still filled the air. A new remix version of the song “Let's Hear It for the Boy” came from the backyard, along with the off-key voices of Amy, Sarah, and their friends.

The girls had set up a makeshift stage on the concrete slab where an old shed used to be. Their pink Superstar Sing-Along CD player sat before an audience of dolls and teddy bears, ready for a concert. Woody called Ren over to the window. “You gotta see this,” he said.

Ren saw that the girls weren't alone. Watching their performance from a distance, Willard made an earnest attempt to dance along with them. It wasn't pretty, but he kept up with them as they sang and danced around.

“Wonder if Uncle Wes can get fined for that,” Ren said.

“I think Willard should definitely be fined for it,” Woody added.

But Willard had caught the dancing bug, and Ren wasn't about to let him lose it. Every free moment he had over the next few weeks, Ren taught Willard how to move. They started at the cotton mill, with other unskilled dancers surrounding Willard in the saddest line dance Ren ever saw.

That was the secret to getting Willard to dance. He was too embarrassed to strut his stuff in front of people who knew what they were doing, like Ren and Woody. But throw in some little girls who only did the basic steps or some blue collar workers who didn't care how bad they looked, and he actually started to learn.

Once he got more comfortable, they took the show on the road. Now that there was some distance from the dance incident at the drive-in that got Ren in trouble with Reverend Moore, music was back in full force outside the diner. Willard was getting good at moving his feet, but the rest of his body was a big mess.

“Just bounce,” Woody said as he and some of his cousins tried to add swagger to the moves. “Gangstas don't dance. They bounce. Get gangsta, Willard.”

Willard got better with each lesson, but his best work was always with Sarah and Amy. The girls encouraged him, taking their role in his lessons very seriously, showing him choreography they'd seen in music videos online.

While Ren was building up Willard's dancing confidence, he was also working on his case for the council. He snuck into the high school copy room to run off extra flyers to spread the word, taping them up around the school and all over town in the places he knew other kids hung out.

A few times he returned to places he'd posted the flyers and found them gone, but he didn't get discouraged. He just put them up again, doubling up the tape. If people were going to take his stuff down, he was going to at least make it harder for them to do it.

Everywhere Ren went, Willard was with him, listening to his iPod and bouncing to the music. It got so bad that at one point Willard was practicing dance steps while holding the defensive line during football practice. Coach Guerntz was not pleased. “Willard, what the hell are you doing? Give me two miles! Move it!”

•  •  •  •  •

Willard slipped in one last little box step before hitting the track to work off his punishment. With every move that Willard mastered, Ren felt the dance get closer to reality. But it was only going to happen if he convinced the council to see things his way; for that, he needed to come up with one hell of a speech.

Getting people to sign the petition was the easy part—most everyone in the senior class eligible to vote had lined up to add their names. Some were dying for a formal dance, while others were just tired of all the rules that prevented them from having any fun. A few students, like Chuck's friends, only signed it as a joke. But even after Ren erased all the “Batman” and “Spider-Man” signatures, he still had more than enough names on the petition to challenge the law.

If only he could get some of those people to write his speech for him!

In school, oral reports were never Ren's thing. His mind always wandered, wondering what the teacher was thinking or what his friends were whispering about in front of him—and that was just for a simple book report. This speech had to convince the council, motivate his friends, and change the minds of everyone in town who was against him. That was a lot to ask.

Ren tore the top sheet off his notepad, crumpling his first draft into a ball.
Crap
. He tossed it into the small trash can in the corner of his bedroom.

“Hey.” Aunt Lulu stood in the doorway. “Was that a three-pointer or just a two?”

Ren sat up on his bed. “That's a no-pointer.” He put the blank notepad down beside him. It was as good a time as any for a break. “Getting names on a petition is one thing. Writing a speech is something else. It's hard.”

Lulu sat beside him and pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of her pocket. It was one of his flyers, covered in stickers of unicorns and Barbie dolls. “I see you've enlisted my daughters in your campaign.”

He took the sheet, happy to see that along with the stickers it was also filled with names. “I'm sorry about that.”

“No need to apologize. This family could use some activism.”

Ren wasn't sure
everyone
in the family would agree. “What about Uncle Wesley? He seems worried.”

Lulu sighed. “Well, he's a car salesman trying to sell cars in the middle of a recession. He's all about worry. He worries about income. About what his customers might think. But that's what grown-ups do. We worry. That's not your job.”

He had to disagree. That had been Ren's main job for the past five years. It was all he could do up in Boston. Worry about his mom's health. Worry about paying the bills. Worrying had become second nature.

“Why is this dance so important to you?” Lulu asked.

That was the whole problem with this speech. He couldn't figure out a way to put the answer to that question into words. “For city and school officials to make a general ban based on fear is an infringement on my—”

Lulu held up a hand. “Whoa! Save all that for your speech. I want to know why this is important to
you
.”

Ren never really thought about it that way. The dance ban was just
wrong
. It was wrong for everyone, not just him. But why was the whole situation getting to him so badly?

Ren began to piece together his answer. “When Dad left … I wasn't really surprised. Even as a kid, I never felt like I could depend on him. It was just me and Mom, you know? She was the strong one.”

Lulu nodded. That wasn't a big secret in the family.

“So when she got sick,” he continued, “it was my turn to be strong. I thought that if I worked hard enough, if I listened to her doctors and did everything they told me, maybe we could turn it around. Maybe she could pull through.” Back then, it was always easier to fool himself into thinking he had control over the situation. “All that effort was for nothing. I couldn't change a thing.”