The Queen Bee of Bridgeton (7 page)

"For the past two months, I've been nothing but 'Closet Boy' to you. I figure I have a lot of work to do to change your opinion of me. If that means buying you flowers and food every day, so be it." He held up the bagel and the latte.

"Great, in a few days I'm
gonna
be
a fat flower expert." I sat down next to him on the lobby bench and bit into the bagel.

"So why do you have to clean this place anyway?" he asked, looking at the vacuum with distaste.

"I don't
have
to clean it. I do it in exchange for lessons. It's an arrangement Ms. Alexander and I worked out when I was eight."

"Why do you even need lessons? You're the most amazing dancer I've ever seen. Why don't you just put on your own shows and get rich?"

I laughed out loud. And I thought I was naïve about things. "Thanks for the compliment, but I'm not
that
good. Not yet, anyway. And it's extremely difficult to make a living as a professional dancer. My favorite ballerina, Natalia
Karleskaya
of the Russian Ballet has been in the business for over twenty years. She's been a principal dancer for most of her adult life and she's still by no means rich. A true dancer doesn't do it for the money. They do it
because they can't
not
do it
. For me, dancing is like an elegant stream of life-giving water. It nourishes my soul. Without it, I'd shrivel up and die."

Will didn't respond. He just stared at me with his blue eyes filled with wonder…or confusion. I couldn’t really tell.

"I sound like an idiot, don't I? That's why I avoid talking to people as much as possible. I come off, like you said, weird."

"I also said I like weird." His voice was deep and sensual causing my skin to tickle. He leaned toward me, embracing my eyes with a penetrating stare. Suddenly he turned away and cleared his throat. "Believe it or not, I feel the same way about basketball."

"Really?"

"Don't act so surprised. Basketball is a skill just like dance. And when I'm on the court and I hear the ball pounding the pavement, it pounds out all other thoughts and distractions, you know?"

I nodded. I
did
know. I understood exactly what he was saying.

"Follow me," I said, putting down the bagel and grabbing his hand. I led him to one of the classrooms.  I left him in the center of the room while I turned on a Brahms Sonata played by
Itzhak
Perlman.

As the luscious violin tones filled the studio, I tried to show him some moves.

I did a simple right arabesque into
devant
attitude, then a coupé, a
tombé
, pas de
bourrée
into an inside pique turn. "Okay, now you try."

Will just laughed. "Not a chance. I can't move like that."

"Sure you can." I went over to him and straightened his posture. "Now keeping your hips
square,
just extend your right leg back."

Will tried to obey, but he was a really big guy and not very flexible. He looked kind of like an awkward, gangly giraffe. I had to hold in a giggle as I reached for his leg to adjust his turnout. Unfortunately, I didn't account for his lack of balance in such an unfamiliar position. He started tilting over and though I tried to keep him upright, he was too big for me and I ended up tumbling to the floor on top of him. We both erupted into laughter.

"I think I'll stick to basketball," he said.

"I think that's best for the both of us."

Our laughter subsided as his arm slid around my waist and pulled me closer. His breath caressed my forehead and his heart rate increased underneath me. I felt warm and safe in his arms. I could've stayed there forever, but after a few moments Will said, "We better get to school."

***

I cried a lot.  I couldn't help it.  I cried when I was happy, sad, scared, or even when I had a certain burst of courage.  I cried when I was too angry for words, I cried when I was embarrassed.  Songs, books, movies and TV episodes made me cry.  It didn't even have to be a sad TV show.  I once cried on a rerun of The Simpsons.
The one where Bart failed the fourth grade.
I just felt so bad for him. And he’s a cartoon character!

Sasha said I was too sensitive.  She said sometimes you had to get over your emotions and make cold rational decisions in order to get ahead in life. That was certainly true in her case.  I just couldn't understand how she could sit on the honor council and hold someone's future in her hands.  Just the thought of making the decision to expel someone from school and banish them to a bleak, barren future made my heart ache. 

The Monday after Will and I rode to school together, Sasha gave the final vote to expel yet another person from Bridgeton. Someone named Nicole Thomas had sewn a cheat sheet into her skirt.  She claimed it was just her study aid and she hadn't used it during the test.  A pretty flimsy lie, but I still felt bad for her.  She actually started crying on stage, which in turn made me cry.  Thankfully, I didn't start weeping while sitting in the audience.  It was one of my quiet cries. Only two or three stray tears escaped. I was able to cover them up before anyone saw.  Or, so I thought.

"Did you know Nikki?" Will asked me as we filed out of
Dardem
Hall.  I shook my head.  "Then why are you crying?"  He handed me a tissue. 

"Am I crying?"  I snatched it out of his hand to clean my face before anyone else saw.  "I didn't realize." I felt the need to explain, but I had a hard time finding the right words to express that I was a blubbering idiot who cried at everything. So, I said, "I'm a blubbering idiot," in a resigned matter of fact tone.  I couldn't come up with any clever or sophisticated explanation, so I just told the bare honest truth.  "I know it's stupid.  I'm stupid.  I just…I'm just…sensitive I guess." 

Will smiled and said, "You're not stupid…"  He leaned forward, put his lips to my ear and whispered, "You're special."  Then he walked away. 

***

The next day before school, I wandered the halls aimlessly thinking of Will. Well, that's not completely true. I did have an aim. I
kinda
hoped to run into him. In four days, Will had already called me unique, beautiful, talented, kind, weird, not stupid, and special.  All David ever called me was Sasha.

Unfortunately, instead of running into Will, I ran into a cow.  Yes, a cow.  No, I wasn't on a field trip visiting farmers or dells.  I was on the third floor of the McIntyre building on the Bridgeton campus and I walked into a cow.  A cow!  Actually, right before impact, I slipped on something wet, which I will pretend was not cow urine, then I lunged forward and planted my face squarely into the side of the massive foul smelling beast.

I sat on the floor for a second with my hand resting in the wet substance, which, once again, I will assume was not urine even though it felt warm, trying to figure out whether I really just crashed into a cow or whether I had slipped into a really elaborate dream.  Before I could decide, Colbert Thornton approached me and frantically inquired, "Where's Sasha?"  I really didn't know how to respond to that.  For one thing, I didn't know.  For another thing, I just had a very physical confrontation with a cow and the cow had won.  I was trying to recover while wiping off the liquid that was beginning to smell more and more like urine.  How could she be so concerned with my sister's whereabouts when there was a cow standing in the middle of the hallway? A cow!

"You mean that's not Sasha?" the scrawny brunette standing next to Colbert said. I didn't know who she was.  I barely knew any of the students at Bridgeton.  I only knew Colbert because she was Sasha's vice-president on student council.  Last year, when they were running for office, they were constantly together planning their campaign. They had professional banners and buttons made, they handed out flyers describing their platform, they even used Colbert's house as a campaign office and made phone calls to other students in order to insure their vote. Talk about overkill.

All of their efforts weren't needed, however, because Blake Armstrong withdrew two weeks before the election and Leila Baker transferred to another school three days before.  Sasha and Colbert won by default.

"Susannah, would Sasha walk into a cow?"  Colbert asked as if my awkwardness should have been proof enough I could not possibly be Sasha. 

Well, at least I knew I wasn't the only one that saw the cow. 

“Sorry, black people look the same to me,” Susannah said with a shrug.

I chose to ignore that comment and focus on the “elephant in the room.” Well, I guess, literally, it was a cow in the room. I was too confused to ask a logical question. So, in the eloquent and articulate manner only I could accomplish I grunted, "Cow," while pointing at it like a three-year-old.

"Yeah, I can see that."  Colbert rolled her eyes and tucked her blond bob behind her ears.  She had just gotten it cut and now looked like that little French cartoon character.  What was her name?  Amanda, Emily, Elise, Eloise?  Suddenly, I wasn't thinking of the cow anymore as I tried to figure out the name of the little French cartoon girl.  Madeline?  No, that was the other one. 
Eloise, definitely Eloise.
Or maybe I confused the two. Let's see, one was from France and one was from New York.

"Do you know where your sister is or not?  It's important," Colbert nearly yelled. Her voice brought me out of my thoughts of cartoon characters and back to the reality that I practically sat under a cow in a urine-like substance I refused to believe was urine.

I looked at the cow then at Colbert then back at the cow and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why they didn't care a cow was in the middle of the hallway.  And why was the cow named Heather according to the sign around its neck?

Colbert and company soon tired of my dumbfounded staring and stormed off leaving me alone with Heather the cow.

"It's the Fat Tuesday Cow," Sasha explained when I caught her outside of her first period class.

"What?"  I assumed she meant Fat Tuesday as in Mardi
Gras
, but I still didn't understand what that had to do with a cow.

"Every year, on Fat Tuesday, someone steals a cow from Mr. Dunn's farm, walks it up to the top floor of one of the buildings and names it after a freshman. You missed it last year. You were on an audition."

"Why would anyone do that?"

"It's a tradition.  It takes forever to get the cow out of the building since it won't fit in the elevator and apparently cows are afraid to go down stairs."

"But why do they name it after a freshman?" I asked as the warning bell sounded.  Sasha looked at the clock.  I knew she worried about me being late to class. 
Again.

"Well, it's always a freshman who needs a little more…exercise than most."

"You mean they're calling some poor girl a fat cow?  That's awful.  They could scar her for life."  I felt a hard lump develop in the back of my throat.  Tears threatened to follow soon. As a dancer, I knew how some girls struggled with body image.  Just last year, Grace Younger, a girl from my studio, was hospitalized for anorexia and had to miss the spring recital.  "Sasha, this is terrible. Who would do something like this?"

"The Bitch Brigade," she said in her 'duh' voice as if I was an idiot for not knowing.

"Bitch Brigade?
You mean they're real?" I'd heard stories about them, but I always thought they were fabrications or exaggerations. To me, the Bitch Brigade was Bridgeton's equivalent of the boogieman.