How to Be Brave(11)

Chloe instructs us to state our name, our year, and one word to describe us. Because I’m at the end of the line, I’m first. Great.

Deep breath. “Hey, everyone. I’m Georgia—”

“We can’t hear you,” Avery bellows into the mic. “Speak up, please.”

“Sorry!” I yell as loud as I can, but I’m not sure if it’s loud enough. “I’m Georgia, I’m a senior, and my word is … um, happy!” Oh my God, what a f*cking lie. That’s the best you could come up with, Georgia?

No one says anything, but I see Liss nod and wave and give another thumbs-up (so forced), and Avery moves down the line one by one. Turns out Sassy-pants’ name is Audrey, she’s a sophomore, and her word is, of course, sassy (she flashes her ass and everyone giggles), and my fellow normal’s name is Mary, she’s a freshman, and her word is cheerful. Way to be creative, Mary, I think. But then again, who am I to talk? I’m the f*cking seventh dwarf.

After every girl has given her favorite inane modifier, Avery takes charge again. “Okay, girls! We have three full afternoons of tryouts. Each day, a third of you will be cut. It’s going to be intense. It’s going to be stressful. But it’s also going to be fun, believe you me.” She giggles at her own little secret joke, and I’m already annoyed. “So now, to start, we’re going to begin with the fun part! We’re going to blast some music, a medley, if you will, and we’re going to ask you to just break out, you know, to freestyle it.”

I turn to Sassy-pants—excuse me, I mean Audrey. “I’m sorry, what?”

“She wants us to dance,” she says, smiling. “It’s a test to see if we can just like let loose or whatever.”

“Oh.” A test. A dance test. A Let Loose test.

Okay, then. I mean, I’m good at tests. I can do this.

I work up my nerve by shaking out my wrists and jumping in place. Chloe walks up to the stereo and presses a button on her iPhone. A lone electronic tune starts low and quickly gains volume, shaking the walls along with the girls around me.

“Oh my God, Taylor Swift! All right!”

Here’s the thing. I love to dance. I just don’t get to do it that much. Sometimes my parents would take me to huge Greek banquets where I’d get dizzy in the endless circles of dance, but I don’t go to school dances or anything. Liss and I did try to go to one freshman year. It was mostly lame—well, except for when it got shut down. That actually turned out to be pretty awesome. We sat on the bleachers for a good hour while the juniors and seniors humped in the middle of the dance floor. And I don’t mean figuratively humped. I mean literally, in the true dictionary sense of the word. Humped, as in had sex. (And yes, it’s in the dictionary, listed as #4. Slang: vulgar. An act or instance of coitus. And yes, I looked it up.) Mrs. O’Brien, the since-retired math teacher, went to break up the massive swell of kids who were congregated together at the middle of the dance floor. Turned out Tim Johnson had his you-know-what in Maggie Kimmel’s you-know-where. Most of the kids in the swarm didn’t know what was happening—they were just joining the bumping and grinding bandwagon—but Mrs. O’Brien almost had to get a bucket of water to break apart the act that was occurring at the center of the storm. Not even kidding. Principal Q-tip was called in, and he shut down the dance and everyone booed him.

We ended up out on the curb. We called our parents, but because of Saturday night traffic, it took my mom forty-five minutes to get us, and you should have heard her screaming into the phone that Monday morning. “Nine-thirty P.M. on a Saturday night in the middle of Chicago, you throw underaged, minor girls on the street? What are you, f*cking insane?” I actually thought she was serious about suing the school, but I soon realized that my parents didn’t have enough money to hire a lawyer, and it eventually became one of those crazy stories we told over dinner. I still don’t know how it didn’t make the news.

All dances were canceled that year and the next, and by the time they reinstated them our junior year, I could really have cared less. Plus my mom wouldn’t have let me go, anyway. Even so, Liss and I have spent many a Friday night turning my bedroom into a miniclub with Christmas lights and my blaring speakers. We could dance for hours on my bed. When she was feeling good, my mom would come in sometimes to join us. And she had moves. She mostly loved to listen to the blues and jazz—Nina Simone, Miles Davis, et cetera—but she was also raised on disco, Michael Jackson and Madonna and all that. She was a product of the late seventies and early eighties, after all. I know how to let loose. I learned from the best.

So I hear the music and decide to just do it. Just have fun. Taylor’s telling me that it’s gonna be all right, and right now, in this moment, I believe her. I throw caution to the wind. I chill. I relax. I move and shake and spin and whirl. Audrey and I are jumping and smiling and I’m waving my arms and shaking my hips. The music changes, first some Beyoncé, then Katy Perry, and Avery’s yelling into the microphone, “I want to see your real spirit!” and I’m totally there. I’m dancing, and I’m alive, and this is my time. This is my day.

*

Well, except maybe it’s not. I get cut after the first round. Not after the dancing; I made it through that. But they ask us to show them three cheers and to do a trick if we know any, so I split the V and dotted the I, and I curled the C all the way to T-O-R-Y. I even did a cartwheel and a round-off. But it wasn’t enough. I was let go. After the first day.