Instructions for Dancing(34)

CHAPTER 30





Off the Cliff



WHEN I GET home from school the next day, Mom and Danica are at the kitchen table peering at Danica’s laptop screen.

Mom says a quick hello before she goes back to typing something.

Danica sighs and takes the laptop away from her. “No, Mom, you have to say something interesting about yourself,” she whines. “Don’t make it about being a mother. Make it about you.”

I don’t have to see Mom’s face to know she’s smiling her look how much you don’t know yet smile. “Those are the same thing, D!”

“But being a mom is not sexy.”

“I’ll remind you that you said that in about twenty years,” Mom says.

I can’t believe Danica is trying to talk Mom into dating. First Sophie and Cassidy, then Dad getting engaged and now this?

When Martin texts me five minutes later to meet him at La Brea Tar Pits, I get on my bike right away. Anything to get me out of my own head.



La Brea Tar Pits is called La Brea Tar Pits because it’s on La Brea Avenue and has quite a few…tar pits. The largest one, Lake Pit, is just off the main entrance. The tar is greenish-black, thick and always oozing. Occasionally a bubble of stinky air burps to the surface.

Lake Pit is my favorite of the pits because it has one of the most macabre sculptures I’ve ever seen. It’s of three enormous woolly mammoths—two adults and a baby. One of the adults is trapped waist-deep in tar. The other adult and the baby mammoth are safe on land, but the baby is clearly trumpeting in distress. Its mouth is frozen wide-open in a scream. Its trunk is rigid and pointed straight at the trapped mammoth. The other adult mammoth looks resigned.

The thing about the sculpture is that it captures a moment in time. You can read it two ways. Either the mammoth in the pit is done for and we’re seeing its last seconds on earth. Or we’re actually seeing the start of a miraculous escape.

How I read it changes depending on my mood.

Today, I decide that the mammoth in the pit is doomed.

I leave the mammoth family to their never-ending tragedy and climb to the top of the main hill and sit down on the grass. It’s three o’clock. At this time of day the park population is mostly families with young children. I watch the little kids run up the hill and roll down it over and over again. I watch their anxious parents watch them anxiously.

Ten minutes later, Martin comes ambling up the hill. He’s wearing a khaki shirt with khaki shorts and khaki hat. There’s a red handkerchief tied around his neck.

“You look like a park ranger,” I say.



“Thanks,” he says. He sits down and wipes his forehead. With the handkerchief.

Before I can make fun of his outfit some more, I notice a little boy staring at the mammoth sculpture. His mom is with him. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but it’s obvious that the boy is upset and his mom is trying to comfort him.

“That thing is such a bummer of truth,” I say.

“I guess I don’t need to ask what kind of mood you’re in,” Martin says.

I shrug and then sigh.

“Sophie and Cassidy told me about the fight,” he says.

“Yeah, I figured,” I say. I rest my head on his shoulder and look out over the park.

“Tell me what you see,” he says, putting see in air quotes.

“You want me to tell you how people end up?” I ask, and he nods.

I look around, trying to find a couple on the verge of kissing. I find one, a guy and a girl, picnicking next to a big sycamore tree. I point them out to Martin. Once their vision ends, I tell him the outcoMe: “Semester-abroad trip to Japan. She falls in love with a Japanese girl.”

“Huh,” he says.

I find another couple holding hands. Again, I point them out to Martin. I don’t have to wait too long for the inevitable kiss. “He proposes to her and she turns him down. She doesn’t love him enough.”

Another couple on a blanket are already kissing. He moves to New York.

We spend the next hour like this. I see all the things I expect to. A lot of sweet beginnings. A lot of bitter endings. Affairs, deaths, illnesses, disenchantment and boredom.



After a while I can’t take any more, and stop us.

People have certain tells when they’re about to kiss: a light hand on a shoulder, or a touch to a waist, or a subtle closing down of the distance between bodies. The only way to live with this curse is to avoid seeing kisses in the first place. I need to learn to look away in time.

“Maybe you could tell them about the visions and what’s going to happen,” Martin says. He’s talking about Sophie and Cassidy, but I know he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just as confused and frustrated as I am. It would be cruel to tell them what’s going to happen to them. I’d be taking away their happiness.

I shake my head. “They’d never believe me.” Couples in love believe they’ll always be in love. It’s one of the ways you know you’re in love in the first place.

“Can’t you just pretend you don’t know?”

“Martin, you didn’t see what I saw. It’s awful. They’re going to make each other so sad. Also, the biggest problem isn’t that they break up. The problem is that they’re going to break us all up. The four of us are not going to be friends anymore. No more epic road trip. No more group chats. No college spring breaks. No more anything.”