House of Dance Read Online Free PDF

program to get smart. I was thinking as well about how I myself was not having what you’d call a typical teenage summer, but then again, I thought, how many summers actually are? How many summers aren’t in some secret way lonely?
    The grape ice had sent a fist of cold to the right side of my head. I twirled what was left with my spoon and drank it down. Time, I thought, to be on my way. Time. I tossed the paper cone and the plastic spoon into a trash receptacle and found my place inside the rush-hour crowd, which was mostly streaming the opposite way, back toward Granddad’s, making a hot burst of wind.
    I began to focus on the little in-between places inside the commotion: the single halves of strangers’ cell phone talk; the wedges of nothing in and around people’s shoulders; the mini puzzle pieces of undisturbed air; the things that didn’t move set against all the things that did. I remembered my envy of Leisha’s height, her special way of seeing. And then I tilted my own eyes high, to find a slice of sky. That was how I discovered the cluster of balloons—the bobbing silver, white, and pink with the sunbeams trapped inside.
    They could have been clouds, scraping close to earth. They could have been poppies after they’d bloomed or tears on the face of the moon. They had that gleam inside them, and there were maybe eight or ten, knocking softly against one another above a pair of legs that I noticed only after the legs had left the crowd and crossed, a diagonal northwest, to the other side of the street. The legs, the balloons went west. They stopped at the doorto a studio above and cut in away from the street.
    I followed the white, the silver, the pink. I came to the studio door. I pushed through. There was a flight of stairs up: very long, very narrow. There were brownish-reddish–colored walls. There were photographs of dancers—aquamarine and yellow and red gowns, men in black tuxedos—on every available wall. “House of Dance,” a bright painted poster said. House of Dance. I stood there undetected, listening to the music and the throb, the very slight and very sweet bobbing together of balloons.

NINE
    A FTERWARD , WHEN IT was getting past dusk and my mother hadn’t yet come home, I picked up the pink Princess phone my father had once sent me with a note, “Call anytime.” Yeah. Right. I carried the phone to the center of my bed, sat down, and dialed Leisha’s cell, even though she was what she called an emergency cell phone user, which no girl in Somers High or perhaps the whole world could understand except for me. Leisha’s an in-person kind of friend. She’s a big hit or miss on the phone. But I was lonely,and I took a chance, and after five long rings she answered, a little out of breath.
    “Leisha,” I said, “it’s me.”
    “Hi, you.” I could picture her with her hair falling down around her shoulders, a T-shirt on, a pair of silky shorts cut high on her long, lovely legs. She might have been smoothing after-sun butter lotion on, or polishing her toenails with her signature color, which is dark purple tending toward black. She might have been finishing a bowl of orange sherbet, which was something she had almost every night and never gained an ounce.
    “How are the little terrors?” I asked.
    “Rotten,” she said. “Want to know how rotten? Jake managed to get his head stuck in a sand bucket today. Yanked the thing on like a marching-band hat and then couldn’t get it off. Had to take him back to the house to cut him free, and he screamed every step of the way.”
    “Pretty,” I said.
    “Totally Jake,” she said. “Thank God no one I know is down here.” She was whispering, so I had the phone pressed hard against my ear. I imagined her turned away from where everyone else was, curled around the secret of our conversation in a house at the beach where the air outside smelled like breeze and the air inside was all damp towels and little-boy screams and clumps of sand.