House of Dance Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Lucky for you,” she said, “that you’re cousin free.”
    “I guess,” I said.
    “Then again,” she said, “there’s this lifeguard. Totally and completely hot. Take Nick and times him by a hundred.”
    “Do you talk to him?”
    “No, I don’t talk to him. I just look at him, and that’s enough.” I pictured Leisha down at the beach with her perfect model body. If she’d seen the guy, then he’d seen her. There was no doubting that.
    “So what’s with you?” she said. “What’s up?”
    “I wanted…” I began, and then I didn’t know where to start, how to explain how my summer was going, what it was that I felt, why I’d called in the first place when I had to know that she would be busy, that she wouldn’t have the time to talk. “My granddad’s been sick,” I said fast. “And my mother’s my mother. And Nick is never home. Stuff.” I wanted to tell Leisha about the House of Dance and the balloon bouquet. About the dancers I’d seen through the window. About my grandfather reading magazines on places he would never ever get to. “Music and throb,” I wanted to say, but that would have been stupid, so I still kept hunting for words, and then, before I knew what words to use, all hell was letting loose.
    “Oh, my God,” Leisha said, whispering no more.
    “What?” I could hear crashing and scampering, someone bawling his eyes out.
    “I think Jake’s just flushed his brother’sswimsuit down the toilet.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “No. I’m not. Oh. My. God. It never ends. I have to go, Rosie. I’m sorry.”
    “Eight more weeks and we’re juniors together,” I said.
    “Heaven,” she said. “Compared to this.” It was getting louder and louder where she was. As if she were taking a walk in a zoo right around feeding time.
    I hung up the phone, and the skies were dark. I lay down and hoped that I would fall asleep sooner than I could start to cry.

TEN
    T HE VERY LAST TIME I saw my father, he was standing in the shadows. There was the bigness of a moon shining in through my bedroom windows, but all I saw was half of his face and the thumb that he was pressing to his earlobe. He thought I was asleep, and even though I was pretty sure he was leaving for good—I had heard what he had said; I had heard my mother crying—that’s what I let him think, that I was asleep, because he didn’t deserve to know how much I was going to miss him.
    My father was a big, tall guy and half Italian, and he was more celebrity than anything else, made you feel as big and special as he was when he was in the room. Then he’d leave and wouldn’t come home for days, and he’d make you feel forgotten. When I was little, I told Nick, Leisha, and Rocco that he was an astronaut. I told them that he rode elephants in India. I told them that he was digging up a new Egyptian mummy. I told them that he was far too famous to spend much time at home. But when he left for good, I told them nothing except that life was better without him. “More room for me in my house” is what I said, and my very best friends made like they believed me.
    The first year was the hardest: the first birthday of mine, the first birthday of Mom’s, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas. Granddad would come, but my mother still was crying or about to start crying, tears streaking down her face and globbing hermascara. I think it was after Christmas when Granddad started to say that it was time that Mom moved on, that life was to be lived, that there was a big wide world to see, and maybe, he said, my father’s running off had been some kind of hidden blessing. My mom didn’t appreciate that, not at all. “You never liked him,” she would answer, “so don’t pretend you understand.”
    “I know something about loss,” he’d say, “and I know something about not living.”
    “Mom never stopped loving you,” Mom would say. “My loss is bigger. My loss is learning that everyone else is loved more than you