“How’d you get so enlightened?”
He smirked. “I guess it just comes naturally.”
I rolled my eyes. Time to get out of here. I was less unsettled than a moment ago, but here, again, I’d just told Teddy all this really personal stuff. And I didn’t even have alcohol as an excuse this time. “Well, it’s been nice chatting, but I gotta go. I’ll see you later. You still owe me a Laurie.”
7
GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS
Teddy
My idea for Laurie was this kid called Tristan Barnes. He was sixteen, and he was a little shit.
On Tuesday afternoon, I dropped in on the music kids during a group meeting. They and the counselors were settling on the order of operations for their recital or whatever. I hung back until it was over and intercepted him. “Hey, Tristan, want to do me a favor?”
I didn’t wait for his answer, just started walking, trusting he would follow. Which he did. “Sure, yeah.”
I was shamelessly exploiting the fact that some of the kids, Tristan among them, were visibly in awe of me. It was funny how there was an inverse relationship between how starstruck the kids were and how much I liked them. I wondered if that said something about the kids or about me.
“Where’re we going?” Tristan asked.
“I need you to help the dancers with something.”
He stopped in his tracks. “What?”
“They need a guy for their show.”
“To play guitar?”
“Not sure,” I said vaguely, and I kept up a brisk pace until we reached the dance studio. The doors were propped open on account of the heat, so we could hear the music before we could see them. It was Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).”
We peeked in. Girls in leotards were dancing. Most of them were paired up, doing an old-fashioned-looking dance, a waltz maybe, but two of them were doing a modern solo thing—except they were doing it side by side, so was that a duet?—in the middle. It was striking, these two girls doing contemporary moves in the middle of these stylized waltzes, all set to Beyoncé. I mean, I didn’t get it, but it was cool looking.
Gretchen shouted some encouragement, and I swung my attention to her at the edge of the dance floor. She was wearing a leotard, too, and it stopped me in my tracks. Which was dumb because I’d seen her in a swimsuit. I’d seen her in two different swimsuits.
The leotard was light blue, and she was wearing a pair of ratty shorts over it. It was, theoretically, nothing special. But damn, there was something about it. Or maybe it was the way she was moving in it. She was following along with the girls in the center, doing the moves they did but in a smaller, more restrained way. From my vantage point, she was in profile, and she was nodding and whispering to herself. When the girls leaped, she made a leaping motion with her arms but stayed on the ground. When they turned, she stayed where she was but made a looping motion with one hand. She looked a bit like a classical conductor.
If classical conductors perspired. She wassweating. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but it was wet along the hairline. Her face was shiny, and there were blooms of sweat under her arms and down the gentle valley made by her breasts.
There was something oddly compelling about all that sweat. And about the intensity of her concentration.
One of the girls stumbled over a move, a sort of leap-twist hybrid, and Gretchen went over to her and said, “You have to lift with the leading hand. Like this.” I was, frankly, astounded at the version of it she performed. I could not believe how she could just be standing there one moment and the next be propelling herself up and around so high and so thoroughly. And she did it casually, like it was no big deal.
She caught sight of us as she spun, and I worried for a moment that we would distract her, make her trip on her landing, but no. She merely completed her spin, landed much more lightly on her feet than should have been possible given the height she’d achieved, and came toward us smiling. “Is this our Laurie?”
Tristan said, “Huh?” at the same time I said, “Yep.”
“Thanks so much for helping us out.” She held her hand out to Tristan. “I’m Gretchen.”
Tristan shook her hand but didn’t say anything—fair enough, maybe he was struck dumb. I understood. “This is Tristan,” I said.
“Aka Laurie,” Gretchen said.
“I thought you needed a boy,” Tristan said.
“We do.”
“What’s with the Lori thing, then?”
