Lupe Wong Won't Dance Read online

  “Hey little one.” Mom gives me a quick squeeze.

  I reach up and slide her earring back into place. “Hey.”

  She walks over to the Crock-Pot. Lifting the lid, she winces. “Well, it smells good anyway.” She lifts my hat like she did the Crock-Pot lid and takes a whiff. “Can’t say the same. Go clean up and be back in ten,” she says. Paolo and I both run for Azteca, but he wins. After a quick scrubdown, we’re both back at the dinner table as my mom starts serving.

  We each squeeze into our chairs in the kitchen nook. Dad’s chair against the wall is still pulled out like he might show up any minute. We might gain valuable space if we moved Dad’s chair out and shoved the table against the wall, but no one’s brought it up even once, so I think we all prefer to leave Dad’s chair right where it is and deal with the tiny kitchen.

  Mom bows her head. “Paolo?”

  His voice has about as much feeling as an email. “Thank you, God, for all that we have. Bless this interesting food to our bodies. And please help Lupe with her cleanliness so she can be next to you or whatever the saying thing says. Amen.”

  Mom sighs and sticks her fork in what looks like olive-colored jerky. “So, how was everyone’s day?”

  “Well,” I say before Paolo can beat me. “You aren’t going to believe what they’re trying to pull in P.E.”

  “Yes, Becky Solden already called me,” she says.

  “She what?!” It’s part of the punishment for having a parent who’s also a teacher. Even worse, Mom teaches kindergarten at the local elementary school, so there’s a decent chance she’s had nearly every teacher’s kid in her class at some point. I didn’t stand a chance. They all know each other. Talk in class … Mom knows. Only read the first half of Anne of Green Gables then accidentally Google the ending of Anne of Avonlea instead for your book report … Mom knows.

  “Coach Solden only wants you to be successful. I’ve neglected you in the dancing area. It’s one thing to be a good dancer.” She starts a seated Macarena. “It’s another to be a good dance partner.” Her eyes fix on Paolo.

  He nearly chokes on his veggie-meat stuff. “No, Mom. Please, no.”

  Mom stands and holds her hand out to Paolo. He looks like she’s holding an ice pick to his eyeball.

  Her voice drops. “Up. Now.”

  Paolo slumps for a second, then he stands and takes her hand.

  She hums out. “If it hadn’t been for Cotton-Eyed Joe …”

  I’m stunned into paralysis by a rehash of the terror I endured earlier. Mom is enthusiastically clodhopping around the kitchen. She makes all the same moves as the dancers in the videos, but she’s a coffeed-up version. My brother is the zombie version. Every couple of turns he glares over at me. I’m in for an epic wedgie for bringing this up. Finally, after nearly knocking over a chair, Mom makes a little bow.

  “Thank you, kind sir,” she says.

  Paolo sits down and starts shoveling glop in his mouth before she can go for round two.

  “Mom, I really, really, really do not want to dance. Whose idea was it anyway to put dancing in P.E.?” I say.

  “I had to do it when I was your age too. I don’t know, Lupe. It’s just always been around.” Mom lays her hand on my cheek. “There are battles worth fighting. Like the dress code thing or your bubbles.” She gives my cheek a quick pinch. “Those, my dear, are good causes. But getting rid of a few weeks of dancing, that isn’t one of them.” She spoons stew onto my plate. “Learn to dance.” She cocks her head to one side and makes stiff robot moves with her arms and legs. “See? It’s freeing.”

  She can’t possibly understand. Dancing is her superpower to embarrass me. Even though she knows my deal with Uncle Hector and how badly I need this A, it doesn’t look like I’ll get any support from her. So when we finish eating, I slink away while she’s busy doing some dance she calls the running man.

  I need Andy.

  I hurry to take a shower. (Not because of Paolo’s stupid prayer.) I wash up and shave the two hairs on my right armpit.

  I sit down at the one and only computer in the house, where everyone knows all your business. I click on Andy’s number and the computer chirps. Andy’s face pops up. She has a big white glob of toothpaste on her forehead, but the zit underneath pokes through the center like a cherry on top of whipped cream.

  “Can I come over?” I ask.

  “What about Doctor Who?”

  I shrug. “Niles can’t tonight for some reason.”

  Andy flinches back. “Weird.”

  I’m glad it’s not just me. “Anyway, can I come over?”

  Andy smiles. “I bet I know what this is about.” Her mom’s a door-crack listener, so Andy is half whispering. “My mom did her usual …” Andy makes her signature hand puppet. “ ‘How was your day, dear? What did you learn? Did you eat all your lunch?’ ” She puts her hand down. “Anyway, I told her about square dancing …”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “She started dancing.”

  Andy’s eyes widen. “If you can call it that. She started kicking her legs out from side to side.”

  I imagine her mom in their perfect museum of a house, wearing her high heels on their marble floors, flapping around like a flamingo on ice.

  “And, Lupe …” Andy shuts her eyes so tight they look like they might suck into her brain.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “My mom yelled, ‘Grab your partner!’ and arm-locked me into a twirl.”

  I slap my hand over my mouth.

  “Apparently it’s an official thing,” she says. “It’s universal. They all did it.”

  “I know. My mom told me. There should be a warning label on it or something. Do they even know how awful this is?” I ask.

  “Do you think they’re brainwashed with subliminal messages by the guy calling out the dance moves?” Andy crinkles her forehead and a flake of toothpaste falls off.

  “That’s one theory,” I say. “There has to be a way to stop this.”

  “How’d it go with Coach Solden after school?”

  I give her the thumbs-down. “Can I borrow your laptop when I come over?”

  “I guess. We can tell my mom you’re writing a letter to the producers to complain about how long it is between Doctor Who seasons.”

  I’m about to object. Instead, I grab a Post-it note and a pen. I jot down out of Andy’s line of sight, Protest letter to BBC.

  “What do you really need the laptop for?” she asks.

  I motion with my eyes toward the kitchen. “I want to do some research without an audience.” The smell of soaking cornhusks drifts into my room.

  Abuela Salgado’s voice blares over speakerphone. “¡Le vas a poner pasas a los tamales! ¿Sí o no?”

  Andy jumps. “Why’s your grandma so mad?”

  “She’s not mad. She just has strong opinions on things. My mom refuses to put raisins in her tamales.” I agree with Mom. But I’m not ready to make weird food segregation one of my causes.

  “Hmmm. Imagine that,” Andy says. “Your grandma has strong opinions.”

  “Very funny,” I say. She doesn’t even know how Grandma Wong feels about putting cilantro in ha gao. Genetically speaking, I didn’t stand a chance.

  Mom hangs up, and within a few seconds Missy Elliott starts rapping her own strong opinions from my mom’s phone.

  Andy shrugs. “Your mom’s still way less embarrassing than mine. At least your mom doesn’t make you listen to Enya.”

  Andy doesn’t know it, but behind her face on the monitor, my mom is squirming around like she’s having contractions.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mrs. Washington greets me at the door of Andy’s house wearing her usual pencil skirt and fancy blouse. “¡Hola, Guadalupe!” she says way too loudly. “Ni hao!”

  I bite back a smile. I’m not sure why Mrs. Washington thinks yelling is necessary, but it’s an improvement from when she used to call out, “Feliz cumpleaños,” then a “Wo ai ni” follow-up. I think it�
��s her way of trying to understand my cultures after my failed Mexinese ethnicity-bubble campaign.

  “Ni hao, Mrs. Washington,” I say back.

  A full nasal assault of a vanilla Glade PlugIns greets me as I walk in. I slip off my flip-flops. My feet hit the cold marble and a shiver runs from my toes up my legs.

  Andy’s mom has replaced their couch pillows … again, and yet another new “Live, Laugh, Love” sign hangs over the fireplace. Our mantel still has decades of smoke stains and dried orange petals left over from Día de los Muertos. I’m pretty sure Andy’s mom single-handedly keeps HomeGoods in business.

  “Andalusia tells me you two are working on something this evening,” she says.

  “Uh, yeah, something,” I answer.

  “Could it possibly have anything to do with …” She smiles and skips backward a few steps, which is an interesting move, but I don’t think has anything to do with square dancing.

  I avert my eyes hoping she won’t snag my arm into a twirl. “Yep.”

  She re-tucks her blouse into her waistband. “I know it’s not your thing, Guadalupe,” she says, giving me a quick hug. “Someday you might look back on this as something you actually enjoyed.” She gives a wince and holds her lower back after that move. “Ooph … enjoy your youth.”

  I snort. “No offense. But, I don’t have time to enjoy my youth.”

  Mrs. Washington presses her lips together, then a laugh escapes. “Well, I have faith that you and Andy are going to find a way.”

  “Thanks for believing in us, I guess,” I say, shrugging.

  She hands me a bowl of carrots, celery, and hummus off the coffee table. “Take this up with you, will you?”

  “Yum,” I say flatly.

  “And don’t forget to chew properly.” She smiles and taps my shoulder. “You don’t have to do the recommended thirty-two, but I find a good dozen chews is perfect.”

  I guess I should be glad that Mrs. Washington cares about me enough to hope I’m both happy and have good digestion.

  “Andalusia!” Mrs. Washington yells out. I know Andy is somewhere rolling her eyes at her full name.

  Her voice echoes down. “In my room.”

  I run upstairs, hoping someday I’ll live in a house where I get to walk up actual stairs to my room.

  When I get there, Andy’s dad is standing in her doorway. “Hey kid,” he says, hitting the bill of my hat and turning to leave. He’s dressed in some sort of Lycra running suit I think is meant to turn his sweat into natural energy. “You two behave.” He gives Andy a mock-serious look, then grins at us and disappears downstairs.

  I flop onto Andy’s bed. Her new soft, cream comforter is like an alpaca and a Snuggie had a baby. My bed still has the Barbie: Mermaidia comforter I insisted on in the first grade. I’ve flipped it over to the bubble side, but Andy still knows what horror lurks on the other side.

  Andy’s closet door is open. The closet is almost as big as my entire room. On one half her jeans and T-shirts hang unfaded and wrinkle-free. Shoes are sorted neatly into cubbies and shiny necklaces she’s never worn are hanging from a jewelry organizer.

  But the other side of the closet is magical. Undissected owl-puke balls sit in a shoebox on one half of a long table. Tiny bones she’s extracted from the owl pellets are carefully placed in piles next to an X-Acto knife.

  The rest of the desk is a miniature model of a mouse city. A gold and red “Welcome to New Yack!” sign is set in swirly letters like it’s an English village. We had a few ideas like Barfsberg, Chunksylvania, and so on, but we settled on New Yack because it sounded classy. Even a pub called The Boney Rodent has two mouse skeletons sitting at the bar holding tiny mugs.

  Besides the twelve-year-old English girl who creates sonatas and concertos, the kid from Memphis who fused an atom, or the Indian boy who created the smallest operational satellite, it’s about the most impressive thing I’ve seen a kid our age do. It’s cool she lets me help pick out names and build stuff every once in a while. But I act casual about it so I don’t get sucked too far into Andy’s mousehole. I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Mrs. Washington hoped and dreamed Andy would create when Andy asked to go to the dollhouse aisle at the craft store. But Mrs. Washington lets Andy keep it hidden behind closed closet doors, “as long as she keeps the rest of her life in order.”

  Cobbled streets and lanterns surround the field mouse graveyard that’s lined with tiny headstones, all with the same last name of Rodentia. My favorite, Paco Rodentia, was mysteriously missing a leg when Andy chiseled him from the barf clump, so she glued a fake leg on him. Somewhere in mouse heaven, Paco’s hobbling around on a prosthetic toothpick.

  Andy grabs her laptop from the shelf above The Boney Rodent and closes the closet door. We sit on her bed and put the computer on a pillow in front of us. Andy slides it closer to me so I can start my research.

  “Can I ask you something?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Why is this so important to you? I mean, can’t you just let this square dancing thing go?”

  I love Andy and she’s usually pretty sensitive to this stuff, but she just can’t know what it’s like to never be able to see your dad again. She wouldn’t understand how it feels, knowing that the last thing he told me was to never give up on things I believe in.

  “No,” I answer. “I can’t let it go.”

  “I wish my mom understood that I had my own ideas.” Andy’s picking at her thumbnail, which means she’s nervous to tell me something. “Now my mom wants me to play club soccer on top of everything else.”

  I actually jump back. “Club soccer!” We both know the club soccer girls at school only hang out together. No outsiders. “You can’t!”

  “It was that or ballet! She thinks it’s the perfect next step toward becoming a well-rounded model citizen.” Andy sighs. “Apparently I need to do some sort of group activity on top of everything else.”

  I guess I should cut her some slack. “But ballet or soccer?” I say. “That means you have to choose Samantha or Jordyn?”

  Jordyn is the Samantha of club soccer. She leads. The others follow.

  “Who would you pick?” Andy asks.

  She’s right. At least Jordyn won’t humiliate her on a daily basis.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she says. “Your mom is happy no matter what you do.” Andy picks at her thumbnail again. “I just want my mom and dad to be proud of me.”

  I try to imagine my mom making Paolo or me do something we hated. “You’ll be a good soccer player, Andy.”

  Andy stops picking at her nail and looks up. “Thanks,” she says, smiling.

  We sit back and find “Cotton-Eyed Joe” on YouTube. Way more than I expect pops up. The song made some big comeback as a line dance. I can’t let my mom find out that tidbit.

  We skip past the learn-to-dance videos and find a bunch about the history of square dancing. I scroll down: “The History of Square Dancing—Ozark Rag,” “The History of Square Dancing—Virginia Reel,” “The History of Square Dancing—Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

  Bingo! “Cotton-Eyed Joe” is a good five minutes longer than any of the others. I must be able to find some valuable ammo in there. I hit play.

  A man wearing overalls and a straw hat grins back at us. “Welcome back to Billy Bob’s Southern Square Dance Nation.” A little stalk of wheat seesaws in his mouth as he talks. I get that square dancing is supposed to be an American tradition, but I’m as American as anyone else, and there’s nothing about this guy that I relate to at all. “Tonight we’re chewing the fat on the old time favorite, ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe.’ ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ predates the Civil War. It was sung by slaves on Southern plantations, and is thought to refer to a man making his rounds with the ladies.”

  I glance at Andy and she shrugs.

  “American history is pretty messed up,” I say.

  She nods but doesn’t say anything. I know sometimes there’s a lot more in what people don’t say out loud.r />
  The man winks and continues. “But why are his eyes white as cotton?” The farmer guy’s eyebrows rise so high they disappear under the brim of his hat. “Could be glaucoma? Or maybe cataracts?” He raises his arms above his head in question. “But if one listens carefully to the words, poor ol’ Cotton-Eyed Joe’s eyes were whited over by chlamydia or syphilis—”

  I hit pause. “Do you know what any of those words mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Andy says. “Greek goddesses?”

  I open another window and start typing in Google: K-L-A-M-I-

  Chlamydia pops up as a suggestion just below. My hands go a little clammy. The word looks way more grown-up and serious than something we should be looking at.

  Andy’s mom might be strict, but because of her whole “well-rounded kids” thing, she doesn’t believe in filters. I take a breath and hover over chlamydia and hit enter. Within a few seconds I’m finding more out about the guy Joe than I should know.

  Chlamydia: a widespread, often asymptomatic sexually transmitted disease caused by Chlamydia trachomatis.

  I type in S-I-F-I. Syphilis pops up this time. I hit enter.

  Syphilis: a sexually transmitted disease caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum.

  Andy gasps.

  I go back to the YouTube video and hit play.

  “That’s right. Cotton-Eyed Joe was doing a little more than farming, folks—”

  I hit pause again.

  Andy and I turn to each other, eyes wide and mouths open. I fall to the ground and giggle, rolling into a ball like an armadillo. “Oh, man. This is too good.”

  But Andy’s not moving. She stares straight ahead stiffly like she just walked in on her parents making out. “I don’t even know what all this means.”

  We can’t be the only ones who’ve noticed all this before. “It means we just won, Andy. We don’t even take sex ed. until the end of next quarter.” I sit back on the bed. “We can put a stop to square dancing now.”