Dancing Dudes (4 page)

4

THE NEXT DAY
after lunch, we began working on our valentine boxes. Mrs. Gibson had us move to the tables in the back of the classroom. I was at a table with Kelly, Brad, Eden, Luke, and Zach.

Mrs. Gibson put some pink, red, and white construction paper, a bunch of pink and red tissue paper, and some glue in the middle of each table. She showed us a box that a kid decorated last year. It looked pretty good. I knew right then that mine was never going to look that good. My art projects always stink.

I thought I would glue some tissue paper all around my box first, and then I could make hearts and stuff out of the other paper and glue them on the sides. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that you shouldn’t use too much glue with tissue paper. It soaked right through and got my tissue paper all soggy. There was glue on my hands and on the table, and my tissue paper was ripping apart. I stuck it on as well as I could.

I glanced around our table to see how everyone else was doing. Zach was cutting out pink footballs and basketballs and pasting them all over his box. I looked over at Kelly, who was cutting out perfectly shaped hearts. I thought I would try that, too. I grabbed some scissors and some paper and started cutting.

“Whoa,” I said, looking at the weird shape I cut out. It looked nothing like a heart. I tried a few more. They looked more like eggs.
If only this were an Easter box, it would look great,
I thought. This was harder than it looked. I peeked over at Kelly’s box. It was perfect, covered in hearts of all different sizes and colors.

“Hey, Kelly,” I said. “How did you make those hearts look so good? Mine look terrible.”

“Oh, those are hearts?” she said. “I thought you were cutting out eggs.”

“Yeah, they’re
supposed
to be hearts,” I said. “Do you think you could maybe cut some out for me?”

She smiled and grabbed a few pieces of paper. In no time at all, she handed me a pile of pink and white hearts.

“Wow, thanks,” I said. “Hey, does anyone want to put eggs on their box? I have some extras.”

“Actually,” Kelly said, “I’ll take them.”

“What? Are you crazy?” I said. “I was just kidding.”

Kelly just smiled again and took the handful of egg shapes and, in a matter of seconds, cut them into more perfectly shaped hearts.

“Wow, you
are
a heart expert,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. No wonder Graham likes her so much.

Mrs. Gibson clapped her hands and waited for us to quiet down.“You are all doing such wonderful work on your boxes that I hate to have you stop, but we’ll have time to finish them tomorrow,” she said. “So let’s clean up and return to your desks. I have one more announcement to make before the bell rings.”

We all cleaned up as fast as we could and ran back to our desks, wondering what it could be.

“Well, as you know, the fourth-grade recital is coming up in two weeks. Mr. Fowl’s class will be singing some traditional American folk songs, and I am thrilled to announce that our class will be performing a real Western hoedown!”

We all looked at each other. Mrs. Gibson seemed much more excited than we did. “That means you will all be learning to square-dance.”

I looked at Graham. He was giving Diane an
I told you so
look
.

“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Gibson said. “You are going to have a wonderful time square-dancing. I’m sure you will all love it as much as I do. My husband and I used to have such a grand time square-dancing.”

I’d never heard Mrs. Gibson mention her husband before, but my mom told me he died a long time ago. I could tell she missed him.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I will assign each of you a dance partner. That means we’ll line everyone up from smallest to tallest—boys on one side, and girls on the other—so we can match you up with a dance partner close to your height.”

Immediately, everyone looked around the room to see who was about their same height. The only people that I knew for sure would be paired up together were Diane and David, since they were both the tallest, and Graham and Suzy, since they were both the shortest. I hoped I would get to dance with Heidi.

Then the end-of-school bell rang, and we were all crowding through the door.

“What am I going to do, Raymond?” Graham said by the coatracks.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Graham had a serious look on his face.

“I mean how am I going to get Kelly to be my dance partner?” he asked. “This could be the moment I’ve waited for my entire life. Not only would I get to dance with her that night, but we’ll be practicing this dance for two weeks.” Graham’s eyes looked crazy, and he was talking really fast.

“I never thought of it like that,” I said. “But I don’t know how you would do it. You and Suzy are the two shortest kids in our class. Unless you can grow overnight, you are definitely going to get matched up with Suzy tomorrow.”

“You’re right,” Graham said. “Unless . . .” He started to smile. “Unless I wasn’t at school tomorrow for the lineup. If I’m not there, Suzy will get paired up with someone else.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But so will Kelly.”

“Oh, yeah,” Graham said. He thought in silence for a moment. “Maybe an idea will come to me tonight.”

 

 

The next morning, Graham wasn’t out on his driveway waiting for me like usual. I was about to ring his doorbell when he opened the door.

“Hey, Graham, running a little late?” I asked.

“No, just eating an extra bowl of cereal,” he said. Graham loved cereal as much as I did. “I was trying to eat as much as I could. The box said there was a toy inside, but I couldn’t find it.”

“That stinks,” I said. “So did you figure out a way to get paired up with Kelly?”

Graham shook his head. “I couldn’t think of anything,” he said. “Matt is the next shortest kid, and he’s still about four inches taller than me. If Suzy weren’t there, it would work out great. Besides Suzy, there aren’t very many short girls. Kelly’s probably even the next in line.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “At least if you don’t get to dance with Kelly, you still get to give her a valentine telling her how much you like her. And she’s making a great valentine box. She was sitting at my table when we made them. You’ll know hers because she has a bunch of perfectly shaped hearts all over it. I mean, those hearts are
perfect
.”

“Sounds like they’re just as perfect as she is,” Graham said in a soft voice.

Sometimes Graham says the strangest things. “Yeah, whatever you say,” I said.

School started out as boring as usual. At lunch we went out and played basketball. There wasn’t any snow on the playground except for some piles of slush on the sides. I stepped in one and got my shoe drenched. It was the kind of wet that I knew would stay soggy the rest of the day. Just as recess was about to end, a lady from the office came out looking for Kelly.

“What’s that all about?” Graham said, staring at Kelly and the office lady.

Then Kelly called out to her friends on the playground, “I have to go—my mom’s picking me up.” Just as she disappeared into the school, the bell rang and recess was over.

“This is perfect!” Graham said. He had a huge smile on his face and was rubbing his hands together.

“What?” I asked. “What’s so great about Kelly’s mom taking her out of school?”

“Don’t you get it?” Graham said. “She won’t be in the lineup today for the dance partners.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said. “It seems to me that now you won’t get paired up with Kelly for sure.”

“That would be true if I were actually going to
be
here for the lineup,” Graham said with an evil smile. “I think I feel something coming on, like a bad stomachache . . . if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do know what you mean,” I said.

“Okay, Raymond, I’ll spell it out for you,” Graham said, letting out a huge breath. “If Kelly is gone and I am gone, then everyone will get paired up except us. Then when we come back tomorrow, Mrs. Gibson will have no other choice than to make us partners. Now do you get it?”

“
Ooooh
, that’s brilliant,” I said. We both ran into class and sat down. Graham immediately made a face like David had just punched him in the stomach. Slowly, he stood up and walked over to Mrs. Gibson’s desk all hunched over. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it must have been good, because Mrs. Gibson got up and walked him out the door.

I couldn’t believe it. I would never be able to pull that off. One, I’m a lousy actor and I never get away with anything. And two, I’m just a chicken. I was more and more convinced that Graham was definitely more manly than I was. I watched proudly as my manly coach walked down the hall.

A few minutes passed by, and Mrs. Gibson was back. “Raymond, could you bring Graham’s coat to the office? He’ll be going home as soon as his mother arrives,” she said.

“Okay,” I answered. I grabbed his coat and ran down the hall.

“Walk, please. . . .” I heard Mrs. Gibson calling from our room. I stopped running and walked the rest of the way.

Graham was sitting in a chair in the office by the fish tank.

“Graham, I can’t believe you’re going home. How did you do it?” I asked.

He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Ah, it was a cinch. I just said I felt like I was about to throw up,” he said. “And it seemed like Mrs. Gibson didn’t want any of that in her classroom, so she just took me straight here. By the way, I just thought of manly rule number three: A man does whatever it takes to dance with his girl.”

“Yeah, well, good luck,” I said. “I’ll call you and tell you what happens—I’ve got to get back to class.”

“See you,
hermano
,” Graham called out in his sick voice as I left the office. I walked back to class going over the manly rules: never cry, always write poems for your girlfriend, and do whatever it takes to dance with her.

We spent the next hour working on our valentine boxes. Mine was looking much better with the hearts Kelly gave me.

“When you finish, be sure to put your names on your boxes,” Mrs. Gibson said. Then she picked up Kelly’s box and held it high for all of us to see. “Kelly was very creative and wrote her name in little hearts. So don’t be afraid to be creative with your name as well.”

Kelly’s box looked great. I wished I had thought of that. Then I saw a bunch of extra tiny hearts that Kelly had cut out but hadn’t used yet. Since she left with her mom, I thought I would just borrow a few and write my name in hearts, too. There weren’t enough to write my whole name, so I just made a big
R
for
Raymond
.

This was turning out to be my best school project ever. Usually my art projects never look good. Last year we made clay sculptures of our heads and put them in one of those ovens that turn clay hard like a statue. I rolled a bunch of thin pieces of clay for my hair, but somehow I didn’t stick them on very well and they fell off in the oven. When it came out, it looked like a crazy old bald man. I took it home and my mom actually thought it was a statue of my grandpa’s head.

We worked on the boxes for a long time. I wondered if Mrs. Gibson forgot that she told us she would be assigning dance partners today. But it was like she read my mind, because just then she said, “Okay, everyone, it looks like you’re all finished. Let’s put your boxes down and come to the front of the room.”

The moment we had all waited for was about to begin. “Boys, I need you to line up tallest to smallest,” she said. We all scurried around trying to get in order. She had to switch a few people who were in the wrong spots. Then she did the same thing with the girls.

I almost jumped for joy when I turned to see Heidi lined up right next to me.

“I guess I’m stuck with you,” Heidi joked.

“I guess so.” I smiled. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Graham.

Then, as everything looked so perfect, something terrible happened: Kelly walked through the doorway.

“Just in time, Kelly,” Mrs. Gibson said. “Come stand here next to Suzy.”

Oh, no! What about Graham?
I thought.

When Kelly got into the line, all the girls moved down. Suddenly, I found myself face-to-face with Lizzy. I stopped worrying about Graham and started worrying about
me
.

“Wait!” I called out. I could hear Graham reciting manly rule number three in my head:
A man does whatever it takes to dance with his girl.

“What is it, Raymond?” Mrs. Gibson asked.

“Shouldn’t I be with Heidi instead of Lizzy?” I said. Lizzy gave me a nasty look.

Mrs. Gibson glanced over. “No, I think we’re fine the way we are,” she said. She continued on down to the end of the line.

“All right, it looks like we’ve done it. And we have a perfect number of boys and girls,” she said.