Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You (10 page)

When my mother and I finally left Dr. Marlowe's office, there were a few more people in the waiting room with various bandages. It occurred to me then that beauty was a lot like ballet. The bar had been raised there, too. It wasn't because of talent and tenacity, though. It was because of technology.

It made me think of an old
Twilight Zone
episode my parents made Paterson and me watch on the Sci-Fi channel one night. They said it was a classic. It opened with a group of doctors and nurses taking the bandages off a woman's face. She was hoping the operation worked and that she'd look pretty like everyone else. When the last
bandage was finally rolled off, you saw her face and it was beautiful. Then you heard everyone gasp. “It didn't work,” they said disgustedly as the cameras turned on the doctors and nurses. All of them had pig faces.

G
ray said his mother didn't mind if we used their house to plan the protest. He'd been raised on rallies and demonstrations. Even though his parents had been divorced for a long time, one thing they agreed on was free expression. He said he'd been making posters for picket lines since he was old enough to use a Magic Marker.

In the two weeks since Gray had suggested a protest, Paterson and her friends had gathered a large and diverse group together. Most of the theater department had gotten involved, taking time away from rehearsing their latest production,
Crucible, The Musical!
Gray said they saw the whole Paterson thing as a “witch hunt” and decided
to get involved. I didn't want to rain on his crusade, but I knew a lot of those drama kids and for some of them, it was just another chance for them to be…well, dramatic.

Paterson, Joey, and I got to Gray's house before anyone else. I'd been dying to see him. Ever since our first date, we'd tried to get together again. But between ballet and my doctor's appointment, things hadn't worked out. He'd come to a few rehearsals, but we were never alone. We had big plans for the next time we were both free. Gray said he knew about a really cool place where they did improvisational comedy. And there was this great sushi bar he wanted to take me to. But when was all this going to happen? The more our dates were delayed, the more I couldn't stop thinking about him. My mind was turning to mush.

When I found out that once again we were going to be surrounded by other people, I tried to put my hormones on hold. Gray had said something about going out after the meeting, but we hadn't planned anything definite. I was really anxious to find out where this thing was headed. Was I just someone to hang out with while he was at Farts? Or was there more going on here?

Gray let us in and gave me a lingering hug. It would have to be enough for now, I thought. The house seemed sort of weird, not what I'd pictured. There were gold bro
cade couches with animal claw feet, lace doilies on dark wood tables with lots of knickknacks and vases and old photographs all over the walls. I stopped in front of a picture of an old man in a safari suit, carrying a rifle and standing next to the carcass of an animal I didn't recognize. “Is this your grandfather?”

Gray looked at the photograph and began laughing hysterically.

Paterson and Joey came over to see what was so funny. I looked at them, baffled. I hadn't thought it was that stupid a question. “I'm sorry,” Gray said, “but if you knew my grandfather, you'd understand why I'm laughing. He hates hunting and he hates guns, not to mention the fact that he wouldn't be caught dead in a safari suit. He's the most left-wing, liberal person I know.”

“So who's this guy?” Joey said.

Gray picked up the picture and stared at it. “I have no idea. It came with the house.” He put down the frame and swept his hand through the air like Vanna White. “With all the rest of this stuff.”

I scanned the room again. “Huh?”

“We had to rent the house furnished. It belongs to some old couple who decided to go on a world tour. Our apartment in New York is the exact opposite of this. My mom's books take up most of the living room, and we only have one black leather couch and two chairs. No
vases. No little, breakable people.”

“Whew,” Joey said. “I was beginning to think I was totally wrong about you.”

“What do you mean?” Gray said.

Joey picked up a container sprouting a colorful fake bouquet. “You know the whole rebel without a vase thing. I thought you were more Guns N' Roses rather than—”

“Rifles and artificial flowers?” Gray said, finishing Joey's sentence. He laughed. “Don't worry, you know the real me.”

We were interrupted by the entrance of a large group of potential protestors carrying poster boards. There were a lot of kids I'd never even seen before. I wasn't sure if the whole picket thing was a good idea, but Gray and Paterson were really into it. Joey didn't seem to be that interested in free speech, but I think he felt guilty that he hadn't been hanging around with us much lately.

While Gray directed Paterson and the rest of the gang to the garage, where they were going to set up work stations, I stayed in the living room, looking at all the pictures. I thought it must be weird to live in a house surrounded by strangers looking at you all the time.

“I see you're getting to know the family,” said a voice from behind me.

I turned to find Gray's mother with an armload of
books and her glasses down low on her nose. “Umm, I thought you weren't related to these people,” I said.

Gray's mother laughed. “I'm kidding.”

I wanted to address her directly, but I'd forgotten the last name she used. It wasn't Foster, like Gray's. Instead, I just asked how her work was going.

“Good,” she said. “But time has just flown by. I was hoping to have finished writing my paper on Atwood, in between teaching and lecturing. Now the semester's almost over.”

“Atwood?”

“Yes, Margaret Atwood—have you read her work?”

“No, but I think they read something by her in AP English senior year.”

“She's a wonderful poet and novelist. I've been writing about the use of fairy tales and myth in her poetry—”

Gray snuck up from behind me. “Don't bother with the poetry. Read
The Handmaid's Tale—
it's her best work.”

“Oh, we could argue this forever,” Gray's mother said. “I'll leave you two alone. I've got work to do. Nice seeing you, Kayla.” She disappeared into a hallway.

I looked at Gray with a puzzled expression.

“It's a running joke we have.
The Handmaid's Tale
is one of my favorite books. It's sort of dark and futuristic. But my mother's always trying to get me to read
Atwood's poetry. Every once in a while, she'll type up one of the poems and leave it on my desk.”

I couldn't help but think about how Gray and his mother led such different lives than most people I knew. It was amazing to me that they actually talked to each other about novels and poetry. My parents read books when we were on vacation, but most of the time my dad read journals about psychology and my mom read third-grade books, stories about kids swallowing turtles and stuff like that. Once in a while they'd mention some interesting thing they'd read somewhere or another, but there were no great debates going on, no running literature jokes.

Gray came closer to me. “So, how are you doing?”

I smiled. “Pretty good.”

“We getting together later?”

My heart started beating faster. This was definitely not the way someone who just wanted to be friends would have asked that question. “Sure,” I said.

He took my hands in his and drew me closer. I was positive he could hear the pounding in my chest. The backs of my thighs were starting to tingle.

As he dropped my hands and slid his arms around my back, Paterson yelled from the doorway of the garage. “Hey, you guys, can we get a little help here? We need markers and things—the whole crew's here now.”

I desperately wanted to ignore Paterson and wait to see where the moment was going, but I also didn't want her barging in on us. I pulled away from Gray and whispered, “I guess we'd better go.”

Gray smiled. “You want to help me get the markers? They're in my room.”

I followed Gray down a dark hallway. I had never been in a guy's bedroom before—at least, not a guy that I liked. Joey didn't really count. Part of me wanted to race into the room, slam the door, and smash up against Gray. The other part, the realistic part, knew that wasn't going to happen with his mom in a room close by and a bunch of protest-planning dissidents in the garage.

Gray's bedroom wasn't furnished as unusually as the living room—no pictures of dead animals or anything. There was one odd thing, though. In each of the three corners of the room sat a guitar, painted periwinkle blue.

I pointed to one of them. “What's this?”

Gray picked one up and began strumming lightly. “It was my sophomore year art project at my high school in Manhattan. I called it ‘Blue Guitar.'”

For a second I thought he was kidding. It didn't look like any art project I'd ever seen—not even some of Paterson's strange sculptures made from McDonald's containers and bubblegum. I tried to look as if I understood what he was talking about, but I was pretty sure I
wasn't hiding my confusion very well.

Gray laughed. “Don't worry,” he said, “you kind of had to be there. It was a weird school. Kids did all kinds of bizarre projects. Paterson's paintings would have been hailed as creative or innovative instead of subversive.”

“I guess that's the difference between New York and here,” I said.

“Among others,” he added, staring right into my eyes. “Some of them not so bad.”

He laid the guitar on the bed and took my hand. As he drew me closer and put his arm around my waist, I could feel his breath on my face. He smelled lemony. I lifted my chin and looked into his eyes as he swept the hair off my shoulder. His fingers brushed my neck, causing a small lightning bolt to rush through me. I'd been waiting for this since our first date.

I put my arms around his waist as his lips moved toward mine. Then Paterson yelled from down the hall, “About those markers, guys…”

We broke apart and stared for a second into each other's eyes. “Oops,” I said. “I forgot we were on a mission.”

Gray gave a huge sigh and mumbled, “Yeah.”

I thought my blood would never stop racing as we grabbed the tubs of markers and walked back down the hall, shoulder to shoulder. I felt as if I was floating across
a stage in a spectacular
pas de deux.
But the minute I spotted Paterson, my thoughts turned to the revenge I was going to exact on her for having the absolute worst timing of anyone in the entire world.

I recognized Ryan and Sara and a few other people who were laying out posters and stencils of block letters in the garage. We were ready to form an assembly line until everyone realized we had forgotten the most important thing—a slogan that would express Paterson's outrage.

“What exactly are we trying to convey?” Ryan asked. His hair was spiked unusually high.

Paterson took a marker out of her mouth. “I guess it should have something to do with censorship….”

“And the idea of having to cover up the beauty of a naked body,” Sara added.

Everyone was quiet for a minute or two, thinking. Then Joey broke in with, “Hey, how about ‘No Nudes is Bad Nudes'?”

Paterson groaned. “Please, can we keep the bad puns to a minimum?”

Gray picked up a red Magic Marker and rolled it between his palms. “What about the idea of patriarchy's need to conceal the penis?”

Joey looked up from his poster. “Gray,” he said, “you're a fine man, but I think I speak for most of us here
when I say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?'”

Everyone laughed. But I liked the fact that Gray was an intellectual type, that he wasn't afraid to say words like
patriarchy
and risk being labeled as weird. Paterson was the only one I'd ever heard mention patriarchy. And that was after she had taken a women's studies course in New York.

“Wait a minute,” Paterson said. “Gray's right. You rarely see a penis exposed in art. Women's bodies are all over the place. Especially breasts. The only time you find penises are in work by homosexuals, like Mapplethorpe.”

“So, what's wrong with that?” Joey said.

Paterson waved her paintbrush like a sword. “Nothing, but you don't see Brad Pitt or George Clooney letting it all hang out on the silver screen—”

Gray interrupted her. “But nudity for actresses is considered practically mandatory.”

“That's right,” Paterson said. “Even Oscar winners like Gwyneth Paltrow have to flash a little boob to get noticed.”

Joey seemed to be in his own world. “I've got it,” he said, raising a ruler. “‘Free Willy.'”

“Willy?” I said.

Joey puffed up his chest. “Not everyone has a Saint Rocco, you know. Some guys just have a willy.”

While everyone else burst into fits of laughter, Ryan
seemed particularly uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going. He squirmed on the floor next to his poster. Another drama guy sitting on an old crate tried to cross his legs and almost fell. It was fun to see the conversation focused on men's anatomy for a change—instead of mine. And it was really interesting to see how self-conscious the guys became.

“Hey, I've got another one,” Joey yelled. “How about ‘Stop Hiding the Salami'?”

“That could have a whole other meaning,” someone said.

“We need to somehow refer to freedom of speech,” Paterson said. She thought for a minute. “How about ‘Bare,'—as in
b-a-r-e
—‘Witness to the First Amendment.'”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't think anyone in administration or on the school board would get it. They'd probably use it as an excuse to show how high-school kids can't spell these days.”

Gray, who had been quiet for a while, suddenly began poking out letters from the large black stencil pages. We all watched curiously. When he was through punching, he laid the words out on a poster: “The Penis Mightier Than Censorship.”

After a few seconds of thoughtful silence, Paterson shouted, “It's perfect. It's got it all—the body, the power
of art, and the First Amendment. What else could we want?”

We all agreed with her—except Joey. “Wait a minute, I've got one more you'll love. How about, ‘What's Wrong with Schlong?'”

Paterson laughed and threw her paintbrush at him. “Enough,” she said. “Let's get to work.”

After a short discussion of logistics, we decided it would be best to outline the phrase on one of the posters and cut out the letters to make a giant stencil. Then we'd use markers and paints to fill in the letters. As we took turns using the stencil, some of the drama kids sang songs from the musical. It was the first time I'd worked with other people for a common cause like this, and it felt really good. Gray's mom ordered pizza and we ate in the garage, surrounded by posters, swapping stories about teachers. Just as I was beginning to relax and forget about all the troubles of the past few weeks, Sara brought up the red shoes. “I heard someone's stalking some of the dancers,” she said to Joey and me.