"The Flamenco Academy" (4 page)

All the burglar bars and buttons in the
world, though, couldn’t keep out the one thing Mom should have been
afraid of. Daddy had the cough for months before he finally went to
the doctor. It was cancer. Daddy acted like it was no big deal.
Still, it was decided that homeschooling on top of taking care of
Daddy was too much for Mom’s weak nerves, and for my senior year I
was enrolled at Pueblo Heights.

Daddy joked about the chemo and radiation,
said he was doing it just to “humor the tumor.” Even when he got so
weak he had to use a wheelchair, he was still able to convince Mom
and me that the thing growing inside of him was merely a passing
annoyance. The day I met Didi was the day even Daddy had to stop
pretending.

When my parents came back out to the
oncologist’s waiting room where I sat watching Didi Steinberg act
like she was reading
Golf Digest
, the expression on my mom’s
face scared me. The way the nurse in her tropical fish smock held
the door open for her to push the wheelchair through scared me even
more. It was too kind, too solicitous. My eyes met my father’s and
everything he’d tried to hide from me for the past four months was
there. The fear and panic were so big that they made him a little
boy who just wanted someone to rescue him. My mom looked at me in
the same lost, scared way. But there was nothing I could do for
her, for either one of them. When Mom realized that no one would be
coming to rescue her, that nothing would change what the doctor had
just told her back in his office, her face started squirming
around. At first, it didn’t seem she was about to cry, more like
she was going to say something but couldn’t remember the words. All
I cared about in that moment was that she was going to do something
embarrassing in front of Didi Steinberg. Like talk.

She did something worse, though. My mother
fainted. One instant she was standing behind the wheelchair,
pushing my father toward me, the next she went down so fast I
thought she’d stepped into a hole.

Didi, who only truly came to life when the
adrenaline was flowing, reacted faster than anyone, even the nurse.
She was helping Mom to a chair before I could figure out what had
happened. My father tried to hoist himself up to help her, but Didi
was already in charge.

“Make sure he stays put,” she ordered me,
pointing to my father as she helped my mother bend forward to put
her head between her knees. She looked at the nurse and barked at
her, “Get us some water. Stat.”

Everyone followed her orders. Her calm,
authoritative manner combined with using the medical word,
stat
, made us all believe that, in spite of the
lime-popsicle-colored hair, she just might be an intern, a medical
student, someone who had answers and could help us. That, I would
later learn, was Didi’s greatest gift. When she wanted to, she
could read your deepest needs and turn herself into whoever could
fill them.

“Cyndi. Rae. Honey.” My father huffed out
one word on each laborious exhalation. “Get. The. Keys.”

I picked the car keys up from the floor
where Mom had dropped them. “I’ll. Drive. Home.” He held out his
palm.

“Are you tripping?” Didi asked my father,
plucking the keys from my hand.

Mom didn’t object. Whatever unimaginable
news the doctor had given my parents had stolen the little bit of
fight she had left.

“You”—she pointed to my father—“need to get
into bed. Stat. You”— she pointed to my mother, who was staring at
the cup of water the nurse had put into her hand as if she were
trying to figure out how to work it—“should not be behind the wheel
of a car. You”—my turn—“need to be in the backseat of the car
monitoring your father. I”—she thumped her chest with an open
hand—“will drive.”

Didi blurted something in Spanish to her
mother. She used the word papi a lot so I assumed she was telling
her mother to take her father home. All Mrs. Steinberg did was
shrug and nod vaguely. Then Didi took the handles of my father’s
chair and propelled him forward. I helped my mother get up. Her
body was damp and clammy against my own. Didi seemed so crisp and
strong marching ahead of us, so dark and well defined. Mom and I
with our identical wispy, strawberry blond hair, blue-veined skin,
invisible eyelashes and eyebrows, had always run together like two
underdone cookies melting into one blob on the baking sheet. I
hated the touch of my mother’s doughy body.

Didi drove us home, helped Daddy into bed,
then refused Mom’s halfhearted offer of a ride home. Instead, she
said she needed the exercise and ran off.

The next morning, without any plan being
made, Didi pulled her dad’s Mustang into our carport and honked
until Mom gasped, “Well, I mean, that is the rudest thing I’ve ever
heard. Go make her stop before the neighbors call the police.”

I crunched across the rocks that were our
front yard, wishing I had a pair of the cool low-rise jeans Mom had
forbidden instead of the dorky ones with a waist she insisted on.
Didi yelled out her open window, “You going to school today?” Just
like it was optional. Just like I might be considering not going
that day.

“Uh, yeah,” I answered. “Give me a second.”
I rushed into the house, certain that if I gave Didi more than ten
seconds to consider what she was doing, she’d be gone. I grabbed my
books and the box of animal crackers I took every day to eat on a
bench in the patio so I wouldn’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria
at lunch. I ran back to the car pretending I didn’t hear Mom
yelling that she didn’t approve and that I was to get back into the
house this instant.

The Mustang, fingernail-polish red with
white leather upholstery, rumbled as we roared down Carlisle
Avenue. I wondered what it would be like to have parents cool
enough to buy a red Mustang with white leather interior. On the
back window, written in swirly script, was SKANKMOBILE. Didi smoked
Eve cigarettes, occasionally waving the smoke out the tiny slit she
opened in her window. Piercings had appeared in her lip and eyebrow
that I didn’t recall being there just the day before.

“You have a theme song?” she asked.

“Am I supposed to?”

“Here’s mine. Check it out.” She shoved in a
CD and an oldie blared out: “Dirty Deeds.” I looked at the case to
find out that the band was AC/DC, some guys dressed up like British
schoolboys.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“You’re thinking, No rap? No hip-hop? Where’s Snoop? Why’s she like
this old-school shit?”

That wasn’t remotely what I was thinking,
but I loved having a conversation with Didi Steinberg that didn’t
require my participation.

“Well, old school still rules! There’s a
reason it’s called rock. Cuz it rocks!” Didi sang along with the
CD, hitting the chorus hard, yelling about doing dirty deeds dirt
cheap. She turned to me as if I were sitting on a stool next to her
at a bar instead of careening down a road and explained, “That’s
how I got my nickname, Deeds.”

We headed east, toward the mountains, toward
the rising sun, which was turning the Sandias the watermelon color
they were named for. Morning light flooded into the car. Didi had
the visor down so only the bottom half of her face was illuminated.
Her mouth was golden as she sang.

With a screech, she opened the ashtray,
snuffed the cigarette, and plucked out a half-smoked joint. I knew
what it was only because back in Houdek Sheriff Zigal had visited
our class in seventh grade with a briefcase filled with drug
paraphernalia. He’d told us a joint could be called a blunt, a
spliff, a number, a nail, a stick, a stake, a spike, a rod. I think
Sheriff Zigal made up some of the names. Didi pinched the joint
between her lips as she fumbled through her purse until she dug out
a box of matches.

“Take the Skank,” she said, nodding toward
the steering wheel as she removed both hands to strike a match. It
took me a split second to process the fact that there were no hands
on the wheel before I lunged over and grabbed it as we bumped onto
the median. Didi laughed when we sideswiped a newly planted catalpa
tree. She got the joint lit and sucked in a long hit before holding
it out to me.

I waved it away and tried to keep the
Skankmobile in its own lane.

Didi shrugged. “How does anyone do Pweb
straight?” she asked. Pweb. I liked her name for Pueblo Heights.
“Gotta keep consensual reality at bay.” She inhaled until there was
nothing left to burn, then popped the still-smoldering roach into
her mouth and took the steering wheel from my death grip. “You’re
not a bad wheelman.”

I made myself lean back, but lunged forward
the instant Didi closed both eyes and joined AC/DC singing, “Call
me anytime. I lead a life of crime!” She laughed when I grabbed the
wheel again. “Wow, someone who’s interested in keeping me alive.
You could be just what the doctor ordered.” She giggled a giggle
that made me remember another one of Sheriff Zigal’s names for a
joint, giggle stick.

Didi’s new piercings, dozens of tiny silver
rings, glinted in the sun. “When did you get the piercings?” I
yelled over the music, keeping my hands on the wheel.

She ripped one of the rings out. It was a
fake clip-on. “No tattoos, no piercings. That’s the rule. Have to
be ready to change at a moment’s notice. If it’ll grow out or wash
off, fine, but I’m not gonna be sitting in the old folks’ home
covered in saggy ink and Ubangi piercing holes.” Even the diamond
studs in her nose were fake. “Nothing permanent. I’m not into
permanent.”

Not into permanent.
That was the
first line in the manual I started composing that day on how to be
Didi Steinberg’s friend.

She took the wheel. “Hey, you study for the
test in Mith Myth?”

Mith Myth was what everyone called world
cultures since the teacher, Ms. Smith, even more than most
teachers, taught what she liked best and that was Greek and Roman
mythology. Hence her nickname, Mith Myth.

“Yeah?” I said, cautiously, not knowing how
dorky she would think studying for a world cultures or any test
was.

“Brilliant? I’ll sit next to you. I’m not
into the whole test-regurgitation thing.”

Not into the whole test-regurgitation
thing.

She pulled into the Pueblo Heights High
School parking lot. It was guarded by the school mascot, a giant
hornet painted on the wall of the gym. The Pueblo Heights Hornet
was a snarling bully with a sailor cap pulled down palooka-style
over one eye, his hornet dukes up waiting to sting all comers into
the next century. Students milled around beneath our hostile
hornet.

“Well,” said Didi, popping down the visor
and tugging her eyelid tight so she could outline it in black
pencil. “I see all the Whore-nut cliques are out in force. You’ve
got your skate punks in their traditional place, east side of the
gym, all properly scabbed and stoned, recounting face plants and
road rashes for their skuts.”

As Didi moved on to the lower lids, I
checked out the skate punks in their black knit caps and giant
shorts that hung off their butts and below their knees. Skuts, I
guessed, were skate sluts, the girls in spiky pigtails, striped
tube socks, and shredded camou cutoffs who revolved around the
punks, pretending to care about skateboarding.

“Next farther out, the gamers.”

This was an all-male group that didn’t
really have any uniform fashion look other than pasty skin and
slumped shoulders. All they cared about was what level they’d
gotten to on Doom and what the new cheats were for Quake.

“And even sadder and more pathetic, our Goth
friends, who all, somehow, have the exact same desire to express
their really intense individuality through dyed black hair, creepy
flowing black clothes, blue lipstick, devil horn implants, and
goat’s-eye contact lenses.”

The Goth kids congregated the farthest of
any group from the bellicose bee. They seemed nervous and, Didi was
right, sad.

“But the scariest of all the groups? The
Abercrombies.” She pointed her eyeliner toward the clique who
occupied the area directly in front of the hornet as if by divine
right. They looked like they belonged front center—cheerleaders,
football players. All the popular kids, the ones who could afford
to buy stuff from Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Ew, backward caps? Cargo pants and fleece?”
Didi pretended to shudder in horror. “Give me a Goth anytime over
those Whore-nuts.”

I snuggled more deeply into the white
leather. The Mustang had come to feel like a cave to me with us on
the inside, all snug and dry, and everyone else on the outside
being drenched in the downpour of Didi’s caustic comments. I
noticed that, for the first time, the knot that had tied in my
stomach when we left Houdek, then tightened when Daddy got sick,
had loosened so much that I could actually take a full breath. I
took one, then another, marveling in the simple pleasure of
breathing. I never wanted Didi to stop talking about everyone who
wasn’t us. I never wanted to leave the Skankmobile.

“Hey,” she said. “I just thought of
something. How are you in math?”

“Sort of, well, brilliant?”

The bells on the rings Didi wore tinkled as
she slapped her hands together like she was praying. “Thank you,
Jesus!” Then to me, “You are so what the doctor ordered. Depew
would just stroke out if I actually turned in an assignment.” She
reached back, fished an algebra book from the pile scattered on the
floor, and opened it to the homework assignment she hadn’t
done.

“Cool beans, factoring polynomials! I
haven’t gotten to do that for years.” The words, unbelievable in
their dorkiness, popped out before I could stop them.

“Hey, knock yourself out.”

While Didi worked on her hair, getting the
lime popsicle tips to stick up in a cunning way, I zipped through
her assignment. Dorky as it was, it was true, I did love factoring
polynomials. We both finished a few minutes later. Didi snapped the
visor back up, tipped her head back, squeezed one drop of Visine
into each eye, and turned to me. “So, how do I look?” She didn’t
look like anyone else under the hornet.