Pennybaker School Is Revolting, стр. 4
We all glanced at one another.
“Excellent!” Coach Abel clapped one time. “I was just getting ready to announce our new unit.” He turned to us. “Boys,” he said, sweeping his arm out wide toward the girls, “meet your new unit.”
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed. Not even Chip Mason, who never missed an opportunity to chime in on an awkward situation.
“Excuse me, Coach Abel, sir? I have a query-slash-declaration.”
I was wrong. Of course Chip Mason was going to chime in.
Coach patted the air with his hands. “You can’t have any questions yet. I haven’t even told you what the unit is.”
“Yes, but—”
“I think you fellas will like this unit. It’s a cooperative effort.”
“But—”
“It will give you a chance to get to know your fellow students better.”
“Of course, but—”
“It will stretch your boundaries.”
“But—”
“Take your learning to new heights.”
“Sir—”
“Teach you to grow and—oh, what is it, Chip?”
Chip pushed his glasses up higher on his nose, then clasped his hands behind his back—his favorite lecturing posture—and paced in front of his squad line a few times. Finally he stopped, looked at Coach Abel, and said, “You do realize those are girls.”
We all nodded and mumbled in agreement.
“Sit down, Mr. Mason,” Coach said. “Of course I realize they’re girls. And that was not a question.”
Chip held up one finger. “That’s why I said query-slash-declaration. You see, a quer—”
Wesley elbowed Chip in the side of the knee. Chip lowered his finger, pushed his glasses up again, and pressed his lips together tightly.
Coach Abel continued. “As I was saying, these fine young ladies are going to be joining you for a while.” All eyes, round and terrified, drifted over to the girls. “Miss Allegro has been kind enough to offer to teach the next unit, which will be … dance.”
He said the last word really quickly. We traded confused glances.
“Did you say ‘pants’?” Dawson Ethan asked.
“France. I think we’re doing something French,” Colton said.
“Ants?” someone asked from the back row.
“Ooh, finally! An entomology unit!” Chip said, bouncing a little on his toes.
“No, not ‘ants,’ you dummy. He said ‘trance.’ We’re going to learn how to hypnotize people. I bet you could do it, Thomas. Woo woo …” This from Julian Frood, who was wiggling his fingers at me.
“For the thousandth time, Julian,” I said, “hypnosis is not magic, and I don’t hypnotize people.”
“Actually,” Chip said, “magicians have used hypnosis for—”
“Dance!” a voice yelled, cutting off Chip and making us all jump. Patrice Pillow was standing in the middle of the crowd of girls, wearing her all-black gym uniform (complete with black beret), her arms crossed, a scowl on her face. “He said ‘dance.’ Not ‘pants’ or ‘France’ or ‘ants’ or ‘trance.’ Dance. And we’re no happier about it than you are.”
“I’m happy about it,” Fiona Patada said. She did a quick spin and a curtsy.
“That’s because you’re a dancing genius,” Wesley said. Fiona placed her hand over her heart and curtsied even lower. “Unlike the rest of us,” Wesley added.
“Now, now,” Miss Allegro said, walking briskly to the front of the gym. She placed the stereo on a cart and plugged it in. “You don’t have to be a genius to dance. You just have to be willing.”
“Well, that counts me out,” I said, expecting everyone to laugh. But nobody did. They were all too worried about what would come next.
What they didn’t know was that I was completely serious. There’s a saying that people who can’t dance have two left feet. I was pretty sure I had two backward feet. In third grade, I got down and boogied at my cousin Peter’s wedding reception—which meant I flailed around and hoped to stay upright. Only during the Chicken Dance, I didn’t exactly stay upright. I flailed myself onto the ground, tripping the bride, who teetered into the groom, who lurched forward into his best man, who flung his dance partner into the cake, which splattered on the floor, causing Great-Aunt Ethel to slip and catch herself on the punch table, causing an avalanche of crashing glasses and pink, fizzy punch that ruined the bride’s shoes. I had a serious Staring at Mom’s Tonsils Because She Was Yelling So Hard Adventure all the way home, and I swore off dancing forever. Like, forever forever. Just thinking about dancing made my stomach gurgle.
Miss Allegro clapped her hands three times, her heels together and her posture so good that even Mom would have nothing to complain about. “Everyone up!”
Reluctantly, we all stood.
“Good. Now girls, come join the boys.” The girls moved just as reluctantly as we had.
“What kind of dance are we doing, Miss Allegro?” my friend Flea asked. Flea only came up to the shoulder of even the shortest girl.
“Ballroom,” she said triumphantly. “We will learn basics in class that you will use to choreograph your own routines. And at the end of our unit, we will have a program to show your parents all you’ve learned. Isn’t that exciting?”
About as exciting as pantyhose.
There was a lot of grumbling going on, until finally Coach Abel held up his hand to silence us. It kind of worked, but ballroom dance—with girls—was really a two-hand-silence kind of job.
“Miss Allegro and I will randomly select your partners. There will be no swapsies, no tradebacks, no refusals or returns. You get who you get, and we expect you all to be mature ladies and gentlemen about it. Let’s make two lines. Boys over here, girls over here; face one another and count off.”
Everyone shuffled around, confused and irritated, as we all tried to pair up with just the right person to avoid maximum humiliation. I planted my eyes firmly on Patrice Pillow, trailing the line and counting carefully so I could be assigned to dance with her.
There were many reasons to pair up with Patrice Pillow:
She was the only person who’d believed in