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about it whenever you tell Leisha about it, that she’ll ask you everything.
    Now Eleanor and Peter were splashing against each other like buckets of paint; something he must have said had turned her can’t into a can . And now through the door that opened to the roof came Marissa, a puff of cigarette smoke trailing behind her. If she recognized me from two hours before, she didn’t act as if she did, and now she cut across the floor and disappeared, and then I heard Max was counting. “One TWO three and one TWO three and one,” he was saying, and I was trying to keep up, and just when I thought that maybe I could get the hang of that one step, he said that it wastime to test my rumba.
    “My rumba?” I said, wiping the sweat off my forehead with a gooey palm, and he said yes, the rumba, and he started counting, not with numbers but with words, slow quickquickslow , quickquickslow , adding a quicker after slow before he stepped forward and I stepped back, and he stepped to the side and I went with him, and then he stepped back and I stepped forward and tried to remember whatever I’d just read.
    “Think of weather,” he said, “and geography,” fitting one hand to the base of my neck and one onto my shoulder, to release me, he said, from myself. He bent down and wedged out my feet until they were pointing away from each other. “Compass needles,” he said. “Think of that.” He said to try to keep my torso still so that I could work the hips, the knees, the feet. “Count with me, Rosie. Slow quickquickslow, quickquick—”
    “—slow,” I said.
    “Quickquick—”
    I felt like a two-year-old. It was so much harder than I’d thought it would be. I’d been crazy, absolutely, to think I could learn to dance. I pulled back from him and caught my breath. “No one ever said,” I said, “that dancing was so tough.”
    “No one’s an instant dancer,” he said.
    “I just thought—”
    “You’re not supposed to think. You are supposed to dance. Think of yourself as a rag doll for now. Let me see what you can do.” Max went to the sound booth to change the song. He returned and stood before me, still. Then, to the music that had started to play, he led me through a dance. “Show me your split,” he said, and I did the lousiest one. “Put your arm across my shoulder here, and let me lift you as I spin.” I felt my hair get hot and loose with curls, my waistband pull. I felt myself being carried across the floor. We were stopping; we were starting; we were spinning,stepping, stopping. We were small steps and tight steps and scallops and lines, and Max was thinking, and as he thought, the green parts of his eyes got bright. “All right,” he said. “There’s talent here. Definitely something to work with.”
    “I have to get really good really fast,” I said.
    “With dancing there’s no rushing.”
    “I know,” I said, and felt my face get hot. “But this has to do with my grandfather.” We were walking down the hall now, my arm linked with his. There was a gorgeous girl my age out on the couch lobby, fixing her shoes, waiting for him to call her name. “It’s a long story,” I said, feeling weird again about my shoes. “But I can tell you next time.”
    “You’ll have to practice when you’re not here,” he said. “And you’ll have to take a lot of lessons.”
    “I will do both,” I said.
    “Dancing is expensive.”
    “I have money.”
    “Check the schedule with Marissa then,” he said. “Sometimes the evenings are best.”

SEVENTEEN
    T HE NEXT DAY started out hot and got much hotter. It began with the sound of crows and the buzz of a juicy housefly that I’d probably let in through the back door by mistake when I was inviting fireflies. Mom was home but not up, and I knew without getting out of my bed how she was lying in hers, her face toward the two old windows she’d have propped up with wide sticks. She’d told me once when I was little that she liked to smell the