Here is the original by Julie Orringer:
When it is time for the boys to pick, do not bite your hangnails. Do not pull at your skirt. Watch how Patricia and Cara lean together and whisper and laugh, as if they don’t care whether or not they get picked. Watch how Miss Miggie brings her arms together, like a parting of the Red Sea in reverse, to start the picking. The boys will push off with their shoulder blades and make their way across the floor. Do not make eye contact! If you make eye contact you will drown. Do not, whatever you do, look at Eric Cassio. You do not care which one of those other girls he picks. You know it will not be you.
And you know which boy will be picked. You know who is picked to demonstrate nearly every time, who Miss Miggie always wants to pick, even when she has to pick one of the others just to mix things up. Eric Cassio is not just great in your opinion. Already the world understands how excellent he is. The music swells toward its final cha-cha-cha. Miss Miggie’s eyes scan the room. Her red lips come together like a bow. She raises her rack of breasts proudly and lifts her finger to point. The finger flies through the air toward Eric Cassio and Miss Miggie calls his name. He scowls and looks down, pretending to be embarrassed, but there is a smile at the corner of his mouth. Patricia bites a fingernail. Understand that she is nervous. This gives you power. Do not flinch when Zachary Booth pinches your arm; do not let the burning in your eyes become tears. He does not concern you. The only thing that concerns you is who Miss Miggie will point to next. It could be anyone. It could be you. Her finger flies through the air. Is it you? Oh, God, it is.
Do not look at Patricia and Cara as they extend their tongues at you. Ignore Zachary Booth’s explicit hand gesture. Forget you weigh sixty-nine pounds; stop wanting breasts so badly. So what if you wear glasses? So what if your skirt is not Calvin Klein? For this one moment you have no hangnails, no bony knees, and there is a secret between you and Eric Cassio. When the others clear the floor, look him square in the eye and share that secret. The secret is, you know he likes to dance. It goes back to the day when you were punished together for being tardy, when you had to transplant all the hybrid peas from the small white plastic pots to the big terracotta ones. Your hands touched, down in the bag of potting soil. When you got cold he gave you his green sweater. Later, as you were cleaning up—the water was running, no one could hear him—he told you he liked to dance. Remember these things. The fact that he ignored you at lunch that day, at recess, and every day afterward—even the fact that he is now Patricia’s boyfriend—does not matter. He likes to dance. Look into his eyes, and he will remember he told you.
Let his arm come around you, tanned and slim. Take his hand; it is free of warts. The dance requires that you maintain eye contact with him almost constantly. Do not be afraid to meet his blue eyes. Smile. Remember what your father has taught you: Cuban motion. It is in the hips. A white boat rocking on waves. The half-hour demonstration with your mother, her hair upswept, was not for nothing. Here you are. Miss Miggie lowers the arm onto the record, and the maracas shake into action.
When you dance with Eric Cassio, communicate through your hands. A press here, a sharp squeeze there, and you’ll know what he wants you to do, and he’ll know what you want him to do. As you change directions, catch Patricia’s eye for one moment. Give your hips the Cuban motion. Make her watch. When you twirl, twirl sharp. Listen to Miss Miggie clapping in rhythm. Let all the misery fall out of your chest. Smile at Eric. He will smile back, just with the corner of his mouth. He is remembering transplanting the peas. He does not smile at Patricia that way; that is a smile for you.
Do the special pretzel thing with your arms, that thing Miss Miggie has only shown you once; pull it off without a hitch. End with your back arched and your leg outstretched. Listen to the silence that comes over the room like fog. Remember the way they look at you. No one will applaud. Five seconds later, they will hate you more than ever.
The next day, watch out. You will pay for that moment with Eric. Wear pants, for God’s sake. Take no chances. In gym you will play field hockey; remember that this is not one of your better games. You are on the red team, Patricia and Cara are on the blue. You are left wing forward. When you get the ball, pass it as quickly as you can. What will happen is inevitable, but it will be worse if you make them mad. It will happen at the end of the game, when you are tired and ready for gym to be over. As you race down the side of the field toward the ball, halfback Cara’s stick will come out and trip you. You will fall and sprain your wrist. Your glasses will fly off and be broken in two at the nosepiece. You will cut your chin on a rock.
Lie still for a moment in the trampled clover. Try not to cry. The game will continue around you as if you do not exist. Only the gym teacher, leathery-skinned Miss Schiller, will notice that anything is wrong. She will pick you up by the arm and limp you over to the bench. Do not expect anyone to ask if you are okay,. If they cared whether of not you are okay, this would never have happened. Let this be a lesson to you about them. When Patricia scores a goal they cluster around her, cheering, and click their sticks in the air.
At home, seek medical assistance. Do not let anything heal improperly. You will need that body later. As your mother binds your wrist in an Ace bandage, you will tell her you tripped on a rock. She will look at you askance. Through instinct, she will begin to understand the magnitude of your problem. When she is finished bandaging you, she will let you go to your room and be alone with your books. Read the final chapters of A Little Princess. Make an epic picture of a scene from a girls’ boarding school in London on three sheets of paper. Push your brother around the living room In a laundry basket. That night, in the bath, replay in your head the final moment of your dance with Eric Cassio. Ignore the fact that he would not look at you that day. Relish the sting of bathwater on your cuts. Tell yourself that the moment with Eric was worth it. Twenty years later, you will still think so.
So I've been playing around with this concept and have quite a few notes for my own junior high self. Here's a couple:
In 6th grade, the gym teacher's teaching assistant, whom you, in all your 12 years of experience, will estimate to be in his early twenties, with a shock of blond hair and clear blue eyes will smile at you and you will swoon. You will quickly learn that a slight smile in return, with a knowing twinkle in your eye, even when you don't know anything at all, is always the correct response. At the end of the semester you will note that, as he is proctoring the midterm (for gym??) and everyone has splayed out across the gym floor to bubble in their scantrons, he will kneel down and whisper an answer that you are hovering over so no one else can hear. This moment will warm your heart for decades. And when, in an overheated, competitive moment, you go after the basketball out of bounds and slip on a section of the waxed wood gym floor and land on your head, despite the immediate and crushing headache, you will be most focused on the fact that this same very buff gym teacher's assistant will scoop you up in his arms and carry you from the gym all the way down to the nurse's office while you marvel at both the size of his biceps and the ring of stars dancing around your head. Never will a concussive brain injury be so worth it.
The first teacher of your sixth grade year will be a beautiful, tall black woman who wears fashionable glasses and talks to all of you like you are her peers. She will begin teaching you math in ways you've never heard before, such as systems other than base ten and multiplying exponentials. She presents you with material not in the textbook that is challenging and interesting. Two months later she will mysteriously exit without warning and in her place for the rest of the year will be another student's mother, who doesn't particularly like your cleverness and tells us on the first day that we can forget everything we were working on in math and turn to our books to do rote multiplication. When you move to public school the next year and are woefully unfashionable with a mouth filled with banded braces, on the first day of math class, when the teacher is beginning to lay the groundwork for teaching exponents and asks the class if anyone knows what ten to the zero power might be, you will, without hesitation, answer "one." You haven't been in public school long enough (the first period of the first day) to know students don't actually respond to their teachers. The surprise on her face that anyone even spoke up in class, much less knew the correct answer, will mark you as the hopeless geek you are destined to be in middle school. Expect no one to talk to you for the rest of the trimester in that class. But again, that split second of surprise and respect on her face will always be worth the ostracizing.
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