How in the world did Mila look like she could stay leaned back like this all day?
She exhaled slowly through her mouth, feeling the tension in her spine. Seriously, it felt like it was going to crack.
Just as she was about to lift out of the position, Ms. Noelle’s hands guided her arm.
“Your arm should be just a little behind your face, Monique. No?”
Which of course meant yes. Ms. Noelle was Canadian. Her French accent took the edge off the gentle command.
Mo’s body went along with the adjustment.
Barre work was hard. The movements were so slow.
Ah-dah-gee-oh, she repeated in her head. The ballet terms were still tricky for her sometimes. But she couldn’t go all the way to Philly and look crazy, not understanding the right words.
Adagio required patience. Something Mo didn’t have a lot of. She charged that to the game.
A) She lived in the Cove, which the local paper had once called “a jungle of narrow, brick row houses that give local drug dealers an all-too-easy escape route.” Really? A jungle, though?
B) If the Cove was a jungle (not that she was claiming all that), then her court, K Court, was the deepest, wildest part of it. It was the very last cul-de-sac of homes, surrounded by a half mile of trees, and it hid any dirt people wanted to keep on the low too well.
Being from the last court (what she called it instead) meant having dudes assume she was just another “thirsty bae from the K” who was willing to be on some stupid stuff for a little cash, jewelry, or attention. Mo wasn’t. Never had been. Linda Jenkins wouldn’t have it. She worked too many shifts at Bay Memorial to keep her kids clothed and fed to have them fall prey to the siren call of street dealing. Well, two of her kids, at least.
The real reason Mo had a shortage of patience was simple.
With four older brothers who swarmed the house like locusts when meals were ready, being patient in the Jenkins household meant not getting anything to eat or going to school with your breath humming because you never got into the bathroom to brush your teeth.
Everything Mo ever did had been about getting it done before her brothers beat her to it.
The Jenkins boys. Every one of them two years apart, like her mother had either kept trying until she got one boy who could stay out of trouble or was trying until she got a girl. She’d finally gotten both.
It was just her and Lennie home now. Rennard and Dante were in jail, a two-hour drive away. Low-key, she always tried to make sure she had dance class when her mother announced the weekend’s plan to visit them. Mo loved her brothers but didn’t get why her mother spent what little bit of time she got off from the hospital visiting them.
And Josiah was in Boys Town, the juvenile lockup. Even if he got out, he’d probably waste the free time he had long enough to turn eighteen, get into nonsense, and end up with their older brothers.
Mo didn’t think about them a lot. That was probably wrong. But they’d been in and out of juvvie or jail since she was five years old. Whenever Rennie and Dante had been home, which wasn’t much, to her they were extra bodies in the house and random big-brother advice that she sometimes remembered but mostly didn’t.
Lennie wasn’t no angel. But, so far, he had enough sense not to get into big trouble. At fifteen, he was (of course) only two years older than her. And they were as close as any other brother and sister, always competing to get the things they wanted from their mother. People swore they were twins. Mo had stopped reminding people they weren’t. People remembered what they wanted. They were as close as twins, though.
He was the one who taught her how to fight. The one who somehow slid their mother eighty dollars for her first pair of pointe shoes. “Don’t be asking me my business, Monique. You needed ’em. It’s whatever,” he’d said when she’d questioned him, worried he was dealing.
And he was the only one left to give out big-brother advice. Which, for real, was tiresome. Lately, it was his full-time job to remind Mo not to “mess with these hard heads out here.”
First of all, Mo didn’t have any interest in any of the dudes from their neighborhood. Half of them were Lennie’s friends—so hard pass. And the others, her age, Mo had known since they were little. Knowing too much about a person made them 100 percent un-dateable in her opinion. Though based on some of the crushing going on among her clique—Tai liking Rollie, Simp liking Tai, Mila liking Chris—she was the only one who felt that way.
Not that she was going into all that with her brother. That’s why her and Lennie had got into it when she pointed out that getting with a dude didn’t make her a bird. That’s what Lennie and his friends called girls who they gamed into whatever they wanted to game them into. She could guess what they wanted but didn’t want to think about her brother doing It with anybody. Ugh.
He had turned his mouth up in disgust, arguing back, “It do though.”
Mo had cocked her head to the side, mouth upturned in as much disgust. “So, basically you spend all this time schemin’ on somebody and when it work, she the one wrong?”
“It’s wack when you put it that way . . .” Lennie had said, then laughed. Still, he held his ground. “But Ioun care. Good girls don’t let themselves get played.”
She’d walked out of his face. Lennie was barely passing school each year. And when he passed, it was probably because the teachers were pushing him through. But if there was a way around and into something he wanted, he had plans for days. Mo didn’t get how he could be smart when he wanted to and dumb when someone else needed him to be smart.
Her mother had always said, because he’s slick like y’all father.
A father Mo had never met. She had no idea if she was slick like him or if that was why she was so competitive. Maybe. If so, then wherever he was, he was one of the reasons she worked so hard at dance and had gotten that scholarship to Ballet America’s Summer Experience.
Shout out to that.
She arched back a tiny bit more, proud of the screaming she felt in her muscles as she pushed them to do the impossible. That screaming meant she was focused and ready (almost) for the intensive.
She’d be gone for three weeks.
Three weeks in a new city. Around girls who had probably been dancing since they were two. Her stomach fluttered.
She lifted out of the arch and let her body follow Ms. Noelle’s instructions while her mind drifted to the summer ahead.
She was nervous about going away for the first time. But the closer it got, the more she thought about what life would be like if Ballet America offered her a scholarship to stay the whole year. She had never heard of a ballet conservatory until a few months ago. But if going to one made her dance like the Ailey dancers, she needed that—screaming muscles, calloused feet, all of it.
Ballet was crazy hard. You had to hold your head at a certain angle and make your feet do the wildest things. Even your hands had to be held a certain way—index and pinky fingers long, thumb under the first finger.
There was a time, not that long ago, when she didn’t get it. For some reason she kept wanting to extend the middle finger. Ms. Noelle would tease her. “Monique, let’s not insult the audience.”
Like, who in the world can see what your hands are doing from the audience?
But now, three years later and after a year in the talented and gifted dance program, when she watched herself compared to some girls who had danced longer, she had it. She wasn’t as good as Mila, but for real, she was getting close.