Some little kids climb onto the wall surrounding the dinosaur sculptures and start pretending to be dinosaurs. They roar and I kind of want to join them.
“Try again,” Fifi says.
X and I move back into position.
“Let down your braids,” he says.
I touch my hand to my high ponytail and frown at him. “Why?”
“Just say yes,” he says. “We’re letting it all hang out.”
Something about taking my hair down feels too intimate. It makes me shy and unsteady.
“You have to take your dreads down too, then,” I say, trying to get my footing back.
He pulls out his hair tie with one hand. His locs fall around his shoulders and frame his face.
Our eyes meet and there’s a thread of something—an extra awareness—between us. A small, unwise part of me wants to hold on to that thread and see where it leads. The larger, more sensible part of me wants to find huge metaphorical scissors and snip that thread into tiny pieces.
The next song begins. Maybe it’s because our hair is down or because Fifi basically dared us to stop sucking, but for whatever reason, this dance is different.
The singer is a crooner. His voice sounds like he’s just found the meaning of life and he’s about to tell you what it is. Beneath his voice, the4/4rhythm is insistent. X throws his shoulders back and smiles into my eyes. His lead is confident. Somehow my hips have unsprung. Infinity hips achieved.
We slip into another song and then another. By the time we stop, there’s a crowd of fifteen or twenty people around us. Some of them even walk over to drop money into our tip jar.
I wait for them to drift away before I count up our earnings. “There’s fifty-seven dollars in here,” I say, shocked.
“Minus Fifi’s twenty, that’s thirty-seven bucks in forty minutes,” X adds.
That’s pretty good, actually.
“So how’d we look, Fi?” X asks.
I know we danced those last songs better than we ever have, but that doesn’t mean it was actually any good.
Fifi is uncharacteristically quiet.
“You’re scaring me,” I tell her.
“Me too,” says X.
“It’s still early stages,” she says.
“Yes,” I agree.
She turns to me. “And hips are better, but still nonsense.”
“Okay,” I say.
She turns to X. “And you couldn’t lead a cow to grass.”
He just laughs.
“But maybe together you might have something,” she says smiling.
“Mostly me, though, right?” X says.
“Definitely,” she says.
