The Trick to Feeling Young

The class schedule read “Adult Intermediate Tap.” I double-checked it, perched reading glasses on my nose, and ran my index finger along the paper taped to the wall. Adult. Check. Three other students, all teenagers, stood laughing, talking, warming up snapdragon feet on a scarred wooden floor. Our teacher, no older than nineteen, no taller than my shoulder, fiddled with the dials on a paint-splattered boombox.

I’m twice as old as any person here, I thought. Twice as old, and six times less hip. Twice as big, too.

The students wore low-slung pastel sweats cut off at the knee, boot-like shoes with no socks, tight cotton camisoles. I wore rainbow-striped socks, tap heels with wing tips and big black bows, a white ruffled skirt with sensible sport shorts underneath and a pink tank-top. I sucked in my stomach and imitated the leg stretches of the tallest student, a girl with flat-ironed blonde hair and the word “DANCE” sewn in princess script across her butt.

“Excuse me, ma’am? The ballet students leave through the other room. You can pick up your daughter there.” Pixie Teacher pointed to the door across the hall. She wore her dark hair in a messy ballet bun and her baby blue bustier matched cut off sweats. A triangular blue stone adorned her exposed bellybutton.

“Oh, I’m a student. I’m here for the tap dancing. I took beginner lessons, oh, a few years ago.”

I lifted my foot to show the shiny metal plates screwed to my toe and heels and then slammed it down with a satisfying clap. I didn’t mention that “a few years” meant two-and-a-half decades. She shrugged her shoulders and bent low, clicked a button. The boombox sputtered, and the Pussycat Dolls assaulted my ears.

“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?”

I almost tapped right out the door while the other students slid, shuffle, toe, toe, heel, toe, slid across the floor like Abercrombie and Fitch marionettes. I pressed my heels into the floorboards, attempted to keep the same time as my classmates, swung my hips fast, high, so that my skirt flared at my waist, revealing my gym shorts. Pixie stifled a giggle and I caught Blondie rolling her eyes. I lifted my arms in a graceful arc and flipped her the bird.

My body searched for sound waves, for muscle memory, for something to grab, to hold, to own.