Dance life

Questions

I stared into Luna's eyes. "From where do you know?!" it was the third time I asked her this question. But I hadn't got any answer yet. "Luna, do you know Juan, or one of the others, or Francesca? Is it so hard to answer this question?"

"Rose, please, please stop asking me. You can't understand it, I know. I'm sorry, but I really, really can't tell you. I know none of them. It's...it's just that I can't... I can't tell you. Because I really like you. If I told you, it would be the same as killing you."

"Killing me? Are you okay?"

"Yes, I'm okay, I'm sorry Rose. I'm really sorry. But I can't explain."

I sighed deeply.

But what the hell did she mean? Why should it "kill" me if she told me from where she had her information about the hip hop thing? Unintentional I thought at the PE lesson, about her unnatural skin and the way she and Nahuel had equivocated my questions.

Was there a connection between these things?

I was so much busy with all the questions spinning around in my head, that I barely noticed how the whole day passed by.

It was when Luna came over to say "bye" to me when I "woke up" from my "trance". I looked at her and I saw in her eyes the pleading not to ask her those questions again.

"Believe me Rose, oh please believe me", she said quietly. I nodded. "It's okay", I said.

After half an hour I was standing in front of the driving school door, like yesterday. I waited a moment until it was three, then I walked in.

"Oh, you're very punctually ", said the woman from yesterday. She gave me a sign to follow her and I did like she showed. We walked through a small door, then trough a narrow hallway and then through another door. We came into a medium-sized room with white walls. Four big book shelves covered nearly the whole walls. A table stood in the middle of the room. It was made from beech. It's massive "legs" were graved elaborately. A chair was next to it. And another one was opposite the first. They were normal office chairs. The woman sat down on one of them and showed me that I should sit on the other.

"My name is Ms Marelo. And you're Rosalie right?"

"Yes, that's right."

"Okay let's start with the lesson then."

She asked me a lot about the theory of driving. All the basic's and so on. One of my friends in Boston had already been at driving school and he'd told me everything so that I had no problems to answer the questions from Ms Marelo.

"We will start our first practical lesson next week", she said when I was leaving.

It took me fifteen minutes to get home. There I changed my clothes and took my longboard. I put on my sunglasses and hurried down. I caught the bus in the last minute and changed to the subway after four stations. Five minutes passed. When the subway arrived at the station I had to walk ten more minutes. And then I saw it. It must've been the biggest skate park I have ever seen in my live. And believe me, I have seen a lot of them. At least twenty teenagers were skating and everyone seemed to have his own kind of board. There were even special places for waveboards, though I had never seen one of this kind before.

"So, how long have you been skateboarding?"

Juan was sitting cross-legged on one of the hills in the skate park. I leaned against a tree and stared at the Rio de Janeiro beach. It was a beautiful view from where I stood.

"I began when I was five years old. That's when my family moved from a village to Rio."

"You've been living in a village?"

"Yeah. When my parents were young they left the forest and came to Rio. They had small jobs here and they lived like that for a few years. Then my dad started his career and he had to deal with the press and all the people every day. So when my mom discovered she was pregnant they moved to a village. That's where I was born. As I told you earlier, I often visited my grandparents in the forest and there I learned how to live like an Indian. But when I was five we moved to Rio because of school and everything. So that's when I started skateboarding."

"Must be cool: living like an Indian..."

"And really hard" he laughed " I can take you to the forest if you want. On Sunday maybe. Then you can meet Diego and go riding with him on Saturday as you planned to."

"Sure. I'd love to see your grandparents."

We had been skating half of the afternoon, ever since we came to the skate park. I looked at my watch. It was already half past five. I hadn't noticed how exhausted I was until now. I had learned so many new tricks during this afternoon. Then I remembered something...