A Dance With Levina

THE WEBSITE

Dancing With The Local Stars officially commenced on a Saturday evening at 7 PM in the cafeteria, its chipped gray concrete walls sadly draped with fading streamers of an indeterminate color, somewhere between red and yellow. For me, though, the excitement began exactly a week before.

Derek had tasked me with creating a web site that would do two things:

First, display a dancing animation of our principal Ms. Wong. Derek said it would be "hilarious" if Ms. Wong "looked like a 'tard'" in the animation as she shimmied across the dance floor in an awkward attempt at the tango. (Ms. Wong, Derek informed me, had gladly given her permission to be parodied.)

And second, allow people to pay for their tickets online.

The coding for the site was easy. The problem I ran into was how to accept the money for the tickets. Derek told me the senior class didn't have a PayPal account, so I had to use my own. I felt kind of weird about it, but Derek said it was common enough for school events to be run with cash; later it was handed over to Ms. Wong, our principal. This, Derek said, was the same situation. All I had to do was withdraw the money from my PayPal account (in cash) and hand it over to Ms. Wong.

Now, I realize I should have checked all this with Ms. Wong. The problem was, I wasn't on the best of terms with her, all because of a little joke the previous year.

Kaycee and I had once created the political cartoons for the Jacobite, our student newspaper. Kaycee spun her skills on the sketchpad and I rapped out the words.

Last year we invented a character called "The Gingerbread Lady," a stick figure based on the bony-thin physique of Ms. Wong. We didn't come out and say it, of course, but the fact that "The Gingerbread Lady" had this odd waddling way of walking, precisely like the way Ms. Wong walked, made the comparison inevitable. Kaycee and I enjoyed a personal meeting with the real-life Gingerbread Lady as a result. She stripped us of our positions as cartoonists and gave us a week's worth of detention. So you can understand that I wasn't eager to have another private conversation with Ms. Wong.

And when I enlisted Kaycee for the animation on the dance website, she was understandably cautious.

"No way."

"Come on, this is totally different," I said.

"Really? How exactly is making fun of the principal any different, Jude?"

"She won't be walking this time. She'll be dancing."

Kaycee just stared at me.

"Okay, so it's similar. But Derek assured me she's game."

"Derek? Did he drag you into this?"

Kaycee knew all about our troubled history.

"I'm not doing it for him," I said vehemently.

"A sudden burst of school spirit, eh?" She didn't mention Levina's name, but I could see by her smirk that she knew the real reason why I had volunteered to make the website. We had had the conversation about my unhealthy "obsession" with Levina Deuchant many times.

Kaycee finally agreed to help after I promised to keep her name off the project. "I've been early accepted to Brown," she said, "and I don't want some stupid prank to jeopardize that." I didn't figure Whatcom State College would be as particular.

The animation turned out great. Kaycee duplicated the same odd walk of Ms. Long's that she had parodied in The Gingerbread Lady, only now it was mixed with an attempt at the tango. Sure enough, it was a hit. It went viral in our school after just a couple of days. The best thing of all: no word from Ms. Wong. It seems Derek had been right.

The money started pouring in. Ticket after ticket was sold, and the digital coffers swelled. When I told Derek how much we had already brought in after just four days, he didn't believe me. I convinced him by bringing up my PayPal account at school and showing him the number: $6,840 and rising fast.

So there I was, one week before the dance, basking in the glow of success from the website, counting the three thousandth page view, and looking with pride at the amount of money from the ticket sales, when my phone rang.

"Hello?" I said.

"Is this Judah?" asked a quiet female voice that I didn't recognize.

"The one and only."

"The one and only designer of the dance website?" My heart raced a little at the thought that this might be Ms. Wong.

"Uh..." I scanned the caller ID info. Why hadn't I checked before? "Unidentified Caller" said the screen.

"Hello?" she said.

"Yeah, uh, yeah, that was me, I mean, I designed the site."

A pause. Then:

"I loved it. Derek said it was all your idea."

"Well, thanks. I mean, he asked me to do it." I still had no idea who I was talking to. Should I ask? Or would that sound stupid at this point in the conversation?

"But the design was your own."

"I had some help from my friends."

"Oh? Who?"

I felt sort of bad for not giving Kaycee credit, but that's what she wanted.

"A couple of people I live with," I said. "Misters Coca-Cola and Kit-Kat."

She laughed softly. "I've met them before," she said. "Well, I just wanted to compliment you. Derek told me how much money we've made already. I was worried I was going to have to break my campaign promise about our spectacular Senior Trip, but now it looks like we'll earn enough for the cruise. Now I won't be a liar. Thanks."

Campaign promise. There was only one girl who had made such a promise. One of the many reasons I had voted for Levina Deuchant.

I had felt better when I thought the caller was Ms. Wong. Now my tongue seemed to be permanently glued to the roof of my mouth. "Just doing my part," I managed to say.

"Your president thanks you. Are you coming to the dance?"

"Mmm hmm," I said.

"Good. Maybe you'll let me thank you in person? I can buy you a fruit punch."

"They charge?" I asked, like an idiot.

"Uh, no," she said. "Just a joke."

Obviously.

"I guess I'll have to work on my timing," she added.

"No, it was funny." Fool. If it was so funny, why hadn't I laughed? Now I looked like an idiot and a liar.

"Well, see you at the dance," she said. "Will you be out on the floor?"

"I went to every lesson; I'm ready to rumba." Ouch. That sounded pathetic.

She laughed, however. Suddenly, I was a champion.

"Well, save a dance for me."

I won't embarrass myself any further by recounting the stammering that followed. I mumbled something like an affirmative and ended the call as quickly as possible.