Chageet's Electric Dance

by Ashir, Rebecca

  Even though she desired to rub the sticky pancake makeup and rouge off of her entire face, she only wiped the tiny pools of wetness forming above her shimmering lips with the side of her finger. Her hand was sweaty and slightly shaking from the sheer madness of the heat. As best as she was able to steady her fingers, she slowly slid the end of one acrylic nail through a stiff brillo of curls and scraped side to side.

  She was still unsatisfied. The desire to relieve her discomfort ate away at her thoughts causing her to forget the order of her dance routine which she was chanting all the while. To make matters worse, her head began to pound and ache.

  As she rubbed her temples in agony, a dancer from the studio where she trained popped her head out of the backstage door. “You’re almost up,” she said with a smirk.

  “My head is killing me,” Barbey responded. “Do you have an aspirin?”

  If it was possible, vulture wings would have spread out from the girl’s black head of hair. She was that kind of girl—the type who preys on wounded carcasses. Oddly, her manicured nails were actually crooked into the forms of claws.

  She stared fiercely at Barbey, who held her pulsating head down in her hands, unaware of the girl’s negative energy.

  “Sure—I have a pain reliever,” the girl said. She grabbed her backpack from behind the door and pulled out a pill organizer. She handed Barbey an amphetamine laced with a surprise from her drug dealer.

  Barbey held the brightly colored pill in her hand naively. “What is this?”

  “It’s the new ibuprofen—works great.”

  “Oh, ok. Thanks!” She swallowed the pill thinking it was an Advil.

  “You can come inside and wait in the wing until your name is called.”

  Though her head ached, Barbey felt relieved to be indoors, out of the sun, in the dark coolness of backstage. Wanting to loosen her muscles in preparation for her dance performance, she slid into side splits on the floor to stretch her legs. Her thoughts were scattered. She felt dizzy.

  The auditorium was nearly three-quarters full. A masculine voice sounded from the grand speakers, “And the next performance is by Barbey Bardot from San Diego Dance Company. The audience clapped.

  But the velvet red curtains opened to an empty stage. Feeling peculiar and lost in a circus of thoughts, Barbey didn’t realize it was her turn to go on stage. The stage manager, a middle-aged, heavy-set man, came over to her. “It’s your turn, Barbie Doll.”

  She was standing on her feet stretching her head down between her legs now.

  “You better get out there,” he tapped her on the back.

  “Oh!” Her head jerked up nearly smacking him in the face. “I didn’t realize it was my turn!”

  He shook his head as he eyed her up and down. “It’s amazing…” He ran his hand over his gray beard. “You look exactly like a Barbie Doll!”

  “Thank you,” she whispered nervously, afraid that she might have ruined her chance of winning the coveted role in Janet’s next video. For a moment, she felt like she was going to cry, but somehow she managed to hide her feelings.

  Feeling oddly light, Barbey strutted out onto the stage in a jazz walk hoping to convince the audience that she had planned to start off stage for added dramatics. As she slinked around the stage now in a figure eight, she felt, to her surprise, as if she were gliding through a magnificent cloud rather than through the actual stale air of the auditorium.

  When she finished her prance, she took a pose and waited for the music nervously.

  Several young girls from her dance studio, wearing Janet Jackson t-shirts screamed, “Barbey!, Barbey!, Barbey!…” They jumped up and down and clapped their hands over their heads enthusiastically in anticipation of her performance. This surprised her and gave her a boost of confidence.

  With her head in an upward tilt, Barbey noticed the black die-cast aluminum lighting fixtures hanging over her head. She wondered why the lights were so bright. Even though she had been on this stage just last week for closing night of the school play she acted in, she suddenly felt as if she were in an entirely new environment. Everything seemed different. She felt so oddly good. Suddenly, she was so energetic. To her great surprise, she felt a strange omnipotent feeling, like she could do anything. She was thrilled to be alive!

  She gazed straight ahead. For the first time, she noticed that the back wall of the auditorium was checkered in black and white. The checkers seemed to be moving around. She dropped her arms to her sides. They felt as light as feathers. Her entire body actually felt airy. She stared at the wall dreamily. It seemed to her as if life was moving in slow motion and it felt great.

  Just below her line of vision, she noticed at the back of the gym a group of teenage girls with sparkly makeup and flashy neon shirts hollering out supporting comments like, “All right, Barbey!” or “We love you!” She started to wonder if she was hallucinating. Why were those girls cheering her on?

  She thought this was extraordinarily humorous and had to turn her back to the audience in a sort of rhythmic manner to hide her laughter. She thought about how unpopular and unattractive she was as a young child. It seemed funny to her that she had succeeded through plastic surgery and careful emulation of supermodels and movie stars in transforming herself from a “total nerd” into a somewhat popular girl. This irony was funny to her.

  A couple of middle school boys standing in the aisle whistled and screamed, “You’re hot!” and “What a babe!” until their mothers came over and forced them back to their seats.

  Barbey was relieved to hear the audience cheering, but the fear of losing this approval ate away her innards, carving her hollow inside like a plastic doll.

  She struck her starting pose—head tilted back, wrists crossed above her head, fingers spread. Her body quivered in nervous anticipation. The music began in a muffled, pounding rhythm.

  Then all at once, the lights flooded the stage even brighter—white and glorious, more radiant than the imagination tends to fathom. The glare was so bright that Barbey perceived that everyone present, even the dullest of persons, must be experiencing the illusion of a celestial reality.

  Barbey felt she looked like a supreme being and the stage looked like heaven. As she began to dance, the intensity of the performance began to heighten beat by beat, step by step in rhythm. She was lit! She couldn’t believe how good she felt. Then she remembered that pill the girl had given her on deck. Had she been drugged? Well, whatever it was, she was glad to feel this bliss!

  Her costume flashed and glittered from the silver sequined bodice, while the fringe lining her hips sprayed out and up: spin, spin, spinning like a jet propeller as she twirled into the light.

  More cheers. She was movin’ and groovin’ to the beat, higher than life, with a painted smile attached to her face, plastic arms raised, jazz hands, head back, then head roll, with a snap into space.

  The audience clapped, screamed, whistled to the rhythm of this phantasm, a step out of time into grace.

  When the music stopped, Barbey threw her hands in the air, raised her chin proud, and bowed, breathless and alive—everything she had worked for had just taken place. Her energy was as powerful as lightning. She felt like she could dance for hours. The audience roared in approval. If only she could hold onto this moment forever, seal it into her soul and eternally ride on its illusive mist like a cloud infinitely recycling itself in the cycles of life. This was so much better than the time she fell on her face, or the time she forgot her routine. This time she succeeded and this time everybody loved her. If only this feeling could last forever!

  For Barbey, the purpose of life was to achieve euphoric highs as often as possible. She lived for the thrills in life—the way she felt after winning a role in the school play, the way she felt when a good looking guy in school gave her flowers, or the way she felt when she made the cheer squad last year. Now, she wasn’t sure why she felt so splendorous but it didn’t matter. She had reached the heights of heaven and she never wanted to co
me down.

  Because the highs she experienced after these excitements were so utterly pleasurable, she was driven to find more and more of the like. And now as she stood upon the stage beaming in bliss after successfully completing her dance before an entirely enraptured audience, she felt an ecstasy so great that her body nearly exploded from the intensity. Life doesn’t get any better!

  But, the shell of her plastic doll flesh was unable to fully contain the intensity of light her ego had produced, so all at once, the side of her face cracked. It was only a tiny jagged fissure in the skin, hardly noticeable, but big enough to release the pressure beneath the superficial surface.

  She felt the sensation of the split like a sharp sting, but she was unaware what had happened. In desperation she looked at her cheering fans, hoping to avert her attention away from the truth and back to her high.

  She reached out longingly one last time for the audience and what they represented to her ego, but the thick, heavy blood red curtains upon the stage inevitably oozed closed and her former elation coagulated and scabbed over as she walked off the proscenium into the darkness of backstage.

  ****

  The summer heat rose up, stretched, and yawned, awaking from its afternoon nap now as Sage, wiping the perspiration off her forehead, trotted up the backstage ramp, under the shade trees, over toward her best buddy Barbey. When she reached the top of the ramp, her eyes locked with Barbey’s momentarily. They both smirked at each other for a second before giggling.

  “You were amazing,” Sage said, hugging her, sunlight breaking through rifts in the trees like hot fire on their shoulders. “See, I told you, you wouldn’t mess up at all.”

  Still breathless from her dance performance and all the excited thoughts of winning the dance role in a MTV video bouncing around in her head, she panted heavily, releasing short bursts of giggles between breaths. Her eyes shifted back and forth nervously, mascara flaking as she gasped, “Do you really think I danced well? You didn’t see any mistakes?” As she waited for an answer, her plastic head started popping out on the left side of her neck socket.

  “I’m telling you, you were great.” Sage shifted her weight from one leg to the other, slightly irritated. “Didn’t you hear the audience cheering and going wild? Duh!” She grabbed onto the top of Barbey’s blonde hair sprayed head, getting her fingers tangled in the curls, and shoved it back into the socket.

  “Thanks, Sage.” Barbey’s thin shoulders released from the stored tension and her neck relaxed as she exhaled like a taut balloon losing its air. “I, like, lost my spot on my chaînés turns though and my switch leap was a little low…”

  “Just shut up, dork!” Sage grinned. “You were amazing and you know it.”

  She sighed in relief and tried to hug Sage again, but she tripped over her own feet and landed face down on the ramp.

  “Are you ok?” Sage looked shocked.

  “I’m great,” Barbey said as she stood up, laughing at her mistake. Then her eyes shifted back and forth once more anxiously, “Could you see the cellulite on the back of my legs?”

  “If you don’t just shut up right now, I’m going to knock you into a huge cottage cheese container and seal you in.”

  Barbey pretended to contemplate the thought, shuddered in good humor, and then, still unsatisfied from not receiving a clear response to whether or not her cellulite was visible to the audience, looked at Sage pleadingly.

  Reading her mind, Sage retorted in high-pitched annoyance, “YOU DON’T HAVE CELLULITE!”

  “Ok, ok, ok…” The two started walking through the high school quad toward the auditorium.

  “It’s strange,” Barbey said. “I feel so energetic and kind of nervous—you know, kind of jittery.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t complain much. Your energy worked to your advantage on the stage.”

  Barbey gazed at the green lawn ahead, noticing from a distance a mysterious guy leaning against a tree dressed in black with black disheveled hair. As she got closer, she thought it looked like the boy who saved her in Tijuana. It is him! Her heart performed an entire dance in three seconds at the sight of him. He was unfathomably gorgeous.

  She tried to cover her feelings and pretended she didn’t see him. Boys don’t like available girls. “Did my parents show up?” she asked Sage, trying to remain calm.

  Sage’s lean body tensed and she stopped, looking at Barbey sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Barbey. They didn’t show.”

  “No big deal.” Barbey laughed, sighed, threw her shoulders back and said, “Good—cause, like, who needs them?” Her throat tightened and she a rush of painful emotions attacked her from the inside.

  But then, she glanced over her shoulder, looking back at the mysterious guy. The warm wind rattled the trees while she pranced long-legged into the cool auditorium to watch the rest of the auditioners.

  As Barbey and Sage walked toward the side bleachers to take seats, some young girls ran over to Barbey with adoring compliments.

  “You were sooooo good!” One little girl with ratted hair and blue glitter on her eyelids said. The other girls chimed in, rustling in their sequined costumes, “Yeah, Barbey, you were awesome!”

  “Thank you, sweeties. I heard Donna rocked on stage.”

  The girls giggled and the ratty haired girl retorted, “She kicked butt!”

  Barbey smiled coolly as she surveyed the room. She was trying to act cool even though she knew her true self was in reality quite nerdy.

  The ratty haired girl continued, “You’re going to win. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  Barbey pretended not to hear, but internal skyrockets ignited and blasted out through her fingertips and toes.

  A sudden hot wind swept through the pop music booming from the speakers, which caused Barbey to whip her head around, losing one set of her false lashes, as she saw the mysterious guy enter through the door and take a seat in the front of the auditorium.

  A redheaded young woman was dancing on the stage to the song, “Don’t Go” by Yaz. Barbey could tell that she was a beginning dancer, but her movements were surprisingly strong and fluid. Even with her elegance, she was certainly not a threat.

  The ratty haired girl giggled and said to Barbey, “That guy’s hot. Isn’t he?” She was pointing at the mysterious guy.

  “Who is he?” Barbey asked as she dug anxiously through her purse, feeling around for her hairbrush.

  “I don’t know, but last weekend my sister took me to the waterslides and he was there with some other rowdy guys. I remember him because he was on the waterslide next to the one I was on. He was sliding down the slide standing up on his feet, even though it is totally against the rules and then, it was so scary, he jumped from his waterslide onto mine. He landed so close to me that at the end of the slide where you slide into the pool, I fell on top of him.”

  “What did he do?” Barbey was brushing the hairspray from her white-blonde curls as she gazed at the mysterious guy.

  She smirked, “Nothing, really. He didn’t even seem to notice me, but I noticed him. That’s for sure. He’s so wild though.”

  While the girls continued their chatter, moving on to gossiping about their favorite rock stars and teen actors, Barbey began to think about how she felt like she knew this mysterious guy from childhood. She didn’t remember him exactly, but something about him seemed familiar. Her mind began to rewind like a video tape reeling through her memories.

  When she wasn’t able to recall the guy in her mind, she wondered if maybe she knew him before she lost her memory. It had always seemed strange to her that she couldn’t remember anything before the age of five. Her mind began to drift back to her earliest memory.

  She couldn’t even remember what her name was before she changed it to Barbey. She was told she was a mute, but aside from that, that was all she knew about her early years. To her, it was as if life did not exist before kindergarten.