Dancing on the Edge Read Free Page A

knew she had come upon something.
    â€œWould you look?” she said. “What in the world?”
    We all crept into the room, looking for what Gigi saw.
    â€œHis clothes!” She pointed to a heap on the floor. “If that isn’t the strangest thing. Look at the way they’re setting, like he was just in them a second ago.”
    It
was
strange. We all agreed on that. Dane’s uniform: his sweats, his bathrobe, his underwear, his slippers with the backs mashed down, lay on the floor in the midst of the candles, looking as if his body had just melted clear out of them and all that was left was the heap of clothes.
    Then Gigi cried out, “He’s melted,” and I heard this and knew it was so.
    â€œWoman, you’re out of your head,” Uncle Toole said. “People don’t melt.”
    â€œThe witch in the
Wizard of Oz
did,” I said, imagining Dane calling out for help and nobody hearing him. My legs began to shake.
    Gigi leaned forward and picked up two of the bottles and held them over her head and cried out again. “Dane! Dane!”
    I cried out, too, but Uncle Toole grabbed my shoulders again and tried to lead me back out of the room. “This ain’t nothing for a ten-year-old to see.”
    â€œBut I want to. What’s wrong? What’s happened? Why did he melt?” I twisted away from him, my shoulders aching from the strong pressure of his squeezing fingers.
    â€œHe didn’t melt,” Uncle Toole said. “See what you started, Gigi?”
    Gigi didn’t answer. She was on her knees, surrounded by the candle bottles, swaying in circles and moaning.
    I darted around the bottles and joined Gigi on the floor, and Uncle Toole stood behind us cussing while Aunt Casey yelled at him to shut up.
    Gigi and I stayed on our knees swaying for a long time. I don’t know when Aunt Casey and Uncle Toole left because I had to concentrate on being just like Gigi. I kept waiting for Dane to reappear, because it seemed to me that’s why we stayed down there on the floor with our arms crossed over our chests moaning to the spirits. I thought Gigi was trying to conjure him up, but he never came back. The candies burned down, and I grew tired. I climbed up on Dane’s bed and fell asleep, my face buried in my daddy’s bathrobe.
    Â 
    P EOPLE IN OUR TOWN didn’t like hearing about how Dane melted. It was as if it were some kind of threat to them, as if they could melt any minute themselves—from the sun, a heated room, a candlelit dinner. Gigi said it wasn’t worth trying to explain to them that not just anyone could melt like that.
    â€œOur specialness scares them, baby, that’s why we’ve got to move,” she said to me one day when I came home from school and found her and Aunt Casey packing up the living room.
    And it was true what she said about us scaring people. Even the police and the newspaper reporters who swarmed around the house and the yard were timid around us. They suspected Gigi of foul play, that’s what the newspapers said at first: M OTHER OF P RODIGY S USPECTED OF F OUL P LAY . Then when they realized that everything he owned and wore was still in the house, that wherever he was, he was naked, they suspected both murder and suicide and had the pond in back of our house dredged.
    About a week after the disappearance, as they were calling it, the papers got ahold of our theory about him melting and wrote a long article about Gigi and her practicing the black arts. The night after that came out, Gigi came creeping into my room in the middle of the night, her slingshot in one hand and her sack of marbles in the other.
    I sat up in bed. “What’s going on?” I asked.
    â€œGo back to sleep, baby. I just got to deal with some adults who ought to know better.”
    â€œWhat?” I rose on my knees and looked out my window. I could see something moving out there, dark shadowlike