Latinx in Publishing is pleased to share an excerpt from Lupe Wong Won’t Dance by Donna Barba Higuera, out on September 8th.
Lupe Wong is going to be the first female pitcher in the Major Leagues. She's also championed causes her whole young life. Some worthy…like expanding the options for race on school tests beyond just a few bubbles. And some not so much…like complaining to the BBC about the length between Doctor Who seasons. Lupe needs an A in all her classes in order to meet her favorite pitcher, Fu Li Hernandez, who's Chinacan/Mexinese just like her. So when the horror that is square dancing rears its head in gym? Obviously she's not gonna let that slide.
“Welcome to this quarter’s curriculum, class!”
I’ve never associated the inside of a gym with such horror. There has to be a way to make it stop. Fu Li Hernandez wouldn’t be caught dead square dancing. Dancing belongs in nightclubs and ballet studios, not a gym. And square dancing belongs somewhere far away where it can’t embarrass anyone, like the 1800s.
We spend the remaining twenty minutes of P.E. watching different versions of the same routine. I’m clenching my toes inside my shoes the entire time. I glance down the line. Most faces are aghast, like they just saw their grandma in her underwear. Except Carl Trondson’s mouth is slightly ajar and his eyes are closed. Is he seriously sleeping through this horror? And Gordon Schnelly, he’s actually tapping his foot along with the music! Each square dance starts with a different man or woman, all with Southern accents, wailing, “If it hadn’t been for Cotton-Eyed Joe, I’d been married a long time ago.”
When the women sing, Cotton-Eyed Joe sounds like even more of a jerk. What had he done to them that they all would’ve been married and happy if he hadn’t come along? Bad enough that Cotton-Eyed Joe had ruined their lives—now he’s trying to ruin mine.
Finally, the torture of the music and watching Coach Solden jog around flailing her arms and legs is over. But some things you can’t unsee.
“By the way.” Coach gives us a wink. “Lace up your dancing shoes. We start tomorrow.”
An icy shiver runs up my spine. A low groan echoes through the gym. I think I hear someone clap, but it must be my imagination. Shoulders sagging, we retreat to the locker rooms.
Andy and I change quickly and head to wait outside the boys’ locker room.
Blake walks out wearing our team’s Issaquah Select baseball jersey and gives me a fist bump. “Hey, Lupe. How’s the arm?”
I make a muscle, and Blake leans in squinting. I chuck him on the shoulder and we both start laughing.
He walks away and Andy rolls her eyes. “You guys are dorks,” she says.
As the last of the boys stream out, I arch my head around the corner. “Niles! We’re not going to prom!”
“Sorry!” he yells back.
Gordon Schnelly beats him out. Gordon is sweating even though we didn’t do anything.
The two-minute warning bell rings. Niles walks out tying his “Annelids Unite! Save the Giant Palouse Earthworm!” sweatshirt around his waist. I might be what my mom calls “a social justice warrior,” but Niles is a huge advocate for our region’s endangered species. Unfortunately for Niles, the Pacific Northwest has some bizarre endangered animals.
“And just so you know, if you were trying to take me to prom, I wouldn’t come out at all.” He motions over his head for us to catch up, like we’re the ones who’ve made us late for our last class of the day.
We speed walk away from the gym and toward the main building. Other kids run past in the opposite direction. When the halls come into view, Andy, Niles, and I exchange a glance. Extra crammed halls mean extra danger.
In elementary school, Niles had Mr. Nguyen as his special ed. teacher back when we didn’t rotate classrooms. Now Niles goes to the Learning Resource Center (a.k.a. LRC) twice a week with Mr. Lambert, or when he, his mom, or a teacher requests it. Niles is on the autism spectrum, so they’ve worked his schedule so he doesn’t have to spend too much time in the halls. But our last class of the day takes us right down the main hallway. And this is one of those days that makes me nervous.
I lock elbows with Niles on one side and Andy on the other. The school hallways are outside, so even when it’s barely sprinkling (which is nearly every day in the Northwest), everyone rushes more. Kids jostle past one another like salmon in the river by our school. So our lame school mascot is appropriate for more than one reason. Someone even painted the halls mud and algae colors to make us feel like Sammy Sockeye too.
“Let’s go,” Andy says, just before we plunge in. We huddle close together and ease into the main hall.
A mechanical pencil falls out of Andy’s unzipped bag about two seconds in and I grab her before she bends down. “What are you doing?” I squeak out. I hand her one of my pencils and keep things moving. “Let it go. You could end up with a concussion or lose a limb.”
Andy stares back longingly as her pencil disappears in a twister of legs and feet.
Even though my brother, Paolo, routinely threatens to “return me to the zoo where my parents found me,” he liked me enough to warn me about the mortal dangers of the halls before I started middle school. “If you die, more food for me. But if you want to live through middle school, keep moving, and, never, ever stop to pick up something you’ve dropped.”
It’s like a Fast and the Furious speed track, but half the people are racing in the wrong direction. On the first day of middle school, Gordon Schnelly ran head-on into a kid with a scoliosis brace and chipped one front tooth and lost the other. He never did find the tooth that flew off the cement path into the mud sludge.
I dodge two chatty girls who are not respecting the passing lanes. When I see a quick break in the traffic, I whip around to face Niles and Andy and start walking backward.
“So, what do you think our plan should be?” I ask. “Plan for what?” Niles says. Andy also looks puzzled.
“Weren’t you there?” My voice is higher than usual. “To get rid of square dancing. I’d do almost anything else than bounce around like a doofus wearing a picnic blanket. Besides, P.E. is not the place for dancing.”
Andy rolls her eyes. “I see a new cause coming.”
Niles executes an impossible last-minute side step before he gets pummeled by a sprinter. “Would you rather eat raw maggot puke or learn the dance?” he says.
“Raw maggot puke for sure,” I say.
I come up with the two most disgusting things I can at the moment. “Would you rather dance with Samantha or eat locker room drain hair?” I ask.
“Drain hair, not even close,” Niles answers, and we burst out laughing.
Andy scoffs. “That’s not really helpful, you guys.”
Niles and I can’t get enough of our “would you rathers”; they’ve always been our thing. But they’re not really Andy’s. Between her mom’s mandated after-school computer coding and Colloquial Japanese for International Business classes, Andy probably doesn’t have room left in her brain for pondering much of anything else. And right now, she’s probably right. We have more important things to focus on.
“So how are we getting rid of square dancing?” I ask.
Used with permission from Levine Querido.
Donna Barba Higuera grew up in central California surrounded by agricultural and oil fields. As a child, rather than dealing with the regular dust devils, she preferred spending recess squirreled away in the janitor’s closet with a good book. Her favorite hobbies were calling dial-a-story over and over again, and sneaking into a restricted cemetery to weave her own spooky tales using the crumbling headstones as inspiration.
Donna's Young Adult and Middle Grade books feature characters drawn into creepy, situations, melding history, folklore, and or her own life experience into reinvented storylines. She still dreams in Spanglish.
Donna lives in Washington State with her family, three dogs and two frogs. Donna's backyard is a haunted 19th century logging camp. (The haunted part may or may not be true—she makes stuff up.) She is a Critique-Group-Coordinator for SCBWI-Western Washington and teaches “The Hero’s Journey for Young Authors” to future writers.
Lupe Wong Won’t Dance estará disponible en español como Lupe Wong no baila el 9 de febrero de 2021.
