Read How Not To Fall for Free Online Page B

the height.”
    â€œI climb well?” I can’t help it. It’s always exciting to hear I don’t suck.
    â€œBalance, flexibility, strength, coordination—yes, you climb very well for a beginner. Practice would allow you to build the motor patterns so you can climb efficiently, and you’d construct decision maps for choosing moves, which would make you faster.”
    â€œAnd I can stand on my toes!” I add as I slide into the flip-flops I wore to the gym.
    He smiles at me. “Yes. I can’t do that.”
    â€œBut you can do pull-ups, which I’m sure more than makes up for it. Also, even without that you’ve got”—I stand on tiptoe in front of him and measure flat across the top of my head—“three inches on me.”
    â€œBut I can’t put my knee in my ear. A skill worth coveting. Ready?”
    We walk out to his car and head home.
    â€œWell, young Coffey, what shall we do next? Coffee on Thursday?”
    â€œI can’t Thursday, I teach at the community center that night.”
    â€œWhat do you teach?”
    â€œDance, dummy.”
    â€œHow should I know? You might have taught biology or maths or, for all I know, painting or poetry or Polish.”
    â€œJust dance,” I say. “Ballet on Tuesdays, jazz on Thursdays, and this semester I rehearse on my own on Wednesdays too.”
    â€œWhat are you rehearsing for?”
    â€œJust the end-of-year recital. All the teachers do solos. It’s no big deal, but, ya know, you can’t just throw something together.”
    â€œNo,” he says. “ You can’t just throw something together. Well. What time are you finished Thursday?”
    â€œSeven thirty.”
    â€œHow about I meet you there—on Grant Street, right?—and we can get some food and work for a couple of hours. You’d be working anyway, right? Me too. Might as well work together.”
    â€œSure.” I smile. In my head I’m already texting Margaret: “WE MIGHT AS WELL WORK TOGETHER!!!” :-D
    Â 
    And when I get home, of course I dissect the whole adventure with Margaret.
    â€œSo he showed off,” she summarizes. “But mostly he was teachery.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd on Friday he brought you food and said you were ‘his sort.’”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd you’re having a study table on Thursday.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDude, he likes you.”
    â€œI think so too! But there isn’t anything.... Like you said, he built a wall.”
    â€œYeah, I don’t mean he likes you likes you, I think he wants to, like, mentor you as you launch into the world.” She makes a launching gesture that looks to me kind of a lot like masturbation, and we both laugh.
    â€œThere was totally mentoring happening on his side, at the rock wall,” I say to my bowl of tuna and greens. “And on my side, it was mostly, ‘I want to bite into your ropy forearms and run my fingernails down your treasure trail.’”
    â€œHe has a treasure trail?”
    â€œI don’t know, that was just my imagination. He kept his shirt on the whole time.”
    â€œAh. That’s a shame. But it reinforces the ‘mentor not fuck-buddy’ hypothesis. I bet he’s got amazing abs, and he totally could have taken off his shirt and shown them to you.”
    â€œWell, I’ll take what I can get.”

Chapter 5
    Burritos and Trauma
    F or the uninitiated, here’s how a ninety-minute community center jazz class goes during the spring: thirty minutes of warm-ups, twenty minutes of floor work, and then forty minutes on the routine for the recital. I’m choreographing it to “Happy.” They love the song and their dance, but I’m pushing them hard. By seven thirty, my eighteen tweens are sweating heavily, their heads down, their hands on their hips as they gasp for air.
    â€œIf it feels hard, you’re doing it