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have to pay just so you can touch her. And I didn’t even have to use any of the pickup lines Primo made me practice for two weeks after Angela turned out not to be my girlfriend.
    “You got to act like you notice a woman,” Enrique said, “and you got to let her know you think she’s fine, but not so fine that she could have you just like that.” He snapped his fingers and stuck his chin up in the air. He thinks that makes him look like a
chingón
movie star but it really makes him look just like that little bobblehead Chihuahua he glued to the dashboard of his Camaro.
    Anyway, I didn’t have to say anything cool or walk like apanther or flash my new cell phone or anything. All I did was sign up for ballroom dance. I could have signed up last semester when Beecher tried to get a bunch of us guys to sign up, but back then I thought ballroom dancing was too gay for a guy like me.
    “You can get the fine arts credits you need to graduate and you’ll meet lots of girls,” Beecher told us. “And let me tell you, girls love to dance. They don’t care if you don’t dance very well. They will like you just for trying.” But we still wouldn’t do it. At first, T.J. Ritchie said he was going to, so some other guys said they would, too, but then T.J. snorted and spit a big wet one into the trash can and said, “You pussies have a good time,” so nobody signed up.
    This semester, I decided to give it a try after I watched one of those dance shows because I was thinking, Yo, look at those dudes—they’re touching those girls. And all the girls on that show looked so fine. I didn’t think the girls at Bright Horizons would be as fine as the girls on television, but at least they would be real live girls and I would get to look at them up close and hold their hands while we were dancing.
    There was only three guys in the whole class and twenty-three girls. At first, I was thinking I would just ask for a bathroom pass and never come back, but the teacher was standing way on the other side of the gym and I didn’t want to walk across that whole floor and ask to go to the bathroom with all those girls watching me because you know how girls are. They were standing real close to each other and giggling andgrabbing each other and pretending they were interested in what each other was saying when all the time what they were really doing was checking out the dudes. All except this one girl who was sort of standing off to the side by herself. Not like she was stuck-up or shy. Just like she was the kind of girl who could stand alone and not care about it.
    I was so busy looking at the girls that I didn’t even realize I was walking until I got halfway across the floor to where the teacher and the girls were standing. Then I got close enough to see that all-alone girl’s eyes and she was looking right at me and not even pretending she wasn’t. I stopped walking and just stood there looking at her, and I’m not kidding, the lights in the gym brightened up like the sun was shining down from the basketball hoop. And the sunlight sparkled on that girl and made her shine like an angel. Just like in the movies. I always thought they made up that romantic shit but I guess you just think that if you never got struck down by love.
    Finally, I noticed that everybody was looking at me, even the teacher, who was this little
gordita
lady with her red hair in a bun and a real tight stretchy black shirt and pants and black high heels with little pink socks just like the ones Letty wears with lace around the tops.
    “Welcome to ballroom dance,” the lady said. “I’m Mrs. Martinez.” She looked down at the clipboard she was holding and then looked at me. “You must be Eduardo Corazon.”
    “Eddie,” I said. I could hardly make myself stop looking at the girl and look at the teacher, who turned out to beMexican. From far away, you couldn’t tell because of her red hair, but up close you could see that she was born with black hair. But