Free Please, Please, Please by Rachel Vail

port de bras . My body tilted slightly forward, adjusting the balance, and I relaxed into dance class mode. Square the chest, and leg up, higher, higher, and, stay. Balance. Ahh. Toes, toes, toes—point hard, extend the line. Don’t move. Chin up, chin up, long neck. Breathe. Position, hold. No thoughts.
    Then I crouched down and jumped off the beam. Mr. Brock yelled dismissed, but I was already pushing open the door to the girls’ locker room.
    “What a jerk,” Zoe whispered, right behind me.
    “Mmm-hmm.” I didn’t want to open my mouth and risk crying.
    “Are you mad at me?” Zoe asked. “I just said that because, I tried to think how to get you down from there.”
    I sniffed. She had a point.
    “That was so unfair of him,” she whispered, “singling you out like that.”
    In front of our gym lockers, I yanked off my T-shirt and shorts, not even caring if she or anybody saw my flat body. “I’m so sick of—”
    “Of what?” Zoe asked.
    “Do you think, seriously”—I looked in her eyes—“do I try to act special?”
    Zoe shrugged. “You are special.”
    “You sound like my mother.” I jumped to yank my jeans over both feet at once.
    “Sorry,” Zoe said. She wiggled into her soccer shirt.
    “Do I, though?” I whispered. “What Morgan said yesterday. Do I act all, better, separate from everybody?”
    Zoe sat down. She didn’t answer or look up as she strapped her shin guards onto her legs and pulled her long soccer socks over them.
    “I don’t want to be,” I said, pulling my book bag out of the gym locker. It got caught on the part of the locker that sticks out to catch the door. It frustrated me so much I just tugged and tugged until it tore free, making a little rip in the front of it. I slammed the bag down on the bench. “I just . . .” I was so angry—at Mom, at Mr. Brock, at Tommy—everybody who makes me feel like a stupid little jerk separate from the whole world. “That’s not what I want to be,” I said.
    “What?” Zoe wiggled her foot into a cleat, then looked up.
    “Separate.”
    Mom, I’m sure, was craning her neck trying to hurry me up. I sat down on the bench. I unzipped my ripped bag and pulled out my blue folder. I opened the folder and pulled out the permission slip, then dug around in the bottom of my bag for a pen. I spread the permission slip carefully on the bench, read it over, and signed my mother’s name.
    “I’m going apple picking,” I said.
    “Are you sure?” Zoe asked. She tied her cleats in double bows while she looked over what I had done.
    I smiled. “I have to do what’s right for me.”
    “True,” said Zoe. “But what if you get caught? I mean, you’re, you’ll, you—”
    “Breathe,” I told her. I felt so calm, it was weird.
    She took a breath and asked, “What’s gonna happen?”
    “It will all work out.”
    “Are you sure?”
    I nodded. “I have every confidence.”

eleven
    I handed my permission slip to Ms. Cress in homeroom the next morning.
    “Finally!” she said. “But Ms. Masters won the cookie.”
    “Sorry.”
    She shrugged. “Sometimes you win, usually you lose.”
    “Oh,” I said. “And I was, is it, I mean, can I still get on the soccer team?”
    “I thought ballet interfered.”
    “No,” I said. “We just decided it was too much, ballet four times a week. It didn’t leave time for anything else.”
    Ms. Cress nodded. “It did seem like a lot.”
    “Mmm-hmm,” I said. “So I’ll just, take ballet Fridays, because we don’t have soccer Fridays, right?”
    “Right,” she said.
    I smiled, surprised by how calm I felt. I’d had this weird, foggy, relaxed feeling from the moment I forged my mother’s signature on my permission slip. All through dance class yesterday I felt it, and ironically I danced better than ever—even Fiona complimented me. At dinner, Paul told us about giving his oral report on the four senses—he totally forgot the sense of taste. He was really funny; we all laughed