Dance with Me

Scratch, scratch.
The sound was coming from the window. Kasey pulled
back the curtain and saw nothing. Then she put on the glasses.

---

Ballora was pressed against the window. Her face, pretty at a distance,
was terrifying up close, split down the middle, with a gaping red mouth and
glowing eyes, eyes which Kasey thought saw right into her soul. Ballora’s
long, blue-painted fingernails scraped against the glass with a horrible
metallic screech. Kasey backed away from the window.
“
Okay, Ballora,”
Kasey said. “
Please. Just let me go to this job interview
first. Then I know what I have to do.”
Ballora said nothing, just watched with her glowing blue eyes.
Kasey sat down on the bed and dug around in her backpack until she
found what she was looking for: the driver’s license of the woman whose
purse she had stolen outside of Circus Baby’s Pizza World.
Sarah Avery. That was the name on the driver’s license. And here, where
Kasey was standing in her new crimson dress and tan flats, was Sarah
Avery’s address. It was a split-level suburban home, not too fancy, but
much nicer than anywhere Kasey had ever lived.
It hadn’t been easy getting here with no bus fare, but finally Kasey had
met a long-haul truck driver who was headed this way and willing to let her
ride along. Kasey had slipped on the glasses once during the trip and had
seen Ballora’s face pressed against the passenger side window, still
watching her.
As Kasey stood on the walkway in front of the house, working up the
courage to go and ring the doorbell, the fall leaves swirled around her. She
didn’t put on the glasses, but she felt Ballora behind her, sharing the space
in the eye of the tiny tornado. Ballora was close enough to touch, waiting
for Kasey to lose her nerve.
Kasey took a deep breath, walked up to the door, and rang the bell. The
leaves blew past her with a giant 
whoosh
, and Kasey felt a sudden,
unfamiliar sense of calm and peace.
A small woman with brown hair opened the door. She was wearing track
pants and a T-shirt from a 5K run for charity. “Hello?” she said, sounding a
little puzzled.
“Hi.” Kasey’s voice quavered. “You don’t know me, and this is really
awkward. Uh … do you remember that time a couple of months ago when
your purse got stolen outside of Circus Baby’s Pizza World?”

---

“Sure. It was terrible. Nobody forgets something like that.” She knitted
her brow and looked at Kasey. “Are you … the police?”
She was so far off track that Kasey couldn’t help but smile. “No,
actually, I’m the thief who stole your purse. Ex-thief, that is.”
The woman’s jaw dropped. “You? But you look so nice.… Why did you
come here?”
“I came because I wanted to give you this.” She pulled Sarah’s wallet
from her backpack. “I’m sure you’ve replaced your license by now, but
your old one is in there. There’s twenty dollars in there, too—my first
installment of paying back what I took from you. I have a job now. I start
on Monday. I’ll send you more money after I get my first paycheck.”
Sarah took the wallet. “This is amazing. What made you decide to do
this?”
Kasey thought of Ballora spinning wildly. “I guess somebody finally
scared me into doing the right thing. I’ve changed. I mean, I’m still
changing. And I wanted to say I’m sorry and ask if you can ever forgive
me.”
“Of course I can,” Sarah said. “So few people admit they’ve done
wrong. It’s refreshing to get a real apology. Consider yourself forgiven. As
a matter of fact, I was just making some tea. Would you like to come in and
have a cup with me?”
“Me?” Kasey said, as though there were somebody else Sarah could be
talking to. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll rob your house or something?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not. Come in.”
Sarah held the door open, and Kasey walked into the bright, sunny
house. A big brown dog greeted her, wagging its tail.
In the kitchen, the little girl Kasey remembered from that night was
sitting at the table coloring a picture with crayons. She looked first at
Kasey, then at her mom. “Mommy, do we know this lady?” she asked.
“No, sweetie, but we’re getting to know her,” Sarah said, pouring hot
water in mugs for tea.
Kasey smiled. In some ways, she felt like she was just getting to know
herself. “I’m Kasey,” she said to the little girl.
“I’m Isabella,” the little girl said. Her eyes were big and blue, but they
were bright and lively, not blank like Ballora’s.
“Isabella, I think I have something that belongs to you,” Kasey said.
Isabella hopped down from her chair. “What is it?”

---

Kasey reached into her bag, pulled out the cardboard glasses, and held
them out to Isabella.
Isabella’s wide blue eyes grew even wider. “It’s my Ballora glasses! It’s
my Ballora glasses that got stoled, Mommy!”
Sarah set two mugs of tea and one cup of juice on the table. “Stolen, not
stoled. But you’re right. Tell Kasey thank you for returning them.”
“Thank you for returning my glasses, Kasey,” Isabella said, smiling up at
her.
Kasey smiled back. “You’re welcome.” Kasey knew she didn’t need
them anymore. And besides, they had always really belonged to Isabella.
Isabella put on the glasses and let out a little gasp of surprise. “There she
is!” Isabella said. The little girl stood still for a moment, glasses on, her
mouth agape in wonder. And then she started to dance.

---

---

S
usie listened to gravel crackling under the tires of her family’s old
minivan as her mom maneuvered it past Oliver, the big oak tree in front
of their house. Susie was the one who named Oliver. Her sister,
Samantha, thought naming a tree was stupid. Her parents said it wasn’t
usually done, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do it. So she did.
Oliver was really, really big. Susie’s dad said Oliver was older than their
house, and that was 
really
old. Susie’s mom’s great-great-great-grandma
had been born in this house over 150 years ago, and Oliver was already
there.
“As soon as we get the groceries put away,” Susie’s mom said, “I’ll start
dinner.” She spoke slowly, with weird spaces between some of her words.
Susie thought it sounded like someone was trying to stop her mom from
talking and her mom was working really hard to talk anyway.
Susie thought of voices as colors. Her mom’s used to be bright orange.
Now it was dull brown. It had been this new color for a long time. Susie
missed the old color.
“Does spaghetti sound okay?” Susie’s mom asked in the same disturbing
voice.
Susie didn’t respond to the question because she didn’t care about
dinner, and she knew Samantha 
would
care. Samantha cared about
everything; she liked to be the boss.
“I think we should have those curlicue noodles instead,” Samantha said.
Susie smirked. See?
Samantha’s voice had changed colors, too. It had never been bright—her
voice used to be kind of a pale blue, but now it was gray.
Susie turned and pressed her nose against the minivan’s side window so
she could see Oliver more clearly. She frowned. Oliver looked sad, even
more than he usually did this time of year. Scattered in a ragged wreath
around the base of his thick, knobby trunk, pale yellow and dull red leaves
flittered over his exposed roots in the afternoon breeze. More than half of
Oliver’s branches were bare, including the thick branch that suspended
Susie’s tire swing. The rest of the branches held leaves the same color as
those lying on the ground.

---

Oliver always lost all his leaves in the fall. Three years before, when
Susie was four and Samantha was three, Susie got very upset about the
leaves falling from the oak tree. She told her mom the tree was crying. And
if the tree was crying, it was feeling bad, and if it was feeling, it needed a
name. That’s when she named him Oliver. Samantha, though a year
younger, said naming a tree was “frivolous.” Frivolous was a word she
learned from Jeanie, their godmother. Samantha liked learning words. She
liked