Don't Let Me Go by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Author:Catherine Ryan Hyde [Hyde, Catherine Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780552776677
Amazon: 1477663096
Goodreads: 12030880
Publisher: Black Swan Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-29T06:00:00+00:00

Billy

“We should mark this day on our calendar,” Billy said, out loud, because he was changing out of his pajamas.

It was about a week later, a Saturday morning. He slid into his stretchy dance pants and then threw on a sweatshirt, because dance pants and a pajama top was just too weird a combination, even for Billy. Even for Billy with no one around to witness the fashion faux pas.

Then he turned on the light inside his closet and worked his way back to the standing chest of drawers. He reached into the top drawer, identifying his tap shoes by feel. His tap shoes. Not the ancient, archival pair from his childhood that he’d loaned to Grace. His regular adult tap shoes, the ones he’d worn at his most recent tap performance. Which, of course, had been none too recent. He pulled them out, and held them under his nose, remembering the subtle but distinctive smell of the old leather, and every memory that came along for the ride.

All the memories, as a package deal. No picking and choosing allowed.

He put them on in the living room, Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat watching with uncharacteristic fascination, as if even she could smell the momentous atmosphere of this occasion.

Then he stretched. Got down on the worn-out old carpet and assumed familiar old positions, and cried out with unfamiliar pain when his muscles didn’t yield to the acrobatics they had used to perform so easily.

In a moment balanced halfway between succeeding and deciding it was all pointless, Billy levered to his feet, walked carefully on the slippery taps to Grace’s plywood dance floor, and began to choreograph a dance suitable for her school performance.

He would have done it sooner, but Grace had needed a full week to rest her injured hip.

“I guess she can at least start with a time step,” he said out loud. “Just to work into the rhythm slowly.”

He knew from experience that it was best to start a big performance with something easy and familiar, because the first few seconds were the hardest. If you were going to freeze, or make a mistake, it would be on the first couple of steps. If your mind was going to go blank, it would be right up front. After the first few seconds of dancing, a sort of autopilot would kick in, and everything would fall into place.

So, he believed, if you’re lucky enough to be in charge of your own fate on the subject, you start with a step you can almost literally perform in your sleep.

He began the strange process of slowly reminding his feet how that time step phenomenon had used to go. It was a weird feeling. His mind picked the step up again immediately. Everything from his brain through the nerve signals he sent to his muscles felt exactly the same. But the response from those muscles reminded him of a certain category of terrible dream, the one where you try to run from the

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