We'll dance again

I can hear my mom smiling. Do you know how disturbing that is? She’s been so excited for so long and now her smile has a little signal that lets me know just how happy she is.
My little box of stuff bounces on my lap as we fly over a speed bump. We’ve driven for eleven hours. Probably not safe but I don’t care and neither does my mom because we’ve almost made it to our new house. When mom spoke about the small town I’m going to be stuck in for another two years I had just pictured a shrunken New Jersey but this is different. The tallest building is a church. Every road is two lanes and something to slow you down that isn’t traffic.
Weirder still; there’s parking available everywhere.
My mom got a new job that promises to pay her enough that we can survive without people’s charity. That’s probably why she’s so excited. I could have stayed with my dad in New Jersey but I don’t really want to leave my mom in a new place all alone. Eleven hours would never get her friends or me to visit regularly.
The main reason I wanted to move here was because I fucking hate my old neighbourhood and school and I need a fresh start.
Junior year may be a bit late for a fresh start but it still beats living under the title “dancing emo fag” for any longer.
My mom has started babbling again about the fact that there’s only two high schools here and how small the town is and other stuff. I’m not really listening; I just want to sleep. No one should ever have to wake at five am, ever. Especially not on a Saturday. I usually would only be closing the laptop and heading for bed by then. Also probably not a good idea but I’ve never really worked in my own best interest
“Look Frank!” my mom chirps, “This is the neighbourhood!”
I glance out the window and see a small housing estate with small houses all with small cars parked outside. Everything seems dwarfed. We’ll fit right in.
My mom drives right into the neighbourhood and stares out the window at each passing house, counting the numbers. “Thirteen, fourteen, shit Frank ours must be well off the road.” Finally we make it to number thirty three, a small grey house that looks exactly like the buildings around it.
The truck with all our stuff in it hasn’t arrived yet and it wasn’t visibly behind us for the second half of the journey.
My mom pulls into the narrow drive and flies out of her seat. “We’re here! This is the house!” She fumbles with her keys till she finds one that looks shiny and new. She prods the door in excitement till they key is in and turned. She glides in, giddy on the high of a new house.
This is itI think standing before the opened door leading into a narrow pale hall this is the door to a new life. Without another thought I step in and walk toward where I think the kitchen would be.

The moving truck arrives about two hours after us. They have our table and chairs, beds and couches. Pretty much everything that could have added to our comfort. My mom ordered a pizza and we sat on the kitchen floor. The only stuff in the house was what we’d put in the car so potted plants and dishes. I brought my cd player too but Mom refuses to listen to any of my CDs.
I unpack my things and go straight to bed, which I had to wait to be carried up the stairs. I fall asleep easily for the first time since eighth grade. Tomorrow is Sunday and then I have school. No one like my mom to leave something as big as moving to the very last minute.
My mom gives me a lift into the local dance school the next morning. Nothing endorses the whole “faggot” look like ballet.
“Hi, I’d like to enrol in the next term of ballet lessons…” I mumble to the woman at the front desk. My mom’s at Walmart picking up the badly needed food. I ate cold pizza for breakfast.
“Hello. Oh a boy. What’s your name sugar?” the woman says searching for something on an overly cluttered desk.
“Eh… Frank uh Iero. I-e-r-o,” I stutter.
“Yea you can spell it all here,” she hands me a form, “if you’re under sixteen you’ll need a parent’s signature.”
“I’m sixteen,” I sigh. I know I don’t look it.
“One term is two hundred dollars that covers costumes and everything right up to and including the Christmas show. You needn't pay it all now,” she says all this as I look down on the form. Cheaper than my old place but a little… efficient. In the gender selection bit it says “girl” or “other please specify”.
I fill in the three pages. The last page has all the actual important information like “type of dance you wish to partake in” and stuff on past experiences. I dig out my phone to get the phone number of my previous school. “Do you dance much son?” the woman is saying to me now while she files her nails.
I nod as I scribble in the last few bits of information. “Yea I do. Um when are the lessons?”
“For what dance?” she asks taking the forms.
“Ballet,” her eyebrows shoot upwards. The tiny teenage boy in an Iron Maiden shirt and black skinny jeans is a ballerina. I get her surprise.
“Starting this Friday at seven pm. Open class at eleven on a Saturday morning so you can get some practice in, that alright with you sugar?” She puts my form in a drawer in her desk, folds her arms and looks up at me.
“Yea I’m sure that’s okay. Bye.”
“Have a nice day sweetheart.”
Well that whole experience made me uncomfortable. Last time I enrolled in a ballet school I was seven and my mom filled out the forms. Also they probably had better questions but whatever. I’m on an adventure now to find Walmart.

“Mom, leave it,” I groan as my mom continues to tell me “no weird band shirts on your first day.” There is nothing weird about my Sex Pistols shirt except that it says Sex Pistols and “god save the queen” on a picture of Elizabeth the seconds face… Whatever I’m sure there’ll be others wearing band shirts in school.
I’m horrified when I see the ones that are. I’m in the door of the two story, 1970s hideous building when all I see are tshirts with One Direction and the 1975. Yea, I believe everyone should have their own taste in music but I can tell straight away no one here is going to feel the same way in return.
Heads turn and eyes glare down at me as I sidle my way through the press to find the secretary’s office. “Freshman” some people grumble down at me, not a bit insulting.
In the secretary’s office a boy about my age is smiling and stapling things together. “Hi, you’re new. Name?” he beams down.
“Uh Frank Iero…” This kid is younger than me for sure but so much taller and so much neater.
He searches through a stack of paper. When he’s gotten to the bottom he frowns and starts again. “Sorry I’ll have to go look for your schedule and things… I thought I’d put all the freshmen in one pile…”
“Maybe you have but I’m a junior,” I say a little disheartened by the fact that everyone thinks I’m a freshman.
“Oh… Right, I’m sorry,” he turns around and gets a page, “I hope I didn’t insult you… Here’s your schedule, map and stuff to give to your parents.”
“Thanks,” I look down at my schedule. First class: Math. Fuck my life. “Uh could you point me in the general direction of the room?”
The guy beams, “Sure! I’m Brendon, by the by. It’s out the door, to your right and up the stairs. It’s the first room on your right you can’t miss it.”
Tactfully I do. Miss it completely and almost walk straight into a classroom full of freshman. Not the best option. I then wander around like an idiot until I find a room with a matching number and stumble in instead to a classroom full of glaring sixteen and seventeen year olds, half of which look hungover.
The teacher, an elderly man with thick glasses and thin hair smiles creepily from the board. “You must be Frank Iero,” he mispronounces my surname but I’m not about to correct him straight off. Here we go, first impressions, time to not be a loser. “Frank’s moved here from New Jersey! Frank, why don’t you take one of the spare desks?” He motions toward two dodgy looking desks in the front of the room, right in front of the desk. Yay.
Math has never been my strength. Geometry especially. Triangles should just fuck off and I doubt there is any chance I’ll get any better with them when I’m sitting practically on the teacher’s lap and still struggle to hear him. Whatever.
The class passes slowly as I sit uncomfortably on the plastic chair close enough to the teacher, Mr. Roberts, that I can smell his man perfume. I scribble some disjointed figures and angles and have paper footballs thrown at me with ingenious slogans such as shouldn’t you be in with the freshman’s or are you an emo and my personal favourite; shorty. One class in and I’m already getting fan mail. This school is going to be so much better…
The rest of the classes pass in a similar way. I turn up late, get introduced by every teacher and end up sitting spitting distance from them. Slowly as the day goes on I get less and less love notes and more and more homework. It’s the first day and I already have more due for tomorrow than I think physically possible to complete.
Lunch sucked. I sat alone in a classroom with my earbuds in, blasting the misfits. I ate an apple and stared out the window at cars moving slowly by and kids practicing all sorts of sports on the various fields. I could never make friends before, I just kind of had a table of people I sat and ate with and discussed the misfits with but by the preppy smiles and letter jackets I doubt I’ll get that here.

At home mom asks me about my first day. I say that it was good and whatever the fuck makes moms feel like their children are happy, well rounded people. I know she just wanted to talk about her day so I brush off talk of my new school and the people and ask her how her day was. She seems delighted and I’m happy for her, I knew she wanted a job like this for ages and they just weren’t available in New Jersey. Something I don’t believe because secretarial assistants are needed everywhere.
I do my homework as quick as possible, eat and ask my mom if I can go exploring. She agrees as long as I’m back for ten.
I take my skateboard out onto the street and skate off in a direction I’ve never been before. It leads me out onto another road and I feel like my little neighbourhood is just a bunch of sterile houses built on a street attaching two parts of the town. I skate around a bit on that road and find a park. It’s got a few trees, a few benches and a few kids shooting up heroine. Now it feels like Jersey. I skate around a bit and find a shabby theatre, another Walmart and a library. The library is closed so I skate in around the edge, into the car park out the back. Not a single car as expected. There’s stone benches and railings though and even better a ramp leading up the two steps into the library. There’s a big NO SKATING sign up and over it spray painted is BAD between the two original words. What clever vandalism…
I skate around for a while, trying some basic tricks and flipping the board as a skate off the ramp.
It’s dark now and I should really get home, especially considering the way home is through the park where the kids were injecting happiness into themselves. Back at the house I discard my clothes and board and lie half naked on my bed, scrolling through social media until three am.

Notes

So here's the first chapter :) next update will come soon I promise :*