Shingaling by R. J. Palacio Read Free Book Online Page A

she kept us rehearsing too late. Telling us funny stories about other teachers. Personal stories about her own life. How she’d grown up in the Barrio. How some of her friends had gone down a “wrong” path. How watching
American Bandstand
had saved her life. How she’d met her husband, who was also a dancer, while performing with Cirque du Soleil in Quebec. “We fell in love doing arabesques on a tightrope thirty feet in the air.”
    But it was intense. When I would go to sleep at night, I had so much information bouncing around my head! Bits of music. Things to memorize. Math equations. To-do lists. Mrs. Atanabi saying in her smooth East Harlem accent:
“It’s the shingaling, baby!”
There were times when I would just put my headset on to drown out the chatter in my brain.
    I was having so much fun, though, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Because the best part about all the crazy rehearsing and Mrs. Atanabi’s drills and everything else—
and I don’t want to sound corny
—was that Ximena, Summer, and I were really starting to get to know each other. Okay, that
does
sound corny. But it’s true! Look, I’m not saying we became best friends or anything. Summer still hung out with Auggie. Ximena still hung out with Savanna. I still played dots with Maya. But we were becoming friends. Like,
friend
friends.
    Ximena’s snarkiness, by the way, was completely put-on. Something she could take off whenever she wanted to. Like a scarf you wear as an accessory until it starts feeling itchy around your neck. When she was with Savanna, she wore the scarf. With us, she took it off. That’s not to say I didn’t still get nervous around her sometimes! OMG. The first time she came over to my house? I was a complete wreck! I was nervous that my mom would embarrass me. I was nervous that the stuffed animals on my bed were too pink. I was nervous about the
Big Time Rush
poster on my bedroom door. I was nervous that my dog, Suki, would pee on her.
    But, of course, everything turned out fine! Ximena was totally nice. Said I had a cool room. Offered to do the dishes after dinner. Made fun of a particularly hilarious photo of me when I was three, which was fair because I look like a sock puppet in it! At some point during that afternoon, I don’t even know when it was, I actually stopped thinking
Ximena Chin is in my house! Ximena Chin is in my house!
and just started having fun. That was huge for me because it was a turning point, the moment I stopped acting like an idiot around Ximena. No more word vomits. I guess that was when I took my “scarf” off, too.
    Anyway, February was intense, but awesome. And by the end of February, we were pretty much hanging out at my place every day after school, dancing in front of the mirrored walls, self-correcting, matching our moves. Whenever we’d get tired, or discouraged, one of us would say in Mrs. Atanabi’s accent, “It’s the shingaling, baby!” And that would keep us going.
    And sometimes we didn’t rehearse. Sometimes we just chilled in my living room by the fire doing homework together. Or hanging out. Or, occasionally, searching for Gordy Johnson.

How I Prefer Happy Endings
    One of the things I miss the most about being a little kid is that when you’re little, all the movies you watch have happy endings. Dorothy goes back to Kansas. Charlie gets the chocolate factory. Edmund redeems himself. I like that. I like happy endings.
    But, as you get older, you start seeing that sometimes stories
don’t
have happy endings. Sometimes they even have sad endings. Of course, that makes for more interesting storytelling, because you don’t know
what’s
going to happen. But it’s also kind of scary.
    Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is because the more we looked for Gordy Johnson, the more I started realizing that this story might
not
have a happy ending.
    We had started our search by simply Googling his name. But, it turns out, there are hundreds of Gordy Johnsons.