I WENT BACK OVER TO DARLA’S HOUSE for a dance lesson Monday after school, and I decided to quit being mad at her when she didn’t seem to even notice. Her mom got on to me about staring at my feet. She said it was like typing: you looked at the document, not at your fingers, which was why they called it touch typing, for goodness sake, except that in dancing, it was your partner instead of a document that you were supposed to look at, but not ever your feet.

Darla sat in a chair in the corner and folded a piece of paper smaller and smaller until it looked like an ant could use it for toilet paper, and then when I had to go, she gave it to me and told me to give it to Wayne. I asked her what it said but she wouldn’t tell me, and just to make sure, she wound Scotch tape around it about fifty times before shoving it back in my hand and then me out the door, as if I had done something wrong or tried to read it already even though it wasn’t meant for me.

She did the same thing the next time I saw her at her house, on Wednesday, and I couldn’t imagine what she might have to say to Wayne in a letter, or in an ant-toilet-paper-size Scotch-taped-up paper wad, either. I told myself I didn’t care, although I really did, but there was no way to get inside what she gave me without tearing something or folding it back the wrong way. It was very frustrating. I asked if she wanted to go riding bikes to Bowlegs Creek, or even Sand Mountain, but she said she couldn’t, she had too much to do, her and Darwin had to rehearse with their mom for a talent show in Tampa. Her mom had just left to go to work at Dr. Rexroat’s, though, so I swore I wasn’t coming back, dance lesson or no dance lesson. But then after another couple of days, there I was, knocking on her door again.

Darwin came down sometimes, and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he sat at the top of the stairs and I could barely see him up there just sitting in the dark, not moving, not doing anything, like he was watching me but not speaking, since I wouldn’t ever go up to his room with him after that one time.

I heard their grandfather every once in a while — coughing up stuff and spitting really loud upstairs somewhere. His footsteps and the floorboards creaking when he went from his room to the bathroom. The toilet flushing. More coughing and spitting. Calling for Darwin.

Me and Darla still didn’t talk much at school, I don’t know why. Maybe it had something to do with how I especially noticed then that she didn’t look like the other girls, mostly because of her Shirley Temple hair. All the other girls had straight hair, or curled on the sides, or bangs. They wore blue button shirts or yellow button shirts with Peter Pan collars, and plaid skirts, and long socks, and penny loafers, like it was their uniform. Sometimes Darla wore that, too, but it never looked the same on her as it did on them. Once, I saw her at Wayne’s locker, standing by herself like she was waiting for him, but he didn’t show up. I don’t think Wayne talked to her at school, either.

One night when we were lying in bed I asked Wayne what the heck was going on with all the notes from Darla, plus how come he never told me what happened to him and her that night at the Skeleton Hotel?

“Will you shut up?” he said. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“So that means you’re afraid to tell me.”

“Why would I be afraid to tell you? Why would I be afraid of anything from you?”

“OK, then, tell me.”

“We were looking for you.”

“Yeah. Right. And how come she keeps writing you notes?”

“I don’t know. She’s a weirdo.”

“No, she’s not.”

“OK, she’s not. It’s all part of a secret spy ring. I can’t tell you any more about it or you’ll be in danger. The whole family will be in danger. They’ll kill Mom and Dad and Tink. They’ll kill you first.”

“You are such a liar.”

“Believe it or don’t believe it. I don’t care. You’re such a baby, anyway.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, would a baby do this?” I swung my pillow down at him hard and knew I scored a direct hit to the face, because he yelled that I scratched his eye, which might or might not have been true. You never knew with Wayne when he was faking. He yelled some other things that I also couldn’t repeat, and he kept it up, trying to make me feel bad for mutilating him, for actually blinding him, until Dad came in and threatened us both with the belt if we didn’t pipe down.

It should have been that Wayne was mad at me since I hurt his eye, but for some reason he wasn’t. Instead I was the one who stayed mad, so that the next time Darla gave me one of her notes, I didn’t hand it over to him. I opened it right up once I left her house. There was nothing about a spy ring, and there was nothing about what I was really worried about, which was them maybe kissing. There was nothing about anything, really. All it said was, “Why don’t you ever write me back?” I couldn’t see the point of a whole entire note with all that careful folding and taping just to say that to Wayne. I could have told her he never wrote to anybody, not even Santa Claus at Christmas when we were little. Mom said he owed all our relatives thank-you notes for presents from three years ago, and whenever he bought Mom or Dad a birthday card or a Mother’s Day or a Father’s Day card, he always forgot to sign it, much less write a note or something. So what chance did Darla Turkel have of getting a letter of her own from a guy like that?

I threw her note in the trash.

At school meanwhile, everything was about the same. The Mighty Mighty Miners had won all their games so far, even against Zephyrhills, their archrival. Those seniors Moe and Head kept taking my rolls at lunchtime off my lunch tray, and nobody looked at me or said anything except that sorry kid Connolly Voss, who wouldn’t shut up about it (“What are you — a man or a mouse?”). I tried one more time to go to the boys’ restroom, but Moe saw me and said he was going to conk my head against a locker if I ever did that again, so I kept peeing outside, behind the cafeteria, killing a bigger and bigger circle of grass even though I tried to aim in exactly the same spot every time.

I didn’t ever get my red belly, and I asked around about it and found out that I wasn’t the only one. Actually there was a bunch of seventh-graders that didn’t get the red belly, either — like Darwin Turkel and people like that — which got me thinking that when they said the seniors gave everybody a red belly who was in seventh grade, they didn’t mean it. The truth was they only chased you down and gave you a red belly if you counted for something, so in a way, not getting a red belly was worse than getting a red belly. Maybe not for the Darwins of Sand Mountain, who had probably already given up on getting people to like them and fitting in and all, but I hadn’t given up on those things yet. I was still pretty sure I could eventually figure out what I needed to do, like grow some more, and get faster, and not try to be so smart in class — stuff like that.

I wasn’t so sure anymore that being the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy in the minstrel show would make people like me, but since Boopie Larent seemed to be doing OK in school, a lot better than me, and since he got his red belly the first week, I wasn’t so sure that being the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy in the minstrel show next year wouldn’t help, either, as long as I kept the shoe polish off and nobody thought I was trying to be colored for real. So I figured I would keep going to lessons even though Darla seemed sad and didn’t talk to me much unless her mom made her dance with me, and I even practiced sometimes when I didn’t think anybody was looking.

One day I had a hall pass to take the absent and tardy slips to the principal’s office during homeroom and I went by the auditorium on the way there. The doors were open and Chollie the janitor was just finishing mopping the stage, leaning back on his mop and I guess admiring his work. I looked in again on my way back to homeroom and he was gone. The auditorium was dark except for the stage lights, like there was about to be a performance or something, only nobody was there, only me, so for some reason I went in. I was pretty nervous, so I closed the doors behind me, held my breath, and listened for about a minute. Then I went up onstage.

I pretended everybody applauded for a long time, but I breathed deep to get my concentration. Darla’s mom said you should never hurry. She said you can’t rush greatness. I waved to the crowd, took my time shoving the hall pass into my jeans pocket. Then, when I was good and ready, I did a sort of tap dance like I’d seen Darla do, though her mom hadn’t taught me any of that stuff yet. The people loved it, anyway, and I took a big bow when I finished.

Chollie hadn’t just mopped up there, he had also waxed, so I took my shoes off and just kept on my socks, then took a running start offstage and into a long slide through the lights. I twirled and glided through a bunch of silky moves I made up, like Fred Astaire. I tried to spin around like a ballet dancer, but that made me dizzy, so I flashed my arms out to my sides and dropped to one knee and did the “Swanee, how I love you, how I love you,” like I’d seen in the minstrel show. I did everything I could think of up there, even the lean-way-forward-and-pretend-to-run-but-not-really while I was singing: “Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy.”

Then Chollie walked back in. I stopped cold, or tried to stop, only I fell down instead. He had come back for his bucket and mop, but I hadn’t heard a thing until he was right there. He took hold of his mop handle, with the mop in the bucket, and looked it over like he was inspecting for damage, although he was chuckling, too, I guess about me falling on the floor like that. Then he looked down at me.

“Why you in here messing up my floor?” he said. I didn’t know what to answer at first, so I just stared at him. He was tall and mostly bald but not old or anything. He wore his janitor’s uniform of khaki pants and shirt with his name stenciled over the pocket. His voice was low and didn’t sound mean like you might expect.

“I have a hall pass,” I said finally. I got to my feet and stuck it out toward him.

He kept looking from me to his mop, then back to me. He didn’t take the hall pass. “I don’t think you have a hall pass to the auditorium to mess up my floor,” he said.

“No.” I looked down at my feet.

“Why you trying to dance like that, anyways?” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “For the minstrel show. To be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy.”

“Is that right.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tapped his foot. I still didn’t look at him. I hadn’t ever really talked to anyone who was colored before, and I remembered the time when Dad and Wayne and me saw Chollie after the minstrel show in August, and Mr. Hollis Wratchford asked Chollie how he thought the Rotary Club did that night and said Chollie was the expert, but I wasn’t sure what he might be the expert of except how colored people were supposed to dance.

Chollie said, “Practicing, huh?” and I nodded my head. Then he said, “Well, you better keep practicing. You better practice a lot.”

I nodded again and said I had to go, the bell was about to ring. As soon as I said it, the bell did ring and I knew I was going to get in trouble for not making it back to homeroom before first period.

I grabbed my shoes and ran off the stage, down the steps to the auditorium, up the aisle to the double doors in the back.

“Wait,” Chollie said, and I stopped just before the doors and turned around. He could have been an actor in a play, standing there all alone in the middle of the stage in the lights with his mop and his bucket. “One more thing, there,” he said. “Don’t you be doing your business outside on my grass anymore, either. I know your daddy, and I know you don’t want me to have to talk to him about a thing like that.”

That made me nervous even though Chollie still didn’t sound mad the way grown-ups usually do when they get on you about something. I wanted to explain it to him, that they wouldn’t let me into the WHITES ONLY, but I couldn’t say that to a real colored person — at least I guessed I couldn’t — especially since I didn’t look colored anymore myself. It was all too confusing. I didn’t even know where Chollie went to the bathroom, either, I realized, and he was still standing there, waiting, so I said, “No, sir,” about doing my business in his grass anymore, even though I had never said “sir” to anybody colored before, either.

“That’s a good man,” Chollie said, and I was happy to hear him say it, although later I didn’t know if he meant me, for minding what he was saying, or if he meant my dad.