Dancing in the Hallways B r e n d a W i l s o n Dancing in the hallways Brenda Wilson Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Dancing in the Hallways Dancing in the Hallways Brenda Wilson Brenda Wilson An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Dancing in the Hallways T he first thing you need to know about North- wood High is that it operates on a strict, un- spoken caste system, more rigid than the carbon atoms in our hideously orange locker doors. At the top, you have the Varsity Jackets. They don’t just wear the jackets; they are the jackets. They move in a cloud of Axe body spray and unearned confi- dence, their conversations a series of grunts about “the game” and “that guy.” Below them, the Artfully Torn Jeans, who curated their existential dread and vintage band tees from Amazon. Then came the GPA Gladiators, the Tech Titans, and so on, all the way down to the bottom. The bottom was where I, Lara Petrov, had been unceremoniously dumped upon my arrival. I was a free-floating particle, an unknown element. I didn’t fit a category, and at Northwood, that was a social death sentence. My first two weeks were a master- class in invisibility, punctuated by the sheer terror of someone accidentally making eye contact with me. Brenda Wilson It was on a Tuesday, a day so bleak it could have been sponsored by lukewarm cafeteria pizza, that I saw her for the first time. I was engaged in the high-stakes ballet of navigat- ing the main hallway between third and fourth peri- od, a manoeuvre requiring the agility of a cat and the moral emptiness of a battlefield surgeon. That’s when the sea of backpacks and conformity parted, and I saw the girl dancing. She wasn’t just shuffling to music in her earbuds. She was performing . In the middle of the scuffed li- noleum, between locker 238 and the perpetually leaking water fountain, she was executing a full-on, hip-swaying, arm-flinging salsa routine with an in- visible partner. Her headphones were a bright, defiant yellow. Her skirt was a swirl of mismatched patterns. And she was completely, utterly alone in her performance, yet she owned the space like it was a Broadway stage. A Varsity Jacket snickered, “Check out Crazy Maya.” Maya. Her name was Maya. She didn’t even seem to hear him. She finished her routine with a dramatic Dancing in the Hallways dip, springing back up just as the final bell screeched its obnoxious cry. The hallway emptied, leaving me standing there, frozen, a single, stationary entity in the river of motion. She spotted me staring. Instead of looking embar- rassed, she winked. “You’re blocking the stage, new girl,” she said, her voice a cheerful melody against the school’s monotonous drone. “Some of us have art to make.” That was how I met Maya. * * * * * * * * * * “So, let me get this straight,” Maya said the next day, sliding into the seat next to me at lunch. I’d been aiming for total invisibility at a corner table, but she’d locked onto me with the precision of a heat-seeking missile. “You’ve been here for two weeks, and your primary goal is to... what? Achieve a state of such profound blandness that you become one with the beige wall?” I poked at my gelatinous meatloaf. “It’s a strategy. A low-profile strategy.” “A terrible strategy,” she declared, stealing a grape from my tray. “Low profile is just another word for Brenda Wilson boring. And boring is a crime against humanity. Look around.” She gestured with the grape at the caf- eteria, a perfect diorama of the social hierarchy. “You see the Varsity Vertebrates over there? Their entire personality is ‘sweat and victory.’ The Artfully Anx- ious in the corner? Their brand is ‘I felt sad before it was cool.’ They’ve all picked their uniforms. Why are you trying to get issued one?” “Because not having one is worse!” I hissed, finally looking at her. “It’s social suicide.” “Suicide?” She leaned in, her eyes sparkling. “Lara, not having a label isn’t suicide. It’s freedom. It means you can be anything. You can be...” She looked me up and down critically. “You can be the girl who knows all the words to terrible 80s power ballads. Or the one who can build a functioning trebuchet out of cafeteria supplies. The point is, it’s your choice. Don’t let this,” she waved a hand at the room, “this factory, stamp you.” She made it sound so simple. The following Monday, the factory struck back. A group of Artfully Torn Jeans, led by a girl named Chloe whose eyeliner was so sharp it could probably cut glass, were dissecting a “problematic” film in the Dancing in the Hallways hall. I made the fatal mistake of nodding in agree- ment with a point. Chloe’s eyes narrowed. “Oh? I didn’t realize you had an opinion. What’s your take on the auteur’s neo-feminist subtext?” I froze. My brain short-circuited. I stammered something unintelligible about the cinematography. They all exchanged a look of pure, unadulterated pity. I might as well have spontaneously combusted on the spot. I found Maya at her usual spot by the leaky foun- tain, practicing what looked like a robot dance. “I tried,” I mumbled, my cheeks burning. “I tried to have an opinion and it was the wrong one. I’m doomed.” Maya stopped mid-robot. “Wrong? According to whom? The High Priestess of Eyeliner? Please.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “Your only mistake was thinking you needed their permission to have an opinion. Come on.” She dragged me to the library during our free pe- riod. Instead of the classics, she led me to the weird Brenda Wilson section, books on crypto-zoology, the history of ink, a DIY guide to building a backyard igloo. “Pick one,” she commanded. “Any one. And own it.” I picked the one about ink. The next day, when a GPA Gladiator started boast- ing about his score on the physics midterm, I found myself saying, “That’s cool. Did you know the ancient Egyptians used squid ink for writing? It’s called se- pia.” The Gladiator blinked. Maya, passing by, gave me a triumphant thumbs-up. It was a tiny rebellion. A microscopic one. But it felt good. Our ranks grew slowly, organically. First, there was Leo, a Tech Titan who was secretly a master of ori- gami and could fold a perfect dragon from a gum wrapper. He’d been ostracized for suggesting a vid- eo game’s graphics were “emotionally shallow.” Then came Sam, a quiet kid from the GPA Gladiators who everyone thought was a grind, but who actually spent his free time writing shockingly funny fanfiction Dancing in the Hallways about historical figures. He’d been caught printing a story where Julius Caesar and Cleopatra argued over the check at an Applebee’s. We became the Island of Misfit Toys, holding court at Maya’s fountain. We didn’t have a name. We were just... us. The climax arrived, as it often does in high school, in the form of a poorly planned school spirit week. The Friday finale was a “Clique Clash” assembly, where each group was supposed to put on a perfor- mance representing their... well, their clique-ness. It was as cringe-worthy as it sounds. “It’s a spectacle of our own oppression!” Maya de- clared, slamming her hand down on our lunch table, making Leo’s origami dragon jump. “We’re perform- ing.” “We’re not a clique,” Sam pointed out, logically. “That’s the whole point.” “Exactly!” Maya’s eyes gleamed. “So our perfor- mance will be the Anti-Performance.” The plan was terrifying. Maya, of course, would dance. Leo would create a storm of origami from the bleachers. Sam would stand on stage and read, Brenda Wilson in a deadpan monotone, a particularly dramatic excerpt from his latest work (George Washington and a time-travelling Gandalf debating the merits of indoor plumbing). My job? I was to provide the soundtrack on a kazoo. A kazoo I had to play while wearing a hat I’d made from a book about ink, with a squid drawn on it. The day of the assembly, my stomach was a pit of writhing eels. The Varsity Jackets did a lackluster cheer. The Artfully Torn Jeans performed an inter- pretive dance about the crushing weight of moderni- ty. It was all going as horribly as expected. Then the principal, looking confused, said, “And now, we have... an independent group?” We walked onto the stage. The silence was deaf- ening, then quickly filled with confused murmurs. I saw Chloe the Eyeliner Priestess sneer. Then Maya started to dance. Not a salsa this time, but something wild and free, a mix of every style she loved. Leo, from the top bleacher, released a flock of a hundred paper cranes. Sam stepped to the mic. “Ahem,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “‘My dearest George,’ the letter began, ‘The elves are most insistent that copper piping is an aesthetic crime...’” Dancing in the Hallways And I, with trembling hands, raised the kazoo to my lips and played a shockingly recognizable, if squeaky, rendition of “Eye of the Tiger.” For a moment, there was nothing but stunned si- lence. Then, a snort of laughter from the Tech Titan section. A genuine chuckle from a Varsity Jacket who was probably confused. And then, something amaz- ing happened. They started to... get it. They saw the absurdity, the bravery, the sheer, unadulterated joy of not giving a damn. We weren’t mocking them. We were offering an al- ternative. We finished to a moment of silence, followed by not polite applause, but a wave of genuine, roaring laughter and cheers. We had taken the school’s stu- pidest tradition and turned it into a celebration of weirdness. The next Monday, the school dynamic had shifted. It wasn’t a revolution that toppled the cliques; they were still there. But the walls had become porous. A Varsity Jacket was seen asking Leo how to fold a pa- per frog. I saw Chloe, the Eyeliner Priestess, actually smiling at something Sam said. Brenda Wilson I was walking to chemistry, not trying to be invisi- ble, when I passed Maya’s fountain. She was there, of course, doing the robot. “You know,” I said, leaning against locker 238. “That’s not half bad.” She stopped and grinned. “I know. So, what’s your thing today? Still ink?” “Nah,” I said, a smile tugging at my own lips. “I’m thinking of taking up competitive cup-stacking. Or maybe learning to yodel.” Maya’s grin widened. “Now you’re talking.” She linked her arm through mine. “Come on, revolution- ary. We’ve got a school to mildly inconvenience.” And as we walked down the hall, the social pres- sure of high school didn’t seem impossible anymore. It just seemed... irrelevant. The most revolutionary act, it turned out, was simply to dance, even if your only stage was a scuffed patch of linoleum between classes. END Dancing in the Hallways Dancing in the Hallways Brenda Wilson Ovi eBook Publishing 2025 Ovi magazine Design: Thanos An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book Brenda Wilson B r e n d a W i l s o n Dancing in the hallways Brenda Wilson is a grandmother of five with a literary arsenal that would put a seasoned novelist to shame. Her bedtime stories, a captivating blend of fantastical creatures and mischie- vous squirrels, have sent her grand- kids often into the deep dreamland.