A/N: A bit late to tell you, but Maybe a Dance was nominated for Favorite Snuggle Fic at the TwiFic Fandom Awards:
twificfandomawards DOT blogspot DOT com/p/vote DOT html
Replace the giant DOT with an actual dot, obviously. Thank you to whoever nominated me (for more than one category!) and thank you all for reading. I love hearing your thoughts :) You're the best!
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Scheduled for Friday
by Anton M.
22: Not (Just) Nala
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Thursday, January 26 (cont.)
Like an official third wheel, I sat cross-legged next to the new lovebirds on the hallway floor. We had the third class in adjacent classrooms, and Jasper was just telling Alice and me how he wasn't allowed to watch TV or play video games until he was twelve when Alice began to teeter sideways. I caught her just in time. Jasper, too, took hold of her upper arm, and he crushed her against him.
"Fuck. You okay?"
"Mm'kay," Alice mumbled, white as a sheet. Her eyes were unfocused.
I'm sure I would've looked as terrified as Jasper did had this not happened before.
"I'm going to murder her dad next time I see him," I threatened. "He sent Alice to school too soon again."
"Again?! Hell, I'll help you hide the body," Jasper replied, holding Alice against him. "Nurse?"
"Not yet. Do you have your lunch with you?"
"In my locker."
"Mine, too." I leaned sideways, looking past the other lovebirds I was ignoring to find the man with the friend. "Peter!" I shouted.
Edward, Lauren, Angela, Tyler and the whole shebang turned to see me, but I looked at Peter and curled my finger to invite him over. I ignored how Edward's eyes followed him when he approached us.
"'sup, Zendaya?"
"Could we get candy from your friend's stash? Alice hasn't eaten properly for three days."
Peter turned, yelling, "Carmen!"
Carmen, a tall, athletic girl, kindly shared a tiny Snickers with me before I tore it in half and made Alice eat it. Color began to return to her cheeks after she finished it, and I dug out ten bucks from my wallet and handed it to Carmen. She shook her head.
"It's okay," she said in a quiet, soft voice. "It doesn't cost that much."
"It will if I keep needing it," I replied. "Please take it so that when I get a bout of low blood pressure I won't feel bad crawling to you for help."
"Really, it's okay."
I tucked it in her boot and quickly lifted both hands. "Yours now!"
She smiled shyly before taking it out and muttering her thanks. I gave her a quick smile before I helped Jasper get Alice up.
"I'm okay," Alice whispered, leaning on us. "I'm okay, I'm okay. No need for a nurse or anything."
"Yeah that's a no," I argued, knowing how much she hated drawing attention to herself in public. "If the nurse doesn't send you home I'll bribe him."
I lifted my bags to accompany Alice but Jasper tucked her by his side.
"I'll take her."
Who was I to prevent chivalry? Besides, they looked illegally cute together, all wrapped up in each other even if Alice was a bit out of it.
Jasper stopped to share a few words with Edward before the two lovebirds continued down the hallway. I dropped my bags, turned and smacked straight into Peter.
"Jesus," I whispered, laughing as he steadied me with his arms. I'd forgotten he was there.
Peter grinned and pushed back his glasses. His eyes flickered behind me, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that Edward was watching us—I could almost feel his eyes in the back of my neck.
Peter checked behind himself (nobody was there) before he took my shoulders in his arms and switched our places. Quietly, he said, "Go out with me."
I gaped at his slightly-too-angular face, his grey eyes and strands of straight black hair falling out of his pony tail, tucked behind his ears. He was skinny but not unattractive in blue jeans and a plaid shirt. I wasn't into him, he knew I wasn't, and yet nobody had prepared me for how flattering it was for someone to think that you were cool enough to ask you out on a date.
Blood rushed to my cheeks in spite of myself. I hesitated, but Peter already raised both arms. "Hey, no illusions here. I know I'm not—" Pushing back his glasses, he tilted his head on the side. "But I think we could have fun. What do you say?"
Listening to the nervous edge in his voice, Mike's 'dating is not the same after you get famous' echoed in my ears, and I couldn't help my smile. So what if my crush had no interest in me? I could still go out with a guy like a normal girl before shit hit the fan.
"Okay," I agreed, feeling a little breathless.
"Okay?" Peter repeated in disbelief.
"Okay," I grinned. "I can't promise—" Not knowing how to end my sentence without bringing Edward into it, I stopped talking, but Peter's shoulders sagged in relief.
I hadn't realized how stressful it must've been for him to ask me out.
"I know," he repeated. "No pressure."
I smiled brightly when we exchanged numbers but not enough to make up for my lack of interest in him.
"So, what do you want to do?" Peter asked, returning my smile.
I felt the pressure to be hip and original and blow him away, and Edward's Fegatello Attack went through my head but so did his expression when I'd told him I'd take my first date there. It would've been fun to go there with Peter but it also felt a bit like… Edward's turf. I wasn't sure how I felt about going there with someone else.
"Dinner and a movie?" I asked, vague and excruciatingly unoriginal.
"Sure thing," he replied. "When are you free?"
Peter was trying to be kind but I did not thrive with the burden of choice all on me.
We agreed to go out at six PM on Saturday evening (restaurant choice pending) just before the bell rang, and while Peter didn't give me butterflies, it felt nice to have caught someone's eye. I was still running on that high, grinning my face off and wishing Alice were here when I locked eyes with Edward just before we entered our respective classrooms. His eyes flickered between myself and Peter as he frowned.
'What made you so happy?' he texted me not even a minute into class, and I gaped at the message because I knew Edward enough now to know he did not text during class. He was breaking his no-texting-in-class rule for me.
'Going on a date with Peter on Saturday! My very first date (as you know), so I'm excited :)'
He did not text back. Like, at all. And Mr. Carpenter kept us five full minutes into the lunch break, so when Jane, Kate and I made it to the cafeteria most of the tables were taken. Peter and Jasper, though, upon seeing me, parted like the red sea on the bench and made room for all three of us. I introduced them.
Funny how I'd been blissfully unaware of Edward's existence not even three weeks ago and yet I'd become so aware of his presence I could feel his gaze from across the table when I sat down. Lauren was barely looking at him as she talked, and so Edward followed me with this raw energy in his eyes. I couldn't tell if he looked upset, taken aback or hurt, but his intensity unsettled me.
I gave him a gentle, friendly smile, arching an eyebrow, and he snapped out of it immediately, nodding at me before he turned his attention back to Lauren.
"Alice fell asleep on our couch," I told Jasper. "My mom's taking care of her. Hopefully her parents allow her to stay home until Monday."
Both of Alice's parents worked downtown, and my mom (when she wasn't on set with me) worked from home most days, so she picked Alice up and took her to our place. My parents wouldn't have minded if Alice stayed with us for the weekend but I was sure her mom or dad had already scheduled to pick her up after work.
"You have good parents," Jasper said.
"Bella has the best parents," Jane corrected, and I smiled at my friends as they shared little stories about them and how much they wished my parents had adopted them. It was sweet but we'd had the discussion before, and I tuned them out to gauge, from the corner of my eye, if Jasper had been correct in the morning.
Not that it made any difference, but… was Edward really bored?
Lauren was explaining something with her hands flailing. She wore a tan skirt and a beige blouse, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a perfect pony-tail and face spot-free like a thirty-year-old alien hired to play a teenager in a movie. She was gorgeous. Edward sat beside her, inhaling his sandwich with elbows on the table and grey sleeves pulled up, nodding along with whatever she was saying. Had Jasper not told me, I would've thought that the dazed look in his eyes could be explained by his crush. It was still possible, of course, probably more true the less I wanted it to be, but his half-smiling, half-shrugging response to her made me feel like his thoughts were light-years away from whatever she was saying.
Oh my God, he was bored.
One thing that made me feel like a million bucks around Edward was how easily he gave people his undivided attention. I felt like the only thing that mattered when he spoke to me, but that made me feel worse, not better. How in love with Lauren was he that he didn't care how uninteresting she was? Maybe her kissing, and, other skills, more than made up for it?
Heart twisting in my chest, I tore away my eyes. I didn't like thinking about how unskilled and inexperienced I must've been compared to Lauren, and it didn't matter if Edward was bored because he still wanted to be with her.
Not me.
I had to get used to that.
"Is that yours?" Angela asked in response to a phone's buzzing, looking across the table at Jasper.
"Nope."
Everyone around me took out their phones until I realized that it was my bag that was buzzing. I'd agreed with my parents to leave my phone on vibrate instead of do not disturb.
Blood drained from my face when Tanya's name flashed on the screen. In the almost year that I'd known our director, Tanya had never called me in school.
Stumbling behind the bench, I threw the empty container of my salad in my bag.
"I have to take this." I lifted my hand in a half-assed wave. "See you later."
I rushed out of the cafeteria, wrapped my mom's black bomber jacket over my shoulders and threw the front door of the school open just as the bell rang.
Fuck it, I'd be late for the next class.
"Bad timing?" Tanya asked.
"It's okay," I replied, inhaling the chilly fresh air in the relative privacy of the front yard. "Did something happen?"
My world rearranged itself as she paused.
"Your sides were published by the Art & Entertainment section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Just a page. It's now being picked up by TMZ, E! Online and the rest of the world."
"Fuck," I whispered. "Tell me you're joking. Which page?"
"A part of a fight scene with you and Mike in the fifteenth episode. How did this happen?"
It scared me how calm she was. Usually, she cursed in Portuguese or confused us with a literal translation of some funny-sounding saying, but not today.
"My coat was stolen on Tuesday," I replied, hearing blood rushing in my ears. "Did the articles mention anything about a coat?"
"None that I've seen."
"Good." Relieved beyond imagination, I facepalmed. "I'm sorry, Tanya. I'm so sorry."
"Have any of your friends read your sides or seen them?"
"Absolutely not."
"Do any of them know what you're called?"
Hesitating, I grimaced.
"Bella?" Tanya repeated.
"One," I admitted. "My best friend. The same girl who's already suspecting my involvement."
"Well, you might want to keep a closer eye on her because she's about to be the first person who knows that you're Nala."
"How big of a trouble am I in?"
"Nothing catastrophic," Tanya reassured. "This is not an NDA violation but bear in mind that it's all zooming closer. How far are you with your house purchase?"
I nervously glanced at the classrooms as I paced, knowing I was going to be awfully late to my class but I didn't dare cut Tanya off since I was the one who'd fucked up.
"Our offer was accepted but it's two or three weeks before we can move in."
Tanya made a disapproving sound. "Nobody but your best friend will know for sure it's you, so there's no reason to freak out yet, but please understand that this might throw our schedule out of the window. Your sides kill the illusion of pre-production. They are proof that the books are actively being filmed, especially with your notes on them, and they point to Atlanta as the likeliest location, which highlights Mike as an aggressively likely candidate for Mathys. His fanbase would be total imbeciles not to suspect this, now."
Shame filled me. I didn't say a word.
"Lucky for us, he's been traveling between LA and Atlanta for the past few months to spend more time with his girlfriend, so I don't think his involvement is quite as obvious as it might feel like to us, but you have to be ready to eat the bread the Devil kneaded."
"I understand," I whispered, weirdly grateful that she'd switched to her usual literal translations of Brazilian Portuguese. "Thank you."
My name on the sides was Mel B. Months ago, during an intense week full of schoolwork and homework and work, I'd brought some sides to school with me to memorize in the car. I'd admitted to Alice in the summer that our names on the sides weren't our real names, and so she'd spent the fall making one ridiculous guess after another until she saw the tip of a paper sticking out of my notebook.
"Spice Girls?" she'd said, grinning her face off.
I did not confirm nor deny her discovery. Scared that I'd violated my NDA, my parents and I had pored over my non-disclosure agreement in the evening, looking for any clauses about sides and if I was allowed to take them to school or admit to the name I went by. We breathed a sigh of relief when the wording in my NDA meant that I had not, strictly speaking, violated it. Alice never mentioned it again, but I had no doubt that she'd remember it.
In spite of what Alice—and probably (after today) the rest of the world—conjured up, Mel B was not, in fact, a reference to Spice Girls.
My first auditions for Underground Memories were not for the role of Nala but for voice acting roles for three different mythical creatures in the books: abunyips, aswangs, and a mountain dragon. Although the small animation I'd been in had had mediocre reception, its small but vocal critics had lauded my performance as two different people. It might've been the push I'd needed to try out for Underground Memories.
The first day I'd shown up with my dad, the three people I auditioned for suppressed their smiles. I was fourteen, nobody knew me, and it was clear even to me that they thought they'd do me a favor by allowing a little girl to audition for the voice of a male dragon.
By the end of my audition, they had a wholly different problem. They wanted me, but they did not want to want me. Rules around hiring a kid were restrictive to their ambitious schedule, and they invited me to a second audition almost certainly because they struggled to justify not hiring me—not to me but to each other. Then, as if their struggle to hire a kid for three different voice acting parts wasn't enough, the mixed-race, curly-haired kid (yours truly) had the audacity to show up for an audition for the role of Nala.
During one late-night discussion I wasn't supposed to hear, my parents expressed their worry about how badly I'd take the news of not getting the role. They thought Tanya and the Casting Director Bree Tanner wouldn't be crazy enough to hire me for a main part if only because they couldn't find anyone better for the voice acting. Even my fourteen-year-old self understood that I should've picked one or the other—I wasn't about to get both. The hours they could legally get out of me weren't enough for them, but they just could not find a more fitting Nala.
Nor could they find a better dragon.
Tanya's decision to hire me for all of it (Nala and three voice acting parts) probably cost them three extra months.
I channeled my guilt into being the easiest teenager they'd ever worked with, and it worked out in the end because they would've needed those extra months for VFX and post-production, anyway. What should've been weeks of intense recording in Alec's Studio ended up being pretty chill because of the time they'd added.
But the name, Mel B, was given to me by Tanya. My second audition, her first time hearing me, she rubbed the shaved-off side of her head as she watched me in disbelief.
"I don't know if I like you," she said. "The only other person with that kind of vocal range is dead. Mel Blanc, of course. You've seen Garrett Kamwanga's work, I'm sure?"
My dad almost fell off his chair but I only nodded, feeling small and insignificant under her judgement.
Tanya lifted her finger before she rubbed her face, thinking. "He's… almost as good as you. Also has that uncanny ability to totally change what his voice does. Bella, was it?"
I nodded.
"I need you four years older and I need you yesterday."
…
Comer o pão que o Diabo amassou – literally "to eat the bread the Devil kneaded" (Brazilian Portuguese) is to face hardships, to suffer, or to pass through trials
Sides – Script sides, acting sides or audition sides are a portion of the script in which an actor/actress is presented with their 'side' of the scene. They are often given in the morning prior to the scenes the 'sides' describe, and they reveal the character, the setting and the dialogue (of that character) but do not reveal the actor/actress playing the part unless notes are added.
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