Salsa Revenge

*This one came from watching bad dancers in a cramped apartment and thinking about how lessons can turn into something else when the walls are thin and the history is thick. Thanks for reading it's silly and sweaty and hopefully a little hot.*

Jada was twenty-eight years old and she spent her Monday night on the couch in a sports bra and one sock, watching her ex-boyfriend's Instagram live. Lewis ran a salsa club now, Salsa Caliente down in the Mission, and every month he went live from the floor so everybody could see how well he was doing. He was doing well. That was the problem.

The camera panned across the club and there he was, thirty-one and shinier than ever, in a shirt unbuttoned just enough to be a decision. Two women in matching red dresses hung off his arms and he tipped his head back and laughed at something, probably himself. Jada took a long pull of wine straight from the bottle, which was classy, and then the phone slipped and she poured a solid glug of merlot right down the front of her white tee.

"Great. Perfect," she said to the empty apartment. "Fantastic."

She sat there with a wet red bloom spreading across her chest and watched Lewis spin one of the red dress women under his arm, smooth as butter. Three years ago this man had looked her dead in the eye, this exact man, and told her she had no rhythm. Eight months of dating, eight months, and the breakup speech was that she had no rhythm. She had thought about it about four hundred times since.

The upstairs neighbor's TV thumped through the thin walls. Somewhere below, the bodega was closing up, and the smell of churros drifted up through the floor vents the way it always did around ten. Jada looked down at her stained shirt, then at the phone where Lewis was doing a little hip roll for the camera, and something in her chest went click.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. You know what? No."

She was going to walk into that club next month, into his monthly salsa night, and she was going to dance so hard he choked on his own lime wedge. That was the plan. It arrived fully formed, the way bad plans do, and she loved it instantly.

The small problem was that Jada danced like a Roomba with a wedgie. She knew this. The plan did not care.

Tuesday at work she cornered Dev from accounting by the printer. Dev did everything, salsa, pottery, a brief stint with a dragon boat team, so he was the obvious source.

"Please tell me you know a cheap dance instructor," she said. "Like, embarrassingly cheap."

"Ooh, what for?" Dev lit up, clearly hoping for gossip.

"None of your business. Dance instructor. Cheap. Go."

Dev tapped his chin, then winced before he even said it. "Okay, so the only person in your price range is Kendra, and Kendra is... hmm. She teaches out of her apartment, she's amazing, she's like forty bucks a lesson, and she's Lewis's cousin."

Jada stared at him. The printer spat out someone's expense report between them like it wanted no part of this.

"Kendra. Kendra who I made out with at Marco's party five years ago."

"That Kendra, yes."

"We were both twenty-four and it was one awkward kiss on a porch and then we never spoke about it again."

"That Kendra," Dev said, grinning now, absolutely delighted. "She's great though. Honestly she's the best teacher I've had and she won't make you feel stupid. Well. She might make you feel a little stupid. She'll be funny about it."

Jada paid forty dollars that night through a Venmo request she typed with her eyes closed. Kendra accepted in under a minute with a single reply: "OH it's THAT Jada. Wednesday. Bring wine."

Kendra showed up Wednesday with a speaker bag and zero hesitation, twenty-nine years old and built like she was made of springs. Jada's apartment was a one bedroom above the bodega on 24th, small enough that the living room had exactly four square feet of laminate floor and that laminate squeaked like a guilty mouse. Kendra kicked her shoes off, looked around, and shrugged.

"Cozy. I like it. Okay, shoes off, show me what you got."

"What I got is nothing."

"Perfect, that's a great starting point. Show me nothing."

So Jada did the basic step, or the shape of a basic step as she understood it from watching Instagram, and it was bad in a way that had texture to it. Kendra lasted about eight seconds before she laughed, really laughed, and then a snort escaped and she clapped a hand over her mouth, horrified and delighted at once.

"Oh my god. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, it's just... you're doing it with your shoulders? Everything is shoulders? Your feet are doing a different dance entirely, like they got the invite late..."

"I'm gonna stop you right there," Jada said, lunging forward to demonstrate, and her foot came down directly on Kendra's. Kendra howled and hopped backward and the floor squeaked triple time, and that was when a broom handle hammered the ceiling from below, three hard whacks.

"That's Howie," Jada said flatly. "He owns the bodega. He does that when we're loud."

"He's doing it now? We've been loud for ninety seconds?"

"He's sensitive. We went on one date once, two years ago. It ended with an awkward kiss on his own doorstep and him saying 'well, goodnight forever' which I think was a joke."

Kendra was still holding her stomped foot and laughing again. "This apartment is a whole universe. Okay. Again. Shoulders down."

They worked for an hour. Somewhere in there the broom came up twice more, and by the second time Jada was yelling "SORRY HOWIE" at the floor and Kendra was wiping tears. It was, weirdly, fun. Kendra taught the way she talked, fast and warm, hands always adjusting some part of Jada mid sentence.

At the end of lesson one, Kendra pulled a folded paper from her bag, a hand drawn footwork diagram with arrows and little numbered feet, and pinned it to the fridge with a taco magnet.

"Homework. L square, then turn. Count it, one two three, five six seven, don't do four, four doesn't exist..."

"Wait, four doesn't exist?"

"Four and eight are just... pauses. They're rest stops. The beat is a road trip, you don't count the rest stops."

"That is the worst explanation of anything I've ever heard. I'm gonna count one two three four