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Between the antique weapon store and the Tex-Mex restaurant was “All Starz Dance Center.” On Tuesdays, my mom dropped me off early on her way to night classes in the community college.

It was Tuesday, and like all Tuesdays, I waited inside the studio’s lobby for you.

Your shadow arrived first. Then your silhouette, specifically the shape of a halter dress over bootcut jeans that you somehow made work. The dress was of a stretchy jersey material that bunched on the sides, giving your body the silhouette of what we thought to be true womanhood.

A thick, partially plucked unibrow accented your large eyes. You had a broad mouth and a small gap between your teeth. You looked a bit like a French actress, but without the perpetual nervous fatigue --more brash, like Brigitte Bardot, also known as B.B., my first crush.

When I first saw B.B. in the movie And God Created Woman that my parents rented because their bougie friend told them it was good, I didn't know if I wanted to be her or fuck her. The director claimed B.B. was "a phenomenon of nature." "She doesn't act. She exists," he said. "That's right," B.B. confirmed. "When I'm in front of the camera, I'm simply myself." B.B. and her character in the movie, Juliette, ate what they wanted, danced where they wanted, and screwed who they wanted with the same simplicity. I admired them.

After that, my parents never rented another old movie, and I didn't meet B.B. again until years when our haircut came back into style-- the middle-parted tapered bangs. In those earlier years, you became my B.B. Like her, you were crass, rude even, some qualities I too tried on from time to time when I felt bold and that it was worth a slap or sometimes more.

We migrated into the dance studio a few minutes after you changed. The impression of your belly ring you got at Claire's two weeks prior poked through your black leotard. This was the first time I noticed it in public. We took our places at the bar in first position, our toes turned out, hips rolled out, butts in, stomachs in, shoulders back, ankles wrapped, hair so taught that my already five-finger forehead gained a finger or two.

To get into ballet posture, one has to become a marionette. A string was tied to the top of my sternum, lifting my chest at its will. First, with just three small tugs, then with a slow, hard hoist until my entire body was suspended. Just my big toes kissed the ground.

The music started. I began to reach behind me with my left hand on the bar, stretching my chin away from my body. Blood rushed towards my face and made it heavy; it sank as my spine contorted into a deep back cambré, a classical ballet term meaning "arched."

I saw my long hair gather on the floor behind my heels.

Then I saw you.

You had an amazing arch.

Your left leg pointed behind you at 45 degrees. Your vertebrae folded backward and extended through your right arm, making a beautiful parallel line with your leg. You looked satisfied as you gazed at your pretzeled teen body in the mirror.

You extended your arch a bit past good form. You didn't follow the typical conventions of a ballerina. That is, thin, poised, with a consistent vertical alignment. Your body moved away from itself. It could break, shake, and put itself back together like that of a belly dancer, the Middle Eastern dancers the West called grotesque in the 19th century. Yet, my mom's gym hosted a full class of belly dancing every week after her Zumba class.

You didn't limit your body onstage. And you didn't limit the spectacle of your body to the sanction of a stage. You danced on chairs at the Dairy Queen while you licked your ice cream cone. You twerked in the pews after Sunday School. You wrote with your body. And like my B.B., your story was not one of feminine mystery, but it was unpredictable.

Your arch was more fierce than the spider crawl in The Exorcist. That infamous scene on the stairs at the height of the young girl's demonic possession, the one not in the original release because the director didn't like that you could see the strings that suspended the contortionist. She was a marionette too. With some help from CGI, the strings were erased --cut, and her backbend was released to the public 27 years later.

Your arch was more memorable than the dip in the famous photograph of a U.S. Navy Sailor grabbing and kissing a nurse in Times Square in 1945. The unnatural and extreme nature of her arch indicates she is caught off guard by the stranger. My older sister had a wedding announcement on her fridge that I initially mistook for this photo. But in a way, it was this photo. In the middle of a large street, my sister's best friend, and my former ballet instructor, leans into a deep back cambré. Red roses dangle in her right hand as her fiance grabs her waist and leans over her. He encircles her body as they embrace in a kiss.

Your arch was more hypnotic than Augustine's hysteria demonstrations at the Salpêtrière Hospital. She perfected her convulsions and arched back for the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. He openly held demonstrations to the public. Freud, Degas, and actress Sarah Bernhardt, to whom she was often compared, frequently attended.

Augustine was able to hold her poses for the long exposure times the camera required and long enough for the plaster casts to dry, solidifying her contorted gestures in stone. When she refused to be photographed, she was put in solitary confinement. Eventually, she escaped the hospital by dressing as a man, a 19th-century Caenis of sorts. Maybe it’s only with Keeanu Reeves in The Matrix that a gravity-defying backbend can be used for combat.

Your arch was more sublime than the quasi yoga positions in the fitness magazines, the ones in the back of the Books-a-Million that we saw after dance class that day. Amongst these magazines, there was the much anticipated Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. It also prominently featured the arch as a medium of extreme euphoria, what freedom is supposed to look like. I marveled at these women and prayed that one day I could be happy like that or have breasts like that.

We continued to sip our caramel macchiatos with extra whipped cream and flip through Cosmo, taking horoscope quizzes and noting fashion ideas. You ripped off the perfume sample sticker from the magazine and rubbed it on your wrists. It was Curious by Britney Spears. You lifted your arm slightly towards me. I only smelled alcohol and your sweat and told you it smelled good. It did.

At the check-out, you smiled at me in a twisted manner. I sweat. I knew it meant you were about to steal a candy bar below the counter, and because of your youthful white skin, you could take it with a smile. Although I despised you when you did this, I also hoped, in a way, your performance was for me.

You split the stolen Kit-Kat bar and offered me half. We walked slowly through the middle of the vast strip mall parking lot into unlit gravel streets. After licking the chocolate off your fingers, you grabbed my hand and swung it energetically in jest. I squeezed your hand with a single pulse to imply I like this. I like you.

On the route back to your house, we crossed a figure carved into a tree. The life-size carving was in the front yard of a modest brick house. It was white man with long brown hair wearing a white robe. He had large moth-like wings extending from his body. The lines of what I am assuming are supposed to be feathers, were painted crudely in a way that made them appear as veins, a gigantic veiny luna moth-man.

I call him Treesus. I don't know how old Treesus is because he gets a fresh coat of paint every year, but he has existed for as long as I know. His face is modeled with wood filler to make a more pointed nose and realistic eyes.

God and I had a good relationship, but I didn't tell him everything. I would've given anything to talk to God about you at the time and my feelings for you. But instead, I whispered these things to Treesus in the front yard of a stranger's home. And I didn’t even have language for him.

That night, he lingered in the shadows, partially illuminated by the sole light of the front porch.

There were no cars in sight, so no one could see us very well. Therefore, no one could bother us very well or follow us very well. We were two young girls walking alone, hand in hand, in short Soffe shorts, the kind with writing along the butt, the kind you roll the waistband down three times so a quarter of your ass peeks out beneath the words, "All Starz."

Later at your house, alternating between gossip and silence, we lay in your blood-stained floral sheets as a tangle of limbs and long hair. It was 2AM. I laid awake, holding you as the radio continued to blast Miss Independent and In Da Club at full volume. You couldn't sleep without the noise.

I didn't know that it would be our last night together like this-- just me and you, me holding you, but you would soon hold onto a God and a boyfriend as if your life depended on it. The pain in your bones you thought to be a dancing injury wasn’t.

So damn painful you couldn't even call it by its name when you told me. And when you told me, you said you would be okay. I don't think I ever heard you say it out loud passed, "I'm sick in my bones."

You played happy for the rest of us. Perhaps you couldn't bear our feelings of sad that you shut them up by buying a wig of every bright color and taking selfies in them with your signature pouty-lip face. You looked great in the purple one, and it was your show, goddammit. But you weren't okay, and you probably knew that when you told me otherwise.

I saw the arch again two years later when I had just moved away from Texas. It was in some B movie like The Unborn, but it could have been Legion or The Grudge. Many movies of these sorts came out around the time you died.

I consumed these horror films with a new kind of devotion.

this story in Dutch