Every Step You Take by Jock Soto Page A

directly from the bank on a big spending spree, splurging on about forty dollars’ worth of candy. When I got home I stashed my candy (a mother lode of M&M’s Peanuts and Reese’s Pieces, as I recall) and my leftover cash in my underwear drawer. I felt triumphant—I was a cunning and clever Candy Lord. When my father asked me repeatedly during the next week if I had received my check yet, I just shrugged my shoulders and shook my head.
    Kiko and I were both getting to be pretty big boys by this time, and when either of us ran short of socks or underwear, we would, with the selfish self-sufficiency of teenagers, walk across the hall and raid our father’s dresser. It had never once occurred to me that when my father ran out of socks or underwear he might reverse the raid—but he did, and this was how I got caught in my lies about the check. Pop was furious when he found all that money stuffed away under my candy one morning, and the scene where he took back the money and confronted me was not pretty.
    On the drive to ballet school later that same morning, Pop and I didn’t speak. The car was a rolling rage cage. That night NYCB had a special gala to raise money for the school, and several kids, including me, had volunteered to sell raffle tickets before the show. As I got out of the car, I told Pop that he should come a half hour later than usual that evening, that I would be inside the New York State Theater doing the raffle thing, but then I would come find him and we would go home.
    Principal dancers Sean Lavery and Heather Watts were performing that night in Peter Martins’s Rossini Pas de Deux . I was dying to watch my idols work their magic, and after the raffle sale was over, although I knew I should go find my father and head home, I allowed myself just one peek inside the theater. Of course I ended up staying for the entire program—there was no way I could leave.
    When the performance was finally over I ambled out into the dark Manhattan night, dizzy with excitement and emotion from what I had just seen—and there was my father, waiting for me in the white van he had leased when he and Mom moved to New York. When I got into the car there was dead silence, and we drove over the Queensboro Bridge and all the way home without saying a word. It was not until we were back in the apartment that he followed me into my bedroom and spun me around to face him and began shouting at me: “Why did you make me wait for three and a half hours? What were you doing in there?” I looked at him and shrugged. “I wanted to see the performance,” I answered, as if this should have been perfectly obvious to anyone. And then we both exploded. He shoved me onto my bed and started yelling at me and I began to scream hysterically, “That was my money, that was my money! And I wanted to see the ballet!”
    The incident marked a turning point for Pop and me. We stopped speaking to each other and coexisted with a wall of resentment between us. When he drove me to ballet school, I would just stare out the window, dying for the moment when I could get out of the car and away from him. I’m sure the commute was equally unpleasant for him. It was a miserable situation—so miserable that not much later I came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution for all of us. Mom and Pop and Kiko and I were all standing on the little balcony overlooking the street at our Queens apartment when I decided to share my idea.
    â€œGuess what! I’ve decided to move out!” I announced with a happy smile. There was dead silence, followed immediately by a horrendous crashing explosion from somewhere below us on the street. My parents looked at each other and then we all looked over the railing to see what had happened. A car that had come racing around the corner had just smashed into my father’s white van.
    â€œThat’s it!” my father screamed. “I hate it here!