Dana teaches the girls how to dance
“Oh, come on now, Max, really? It’s left arm first!”
Max looked around nervously at the line of girls she stood among, her right arm extended into a fist in front of her while everyone else had their left arm extended, except for Kate, who had immediately shifted into the Nae-nae portion of the dance before Dana clapped to stop everyone.
Max stared down towards her right arm. It wasn’t her fault she was so used to using it.
“Right …” Max said, and opened up her hand, Dana’s head snapping to the side and Kate’s arm shifting back to having her left arm extended as the rapid pull of time forced them back several seconds.
This time, Max punched out with her left arm just as Dana made the same motion, albeit much more smoothly. Kate’s lips quietly moved to the song, “whip, now watch me nae nae”
This time, they got significantly further into the song before Max made another mistake, but this time Dana didn’t call her out because it wasn’t an embarrassingly early portion of the chorus. They just continued on, Max rapidly shifting to try and fix her dance while Kate lagged slightly behind everyone else, somehow terrible at counting time for dance despite her extensive music practice.
It was really hard to call how this dance battle with the boys was going to go over. For one thing, while Dana, Chloe, Victoria, and Rachel all had the dance down perfectly, only Dana and Rachel didn’t look ridiculous doing it - Chloe was too gangly and Victoria’s arms and hands were disproportionately large for her body, so a lot of the extension motions made her look a little weird.
Dana wore gym clothes and was the image of precision. Chloe wore a tank top and jeans, the whip-punch with her right hand being one of the coolest moments of the song for the sheer value of her well-muscled and beautifully tattoo’d arm. Kate had worn her pajamas for their flexibility, but that ultimately proved unnecessary as her low flexibility and poor attention to highly repetitive rhythm kept her from extending to any significant degree. Rachel had worn a flannel, booty shorts with leggings, topped off with a gold-lettered snapback for the sake of getting into character, which looked like it had been stolen off of Justin. Max just wore her Jane Doe tank and jeans, and her Chuck Taylors squeaked every time she tried to slide into a whip. Victoria was too crisp for her own good, and the way she hit everything perfectly on time left it entirely evident that she had watched tutorials and practiced in her room - although that had been easy enough to hear last night. Still, it was all worth it to see Victoria show up in her only t-shirt, which happened to be a wall of text quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Once More, with Feeling”.
As they continued on through the dance, Max eventually abandoned all use of the rewind to hide her mistakes as she just became too tired to force everyone back through time, never mind the fact that at a certain point she was just learning too slowly to avoid having Dana help her.
When the practice ended, Max trotted on over to Instructor Dance Queen Dana Ward and gave a sigh of exhaustion. “I swear,” she started, “If we lose to Trevor and the clumsy cat crew after that it’s all me and Rachel’s horrible attempts at irony.” She wrapped her arms around Dana, immediately regretting it due to the sticky heat that accompanied the act.
Dana laughed brightly and kissed Max on the forehead, but both were quick to drop the hug to evade the heat. Perhaps the boys had gotten the better deal - they practiced outside while the girls practiced in the gym. This had originally seemed beneficial, but it was just hot in here now. Or, at least, the girls were just hot in here now, and there was no refreshing breeze to mitigate the situation.
“Don’t worry, babe, we’ll kick their asses. None of the boys have the hip action to pull the dance off, except maybe Warren, and he’ll probably make it dorky and weird.” She took a step away and retrieved a water bottle from the ground, finishing off what remained of it after the practice. Max followed her to a trash bin, and her eyes zero’d in as Dana made a three ounce contribution to global warming and the eventual collapse of the human species under its own waste.
She cleared her throat to distract herself from that, lacing her fingers behind her back and swaying a little as she looked up at Dana as she turned around. Dana took a moment to look at her before a grin broke out on her face. “Aww, shit, you’re so cute,” she crooned, and took a step forward to wrap Max in a tight hug again, lifting her up and spinning her around while Max giggled furiously.
“Huh, GAY!” Chloe’s shout came through hands cupped into a megaphone, and as Max and her girlfriend broke apart, they turned to look at the tall, tattoo’d punk. Once the attention was on her, Chloe immediately broke into ‘break your legs’, and Rachel paired with her a second later, positioning herself just close enough in front of Chloe to be suggestive as she broke into her own bop-bop-bop.
In almost perfect unison, Dana and Max’s hands snapped into flipping the punk girlfriends off, but this just seemed to make them gleeful, and their own middle fingers rose while they accentuated their dancing. They all grinned.
“WE’RE GONNA KIIIILLLL THE BOYS THURSDAY NIGHT!” Dana hollered, and most of the girls still in the gym whooped in appreciation.
With an excellent degree of comedic precision, Kate crossed herself just as the whooping died down, and said loudly, “My lord, forgive me, for murder is a sin, but we will surely lay these punk ass bitches low.”
“Amen, sister!” called Courtney on her way out.