armpits and also her belly button and lower back. “I’m giving it my best.”
“That’s not all you want,” he snapped. “You want to win!”
“Well, sure.”
“So then stop apologizing for yourself with words like humiliate! The body senses what the brain is thinking!”
Cleo didn’t mean to apologize, so she reached for her water bottle, and they trudged back to the ballroom for a catered lunch of finger sandwiches and kale salad. Cleo checked in with Georgie, who reported that Lucas had perked up significantly at the notion of watching her perform on YouTube this evening, and then she checked in with Gaby, who had promised to stop by for moral support.
“What’s your dance?” Bowen said, pulling up a seat at her empty round table, which later this evening would be adorned in gold and silver linens and crystal wineglasses and butter knives and rolls and a fairly average lobster salad followed by prime rib.
“Mambo.” Cleo shrugged. “Like from Dirty Dancing.”
“Ooh.” Bowen’s eyes went wide. “I had such a thing for Jennifer Grey.”
Cleo wondered if there was a woman in the world Bowen wouldn’t sleep with other than her.
“We’re doing a jive,” Bowen said.
“Yikes.”
“Yeah, it’s not gonna be great,” he replied. “I think they overestimated my abilities.”
“Tends to happen with men,” Cleo said.
“What does that mean?” Bowen stopped chewing his sandwich.
“Just, you know, the producers probably took a look at you and thought: What isn’t he capable of?” Cleo knew she was being petty, but she didn’t feel like being kind.
Suzanne Sonnenfeld slid up right at that moment, so Cleo dropped it.
“You guys ready to taste blood?” she said.
“Oh, eat shit, Suzanne,” Cleo snapped.
Bowen, who had been sipping a Perrier, nearly choked.
“Well, well, well,” Suzanne said. “Look who suddenly isn’t hashtag Team Woman.”
“I’m not hashtag Team Woman for women who suck. ‘Not All Men’? Give me a break.” Cleo narrowed her eyes.
“Oh, Cleo, lighten up. It’s all for show. It’s all for my show. I think your professor got what was coming to him,” Suzanne said.
Cleo stood, dabbed her mouth with her napkin, and threw it on the table. “I’m a senator, Suzanne. You can address me accordingly.”
The truth was that six hours was just not long enough to master the Dirty Dancing lift. Maybe for someone else who was not Cleo McDougal, it would have been. But there were a couple of issues in play, most of which revolved around trust—that Cleo didn’t trust that they wouldn’t topple over; that Cleo didn’t trust Francis (though she was trying), who was maybe four inches taller than her, to carry her weight; that Cleo didn’t trust herself to take the leap in the first place.
The rest of the steps were mostly memorization. Once that was down, Francis kept screaming at her to “put some passion in your hips” and “feel the sway, Cleo, feel the sway,” but Cleo did not feel the sway, and she sadly worried that she had no passion left in her hips because, honestly, it had been so long since there’d been a reason for it to be there.
With one hour to go before hair and makeup, Cleo was exhausted. She hadn’t worked her muscles this hard for this long in, well—she never had. Gaby, with her marathon training, would have been much better suited to this task, but it was too late for that. And besides, Veronica Kaye wasn’t showing up to see Cleo’s chief of staff leap into Francis’s arms.
“One more time,” Francis said and pointed to the far corner. Cleo skulked back and turned around to face him, chastising herself for ever agreeing to this stupid thing in the first place. Georgie was right: revisiting your regrets was ridiculous! Whatever made her think that one stupid day of dance could make up for thirty-seven years of not paying attention to the arts? This wasn’t connecting with her mom or her past or anything of the sort. She’d been a fool to think that it would, and now she’d have to be a fool in front of five hundred of Washington’s elites, not to mention YouTube subscribers. (She hadn’t realized there’d be video until this morning—Arianna hadn’t put that in the email.)
But Cleo McDougal did not like to lose. So she eyed Francis across the room and saw his outstretched arms and heard him shriek, “Now, Cleo, now!” and so she ran, and then she leaped, and she was as surprised as anyone that she nailed it.
TWENTY-THREE
Gaby ran into the greenroom, breathless, with just minutes to go