kallmekallie:
The first thing she noticed about the girl was her dog.
“Oh my god, he’s so cute,” Kallie gasped as she turned her head towards the canine. “What’s his name?”
There were some angry shushes from a couple sitting near them- two white people with dreadlocks and a distinct aroma that really meant they should be more chill than they were currently acting. Kallie rolled her eyes.
“Oh, go smoke another doobie,” she spat back in a whisper, then turned back to the girl sitting next to her. “Sorry, I promise I’m not… like, mean. Or anything. Unless you’re mean to me first, which you haven’t been. Sorry. What’s your name? You look a little familiar, but… ugh, yeah. Sorry.”
Oh no, the Minnesota was coming back out. Kallie could feel it every time she heard herself inexplicably apologizing for no particular reason. It happened every time she was out of her element, and meditation class was so far out of her element she might as well have been in a different world. Sure, there was yoga class and shit back in her Minneapolis suburb, but meditation felt so… crunchy.
Nolie smiled, watching as Kallie noticed Charlie laying behind her. “This is Charlie,” she began, but paused as the people turned around to hush them. It was still funny to her, in a way, how one moment she could be dancing on a stage in front of hundreds of people in a studio and millions watching back home, and the next moment be paralyzed in fear by the very concept of someone looking at her.
But Kallie took care of it, and Nolie was relieved not to have to do any confronting, which would certainly defeat the calming effects that meditation was supposed to have. It surprised her how much kinder the woman seemed in real life, compared to what Nolie had seen on television. “It’s okay,” she assured Kallie. “I’m Nolie, well, um, Magnolia, but nobody calls me that very often.” Mentioning the show was something that still felt awkward to Nolie, but at her last session with her therapist, she’d been encouraged to try out more discomfort. “I, uh, won So You Think You Can Dance last summer? Or maybe you did dance competitions, I was at a lot of those... I don’t know.”
The annoyed couple turned around to shush them again, and Nolie sighed. “Do you want to get out of here?” she whispered. “I don’t think I can really be chill with this many judgey-Judys around.”
