‘Wanna Dance?’ : Growing up: Even with help from older siblings, MTV and ‘The Wonder Years,’ it’s still tough to ask a girl to dance when you’re 12 years old.

Miguel Garcia tensed as he stood at the entrance to the school cafeteria. Surrounded by a cocoon of sympathizers and friends, the Niles, Ill., seventh-grader fingered his new purple shirt. In a few minutes the lights would dim, and the school dance would begin.

Gemini Junior High’s cinder-block cafeteria had been cheerily decorated with snowflakes and Santas, but the 12-year-old scarcely noticed. Miguel had serious business at hand. A few months before, at the last school shindig, he had danced cheek-to-cheek with the classmate of his dreams. Something had gone wrong, though, and she had ignored him ever since. Tonight he was struggling for the courage to approach her again.

When the music started, Miguel straightened like a cadet. “It’s all on me now,” he said. As he disappeared into the cafeteria, an eighth-grader who’d been eavesdropping shook his head: “School dances are harder than you think.”

Welcome to the mating dance of the 12-year-olds. On weekends and after class, junior high students nationwide try to apply all they’ve learned from their older siblings, MTV and “The Wonder Years” to approach members of the opposite sex. But most will find the experience daunting.

Not much has changed in this school staple over the years--other than the music. It’s still difficult to approach a girl and ask her to dance. “I mean, what am I supposed to say?” wondered another anxious seventh-grader at Gemini. “That something comes over me when I think of her and hear the song, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex?’ ”

Certain rules quickly become apparent: directly asking a girl to dance can be suicidal (better to have a friend inquire); good dancers enjoy considerable social prestige; slow dances, although infrequent, are safer than fast numbers; traveling in a pack is a must, and many junior high girls tend to be, well, a little more mature than their male counterparts.

“The girls are so different at dances,” says Brian Wood, an eighth-grader at Parras Middle School in Redondo Beach. “It’s like you’ve never seen them before. They show up in miniskirts with big hair, and they’re all wearing perfume. It’s hard to talk to them, because it seems like you don’t know who they are any more.”

Daniel Rodriguez, 14, an eighth-grader at Chester W. Nimitz Junior High School in Huntington Park, also knows his dance etiquette. He has been attending afternoon dances for the last two years.

“Usually a guy or a girl will come up to me and tell me that a certain girl wants to dance with me but she doesn’t want to ask me,” says Daniel. “So I go up to the girl and say, ‘Wanna dance with me?’ and we do.

“I especially like the slow songs,” he adds. “We’re like sardines in a can when we dance.”

At first he was nervous about slow dancing “because when you dance fast you don’t even touch, but when you dance slow you have to hold hands.”

But Daniel has it down pat. Two years of attending school dances “has taught me to respect girls.” And that’s something he is teaching his younger brother, Joseph, a seventh-grader.

“My brother will ask me for advice at the dances. He wants to know, ‘What should I tell a girl when I ask her to dance? Where do I put my hands? What do I say when the record is over?’ ”

“It seems like there’s just so much we don’t know about,” confessed Brianne Reilly, 12. At the Gemini dance, she and her friends wandered around like sightseers--anxious, nervous, full of anticipation.

Good dancers may be exempt from the general Angst. “If you can dance, you can meet more people who are cool,” explained John Bassler, 12. It can also provide an introduction to members of the opposite sex. Seventh-grader Maleah Bataoel volunteered: “I’ll try to talk to a guy if he’s a good dancer.”

Unfortunately, few Gemini boys were accomplished fast-dancers, and since 90% of the music was fast, that meant a lot of down time. Most of the boys became expert floorwalkers, developing the watchfulness of store detectives. They cruised the cafeteria in their slick shoes and new Bugle Boy outfits, all eyes and wishful desire.

“The girls dance with each other all the time, but we can’t do that, so we just hang out during the fast songs,” lamented Bassler. “Sometimes we circle the people dancing and go: ‘Ooooh, look at them move.’ But other times I just walk around the room playing my portable Nintendo Game Boy.”

About 25 minutes into the dance, the disc jockey queued up “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye,” by Boyz II Men, the evening’s first slow song. Nearly all the girls who’d been schmoozing by the ladies’ room raced into the cafeteria and grabbed a boy. They had to. Most of the boys believed approaching girls entailed too much risk.

Once the boys got to the dance floor, however, they were on familiar turf. Even boys knew how to slow dance--it was the one step they’d learned from MTV.

During the slow numbers, the balance of power began to shift. The slow songs meant more to the girls than most were willing to admit. One seventh-grader ran out of the cafeteria crying after spotting her true love dancing with someone else. When she poured her heart out to her best friend, the friend began crying, too--it seemed she was secretly in love with the same boy. All told, 13 girls spent parts of the evening in tears.

At Nimitz Junior High, 13-year-old Yesenia Konishi admits she enjoys the slow dances. “That’s the main reason we go to the dances--to dance with the person you like. Sometimes it feels like you’re in heaven.”

But she knows heaven has its share of emotional trauma. At an afternoon dance three months ago, Yesenia says: “I was asked by a boy, ‘Do you wanna go around?’ ” She had a crush on the eighth-grader and was hoping he would ask. “We went around for about two weeks and then it was all over. I broke up with him,” she says, adding that the day after another recent dance, another boy slipped her a love letter expressing his “feelings toward me. It made me feel good, but I already had another boyfriend.”

Miguel sat out that first slow dance in the Gemini cafeteria; he still lacked the nerve to approach his would-be girlfriend. Instead, he wandered aimlessly, eyeing the dancers. His friend, 13-year-old Blair Haltom, was growing concerned.

“Miguel hasn’t asked me to help him,” he said, “but I know he will. I’ll probably have to go up to her and tell her he wants to dance.”

Haltom was a matchmaker, one of the key players at the dance. Shy schoolmates depended on people like him.

Garcia made a last stab at attracting the girl himself. He entered a limbo contest and, catching her eye, shimmied like a crab under the stick. The girl seemed unimpressed.

For most everyone else, the dance was nearing a crescendo. Every 20 minutes, a slow song would cause the boys and girls to rush into frenzied embraces. Then they would scatter immediately afterward. No one wanted to be caught with someone they liked with nothing to say.

They were all waiting for the last slow dance of the evening. It was like a declaration of love. A boy could dance with a girl and show his commitment, knowing that when the song ended, the lights would snap on and he could bolt for the parking lot and his ride home. Later, with his buddies, there would be a thorough rehash of the evening.

At 9, the disc jockey played “Because I Love You,” by Stevie B. When the song started, Miguel still hadn’t made his move. He couldn’t summon the nerve.

But somehow, with some help from a matchmaker, they got together. Miguel danced like a glad-handing politician, accepting a parade of back slaps and high fives from his friends.

Five new couples fell for each other that night. In school the next Monday, there was much speculation on how long the relationships would last.

The consensus? Two weeks.

Staff writer Michael Quintanilla contributed to this story.