“Great question. Gerald?”
“How did you know my name?”
“Lucky guess.” I hit play.
Missy Elliott fills the room, and the energy shifts. A few of them start nodding along before they even realize they’re doing it. Maryann—bedazzled sneakers, earrings the size of doorknobs—starts bouncing in place with the enthusiasm of a woman who has been waiting her entire life for this moment. I’m not gonnalie; I kind of love it. It’s so different from ballet. From working with kids.
I teach them a basic four-count: step, step, bounce, hold. Kind of like I did with Lily that day in the living room. It’s low impact but high energy, and the beat does most of the work.
Dolores nails it on the first try. She doesn’t just nail it—she adds a hip pop at the end that I didn’t teach, and three women behind her gasp and immediately try to copy it.
Gerald goes right when everyone goes left and crashes into Arthur, who absorbs the impact without complaint and keeps dancing.
Maryann does, in fact, make the body roll sexual. Impressively so for someone who probably has a replacement hip.
And I’m standing in the front of the room, watching twelve people over the age of seventy move their bodies to Missy Elliott in a fluorescent-lit community center, and I feel it—that thing I’ve been missing for months, maybe years. That click. The alignment of who I am and what I’m doing, all of it lining up at once like a lock finding its key.
I’m not teaching ballet to eight-year-olds whose mothers want them in the front row. I’m not worrying about recital costumes or studio politics or whether another Karen is going to threaten a one-star review. I’m just dancing, and they’re dancing with me, and the joy in this room is so thick I could swim in it.
We run the routine three more times. By the end, Gerald has found his left foot, Maryann is grinning so wide I can see every tooth, and Dolores is teaching Arthur the hip pop in the corner while he pretends he needs more instruction than he actually does.
“Same time Wednesday?” Dolores asks me on the way out, pressing a folded twenty into my hand.
“Dolores, you don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to. Take it.”
I take it.
I meet Winnie for lunch at a café near the community center, and I’m still buzzing when I slide into the booth across from her. I must look different because she takes one look at me and says, “Okay, what happened? You’re glowing.”
“I just taught my first hip-hop class to twelve senior citizens.”
“You what?”
I tell her everything—Pat, the fluorescent room, Dolores, Gerald going right, Maryann making it weird. Winnie is laughing so hard she has to put her fork down.
“Syd, that’s amazing. You have to keep doing this.”
“I think I do. I think this might be my thing.” I say it out loud, and it feels real in a way that talking about opening a studio never did. “It’s not ballet. It’s not what I went to school for. But it felt right in a way that ballet hasn’t felt in a long time.”
“Sometimes the thing you went to school for and the thing you’re meant to do aren’t the same thing.” She sips her coffee. “I got a degree in kinesiology thinking I’d work in a hospital. Now I teach downward dog to hockey players who are so stubborn, I want to throttle them. Life is weird.”
“Life is very weird.”
We eat. We talk about careers and finding your path and the strange limbo of being adjacent to the hockey world without actually being part of it. Winnie gets it in a way most people don’t—she’s this independent person who happens to be in love with someone whose life revolves around the ice, and she’s figured out how to have her own thing inside that.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, stirring her coffee. “About Archer.”
“Sure.”
“Is he over Bree? Like, really over it?”
I think about this. Weight it before answering. “I think so. He doesn’t talk about her with anger or sadness. He talks about her like someone he used to know really well and still respects. From what I can tell, the co-parenting is solid. She takes the twins every other weekend, sometimes midweek, and they communicate about schedules without it turning into a thing.” I pause. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Banks says he’s been different since the divorce, more closed off than usual, and Archer was already the most closed-off person on the team. Banks thinks he’s lonely but would rather die than admit it.”
“That sounds about right.”
