Page 91 of Born to be Wilder

I wasn’t thinking about the surgery.

I wasn’t thinking about Alejandro or what I’d look like in the mirror next year or the decision that sat in my chest like a stone I couldn’t put down.

There was just the music and my body, which had always understood each other at a cellular level, and somewhere between one note and the next, I stopped dancing with them and simply started dancing.

I don’t know exactly when it happened. I became aware of it gradually—the space around me widening, the others stepping back, the crowd shifting. The old man was still there, a step away, watching me with that same bright expression, and he gave me a single nod that said, Yes, go. This is what it’s for.

“Go, Alice! Show ’em what you’ve got!” Marge whooped, clapping to the song.

So I did.

Since I could walk, I had danced. Music lived in my muscles the way language lived in the tongue—automatic, instinctive, summoned without effort. My arms knew where to go. My hips knew what the trumpet was asking for. My feet found the rhythm and stayed there, and the rest of me built something on top of it that I hadn’t planned and couldn’t have planned, and that was, I realized, the point.

The crowd circled me.

I was aware of it without looking—that gathering attention, that collective held breath that meant people had stopped doing whatever they were doing because something was happening here. I had felt it countless times on stages: the intoxicating electricity of being truly admired.

I gave it everything I had, but for once, I wasn’t dancing in public as a performance. I wasn’t performing a routine. I wasn’t Gammy the Vegas showgirl. Tonight, I was just me. Just Alice. I was letting the music breathe through my body, and the more I danced, the louder the crowd around me roared.

My body had always obeyed me; my control over every single inch of every single muscle had been innate since I could walk. It was part of what felt like such a betrayal—this body of mine now choosing to attack me rather than move with me. It infuriated me, and in turn, I danced my way through the rage, through the hurt, through the fear, and I controlled the only thing I could in those moments by letting myself go.

When the trumpet blew its final notes, the crowd erupted.

I let it wash over me and gave the crowd one final turn, one final reach of the arms, one final moment of… me—and then I stopped. Poised. Breathing.

Cheering, clapping, people pressing forward to see, phones going up, shouts from a balcony above where someone had been watching. The noise of it hit me the way applause always hit me—not in my ears but in my chest, warm and immediate and deeply, fundamentally nourishing in a way I could never adequately explain to anyone who hadn’t stood in it themselves.

The old man in the purple suit clapped with his white-gloved hands above his head, grinning that gold-toothed grin, and I grinned back at him and bowed.

Marge crashed into me from the side, practically tackling me. “THAT’S MY FRIEND!” she bellowed at the crowd, pointing at me. “THAT IS MY ACTUAL FRIEND! Isn’t she amazing?”

Doris had tears on her face, smiling so wide it looked like it hurt. Sylvie was laughing and pressing both hands to her cheeks and shaking her head.

You are incredible, she mouthed.

The old man stepped forward and lifted off his flower-pot hat, took my hand, and bowed over it. “Magnificent” was all he said. Then he straightened, touched the brim of his top hat, and melted back into the crowd, dancing away as though he’d been born to dance, just like me.

We stood there while the crowd reclosed around the space, the band moving into something new, the night carrying on around us. But I could still feel the music in my feet. The applause in my chest.

I touched my collarbone. Breathed.

I was still here. Still this. Still entirely, completely myself.

We continued dancing to the music. Song after song we danced and laughed until we struggled to breathe. As we drifted from the crowd to a nearby bench, we collapsed in a heap.

“Wow. That was so fun!” Doris fanned her face. “I don’t think I’ve ever danced so hard in my life.”

Marge was still tapping her foot. “These musicians are the real deal. Man, I wanna come back every year!”

“This really is amazing.” Sylvie struggled to catch her breath. “I would definitely come back.”

“Me too,” I said, and that small pang in my chest twinged as my mind whispered, If you survive to return.

I shoved down that voice again, and my eyes moved from the loud, colorful crowd to a man sitting on a folding stool at the corner of the street, slightly apart from the chaos, as if he’d found a pocket of stillness inside it.

He was young. Twenty-five, perhaps. Shaggy dark hair covering one of his eyes, his head bent down as his hand moved effortlessly over his pad of paper.

He looked up at me, then back down to the paper. As the widows talked, I watched him.