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PARTI
POLITICS AND LIES
1
Once upon a time, I’d been the perfect daughter.
Dance recitals, nationals, state championships… I’d done them all. Standing up there as objectively the greatest, with ribbons in my hair and ambition in my eyes, receiving golden trophies and shining medals and the kind of wave-like applause that engulfs and sweeps hard enough to remind the girl on stage that she’s not an impostor. That daily hours-long practice, with several people invested in your talent and success, could not possibly an impostor make.
I remember hugging my mom fiercely after each competition, with bouquets in my arms… Because she’d done this. These were her wins, too. The time involved in driving me from place to place, in organizing and cleaning my costumes and props, in forcing me to practice on the rare days when it’d been furthest from my desire, when all I’d wanted had been to sleep and be lazy.
In many respects, my mom was my dance partner. She just didn’t appear on stage with me.
Laziness had always been discouraged. Fun had never been encouraged, either — because dancing was fun, and you like dancing, don’t you?
What you considerfunchanges when you do it for money.
When the kids at my school were hitting puberty, sleeping from dawn till late afternoon, smoking and drinking and falling over themselves in lust, I’d be shuttled from one dance studio to the next. I’d be eating healthily — eatingclean, as instructors had insisted with maniacal fire in their eyes. Sometimes I’d even skip meals, but dancing for hours is hard enough when sated never mind starved. I ignored all food talk. A girl in my year had been hospitalized with an eating disorder, after all. Sometimes I wondered if adults were actively malicious instead of stupid and lacking in empathy, that deep down maybe theywanteda successful teenage girl to spiral out of control and destroy herself like so many others had done before.
All the money we had went into dance, because dance was our only way out. Out of Greenvale and our small apartment. I had the talent. I had prospects. I could win the success lottery and leave this doomed town forever.
And then came the storm.
My dad started off chasing storms in his twenties. The destruction, he’d once told me, had been awe-inspiring. Like staring up at the night sky and being overwhelmed by your insignificance, your mortality. To chase a hurricane is to confront the abyss head-on. The scale, the magnitude, as this beast of nature rifles through deserts and unpicks trees like splinters from human flesh. To chase a hurricane is to fall in love with power.
Dancing girls do not chase hurricanes. They do not fall in love with power. They protect themselves accordingly and never covet danger. The only power to be valued is in the muscles of their legs and the prettiness of their face.
When a hurricane razed our community to the ground, my dad was right there on the front lines. He helped the newly homeless, the dispossessed. He mended bumps, scrapes and broken bones — but most of all pride. Our community may have been small and tightly knit, but it had never been impacted by something like this before. We had never been so casually disregarded, so contemptuously considered, by Mother Nature.
Mothers are kind. Mothers are loving.
Mothers don’t scare their children.
In the aftermath of my dad’s death, Mom changed. It’s inevitable, I suppose, and I don’t blame her for it. Nothing seemed to matter to her other than oblivion. I was forced to continue as normal, as though Dad were only out of state and not out of the picture entirely. Driving to rescue a family in the south of town, his car had been picked up by the storm. He’d spun out of control. Authorities said he’d flown like Icarus, for a second seeing the world from an altogether unnatural angle, askew and alive, before crashing straight into the heart of the desert.
Mom had to formally ID him.
He’d been brave, people had said to our faces at the funeral.He’d been stupid, they told each other behind our backs. A glory-seeker. Abandoning his family like that, just to be the hero of the hour. Acting like hurricanes are untamed pets instead of cruel monsters. He’d hadresponsibilities. He wasn’t a twenty-year-old storm-chaser anymore.
And so Mom had slid. And slid. One bottle a night became two. Night-drinking turned into day-drinking. All the while, I had to wear a pretty face and continue to dance. I had to ignore the whispers, the stares, the pity and fascination for the newly fatherless girl who walked the school corridors in a silent, friendless daze.
Those days are a blur now. A lurch in time, the comma of my teenage years, a hope that maybe this isn’t real life. Nausea in the pit of my stomach. Night sweats. Insomnia. Shallow breathing. Panic attacks and a constant high-thrumming stress. The nightly pleas and secret prayers that we’d wake up properly from this sleepless madness, that this can’t possibly be the disaster our nightmares foretell. The violation, the theft and breakup of our family, just to provide the most vicious death in return.
Before, we’d been so together. A busy, happy, striving family. Laughter between the walls. Hope for the future, pinned on me.
The laughter stopped. Hope stopped. And our futures became irreparable.
Putting a brave face on things… I don’t know if it’s bravery or stupidity. All I know now is that I should never have taken part in that talent show, because no, things were not okay. Things were the opposite of okay. It took a bad jump to make me see that. It took my ankle cracking for me to finally feel pain.
And then my mom, drunk inside the little rented hall after our school had been blitzed, sayingIt should have been you.
It should have been you.
Moms don’t say that to their daughters.
They don’t. Not even when drunk.
But here she was, as clear to me as she believed her own mind, looking at me with disgust in her eyes, as the entirety of my dance career disintegrated on stage in a single mistimed jump.
