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“How’s Lissa?” asked Mom.
“Fun.… Committed,” I said. “She’s really in it.”
“Well, I don’t envy her. Dancing is such a hard life.”
“Not if it’s the only one you’d ever understand.”
Dad, who slept closest to the door in old-fashioned protector style, now reached out his hand to cover mine. “Was it difficult for you? To see her? To be there, around all those kids?” If Mom was right that Dad’s voice was the window to his soul, I could tell from the way he asked that a small, quiet part of his soul had been crushed I’d given up dance.
“Not as bad as I thought. Good night,” I answered softly, leaning down to kiss him quickly on the forehead before I turned and left the room.
Birdie’s reply to my question was immediate, pinging my in-box by the time I’d come back from brushing my teeth in the bathroom.
Hi, Ember—
Hooray! I was so happy to get your email message. I’ve really been hoping that you would come on over to the Fine Arts building and say hello. It’s not the same—and for sure quieter—with you and Lissa both gone.
Also, Ember, I have something to show you that I think you will want to see. Drop by tomorrow after rehearsal—but not too late.
I would love to reconnect. Sooner the better. xx B.
I clicked and reclicked the message like a lighter all the next morning, during and in between classes.
Then I let my fingers send a quick ok see you then! at lunch.
Walking out of the cafeteria, Rachel and I made a plan to hang out this weekend, which was a step in the right direction—but things between us still didn’t feel exactly perfect, so I nixed asking her to come with me for support, for my very first visit back to the dance studio. Dance wasn’t Smarty’s cup of tea, anyway. What we needed most was some real time together out of school. No Jake and no Holden; in fact, nobody else at all running interference. We’d make our way back to the right rhythm, because we always did.
I also called Jenn to reschedule my physical therapy. My afternoon was now clear, and with the school day over, I killed the next ninety minutes in the library. Schoolwork was not the same this year—I could feel teachers giving me leniency on papers and quizzes. I’d never been a spectacular scholar, or even a scholar at all, but now I struggled for my B-minuses and C-pluses. It was trickier, since the accident, to lower myself deep enough to reach those hard, fixed places of concentration.
Paris. My conversation with Lissa kept nudging at me. I’d wanted to take off even before last February. The land of shiny copper pots, of soufflés and flambés, and recipes that needed careful, close instruction. I’d have been in a country where I didn’t know the language and didn’t have any friends, and far from my parents. Was that what I’d been dreaming about, when I’d confided to Lissa?
At half past four, I gathered my books and left the main building, then headed down the block to the converted church that Lafayette used as its Fine Arts Center. The place of my old dreams.
It was the first time all year that I’d walked up the worn steps and through the arched front door. The entrance was the only place where you could smell the building’s previous holy days. That dry-papery, ancient-wood, furniture-polish churchy smell. On the way through, I pressed my hand to the scar ridged beneath my bangs. It gave me courage—I was older, I was different, I was returning to the studio not in failure but with resolution that my past was my past.
I’d heard a rumor that some new hit TV show about ballet dancers had caused a major uptick in Lafayette freshmen taking dance as an elective, and the front hall of locker banks did seem extra crowded with girls in wraps and leg warmers, packing up and heading out. But from the deep cream walls and the lost-and-found basket at the front desk to the corkboards crammed with local auditions, everything looked the same as it always did. It was both exhilarating and strange to be here again.
Stranger still was that I was all but unrecognized by the freshmen and sophomores.
In H studio, I peeped in on a couple of mirrored dancers lingering at the bar. The floor was dusted in cornstarch, and Birdie’s favorite Café Europa radio station was playing Charlotte Gainsbourg in a remix. Laughter drifted from the more casual “green room” next door. And even though there was no reason for it, the sound left me feeling unsure of myself, as if I’d been deliberately left out of the joke.
I walked down to J studio, where most of the one-on-one choreography happened. The protocol of J studio was silence, no music, and it was usually more intense, too, a controlled randomness of small groups and individuals working piecemeal through routines. Some of the dancers were beating out their eight-count combinations, while others performed in pairs. In back was a nest of freshmen stretching through their end-of-practice cooldowns.
With no Birdie in sight, I sat in a spare folding chair by the door.
“Ouch!” The seat was too hard; I winced as pain jolted up my spine. It was like a reminder that the place where I really belonged was in my physical therapy class—not here.
“Ember! You okay?” Marianne Polzone, skimming past, paused to check me over.
“Hey, Marianne. Fine, I’m fine.”
She nodded and resumed the complicated steps of a floor routine. Marianne was a senior, and she’d always been somewhat robotic in her style, but she’d really changed this past year. As I watched her, I had to respect how far she’d come from “Marianne Plod Zone,” Lissa’s smirking name for her.
After a minute or so, Marianne even dared a small, pleased glance at me, as if hoping that I’d noticed how much she’d improved. I smiled back. Yes.
Wade Adams, working on some difficult choreography on the other side of the room, was just as rubber-bandy and intuitively brilliant as always. His older brother, Chester, was a principal with the ABT, which is where Wade himself very likely would end up. Wade and Chester both looked like young, tall, redheaded Woody Allens. Not exactly leading-man types, but you forgave them their shortcomings in the looks department when they started to move.
I relaxed deeper into my seat, as Hannah Thwaite bounced into the studio. Hannah! I’d hardly seen her at school—she probably lived in the Arts building. Hannah was one of the best dancers at Lafayette, a natural despite her round, blow-up-doll figure that she liked to emphasize. Today she’d been highlighting her assets with a plunge-neck leotard, and as she sprang to the corner of the room to retrieve her shrug, she noticed me.
