by A. K. Small
I sighed, then started to take off my shirt to examine my ribs, to count how many protruded (I’d almost failed a weigh-in), when I heard a faint knock on the door. Little Alice stood in the hallway in her pale pink leotard. Two other Sixth Division rats were with her, dressed the same way. All three curtsied.
“We’re scared to go anywhere now that the doors are locked,” Alice said.
Her eyes were wet as if she’d been crying. I slipped my hand in hers. The other two rats waited immobile like little sentinels beside her.
I said, “You’ll get used to it. We all get used to it.”
“Why do they lock us in all winter long?” Little Alice asked.
I shrugged. “Something about germs, laser focus, and monastery silence. At least, that’s what I remember.”
“I don’t like it,” Little Alice said.
“Want me to show you something?”
They nodded.
I didn’t tell them that I needed my own spirits lifted. I took the girls downstairs, helped Little Alice and her roommates figure out how to use their card keys, then led them to the dance annex, to one of my favorite places: the Hall of Sculptures and Photos.
Little Alice ran from one frame to another. “I didn’t know this existed,” she said. She stopped at various busts and statues and read the engraving beneath the art. She asked questions, her friends scurrying behind her. “Wait!” she shouted in front of one photo. “Is that you, Mademoiselle Marine?”
They peered at a photograph of my peers and me in Sixth Division when we were eleven years old, Little Alice’s age.
“Were you already best friends with Kate? Like me, Ludivine, and Simone?” Alice looked at her girlfriends and blew them kisses.
“Yes,” I said.
But as I looked at the picture, I suddenly remembered. We were all dressed in our rat costumes for Scaramouche, our baptême de la scène. We smiled with our mouths shut. Our shoulders grazed and, though the picture did not show it, I recalled that Kate’s and my fingertips, hiding behind Bessy’s tutu, were entwined. But the love between us was already lopsided, another fact the picture did not show.
Inside the wings of the Palais Garnier, I’d squealed as I’d twirled around in my tutu. This was my first time dancing on the big stage, my first step in fulfilling my promise to my brother.
“Watch me,” I yelled to Kate as I pirouetted.
This was even better than having my pick of treats at the boulangerie. This felt like flying. I touched the gauzy material on my chest and kept on spinning.
“Stop.” Kate clapped her gloved hands together. She scrunched her painted-black nose, lifting the crayoned whiskers adorning her cheeks.
I obeyed. Dizzy from the twirling, I bumped against her and laughed. “What?”
Kate folded her fingers on her tutu. A furry hat with two oversized ears sat on her head. “I like your tutu better,” she said, ears swaying. “Yours is wider, heavier than mine.”
“Well, I’m bigger,” I said, the smile on my face disappearing.
“Can we trade?”
“We’re not allowed,” I said. “Plus, Madame Brunelle has eyes in the back of her head and the first bell already rang.”
Tears welled in Kate’s electric-blue eyes. “I can’t go onstage if we don’t trade. Please.” She crossed her arms and shivered.
“Don’t cry. Your makeup,” I breathed. “Here, quick. Unzip me.” Without thinking, I turned and waited for Kate to take off her tutu.
As we slipped off our costumes, other Sixth Division rat-girls arrived and watched the late swap with curiosity. It wasn’t until the second bell rang and Madame Brunelle’s pointy shoes clicked near that I worried about our secret trade, not for Kate but for myself.
“Am I all zipped?” I whispered to Kate.
“Almost.”
Kate grabbed the straps of her old tutu, now snug on my chest, and yanked them up, hard. Something ripped. But I didn’t have time to fix anything because Madame Brunelle was there, spinning me around, looking at me as if I were nothing but a broken stage light.
“That tutu fit you two days ago. What on earth do you eat?” She sighed, dusting her hand on my back. “I’ll be shocked if you’re still here at the end of the year.”
Beside us, Kate bent her legs. I could see her angst was gone and that she approved of the new fullness of her costume. When The Witch was far enough away, Kate hugged me and kissed my cheek.
“Don’t listen to a thing she says.” She caressed my shoulder as the music began. “That old witch doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I swear. It’s hard to explain but sometimes I think I’ll float up to the sky and become a tiny black dot. Anyway. You saved me.”
I hadn’t thought about it much, except for the way my stomach had hurt during the performance. Sadness had overwhelmed me several times that day, doing battle with the euphoria I had felt earlier.
Now, as Little Alice and her friends admired the photograph, I felt it again, cette tristesse, that sadness, trickling inside me, but I also wondered if Kate had felt the same hollowness she’d mentioned back then when she ran out of ballet class the day of The Anchoring—or even last year when she couldn’t get out of bed for a whole weekend in November, then again in January.
On our way back to Hall 1, where all Sixth and Fifth Division girls lived, Ludivine poked Little Alice in the ribs; Little Alice nodded and asked if we could go to the restrooms, to the ones off the common room.
“We wanted to show you this,” she said once we were inside. She pointed above the sink.
“I think it’s junk,” Simone said.
An untitled piece of paper in someone’s scribbly handwriting was stuck to one of the mirrors. I read:
Codes To The Right Girl
Green: The Knowledge Quiz
Red: Perfect Body Check
Blue: Electricity and laws of attraction
Silver: The experience of a pas de deux
Gold: Taking the stage
Platinum: Winning The Prize
One more line had been added beneath the rest of the codes in red marker:
Final code: A BROKEN HEART, BAD RATINGS, OUSTED
I stared at the writing until Little Alice said, “I don’t think it’s junk.”
I tore the paper off and stuck it inside my warm-ups.
“Ludivine is right,” I replied. “Cochonnerie.” Junk.
It wasn’t until Kate and I were back in our room, soaking our feet in mandatory ice buckets, that I wondered whether to show her the notebook paper with the codes. Who knew who’d written them, what they even meant, and if any of them were true? Would she laugh at them, think it was all a big joke? Or would seeing this kind of senselessness in ink bring the old Kate back, the one who stayed up with me at night dreaming of fame?
“How much longer?” Kate moaned, grimacing toward the ice.
“Eight minutes,” I answered.
The buckets worked like this: one of the patrollers or the housemaster knocked on every room of Hall 3 and delivered them after community chores were finished, on Tuesday and Thursday nights if we had no injuries and nightly if we did. He watched as we placed our blistered feet in the buckets and he came back fifteen to twenty minutes later. We had to keep our ankles submerged until our feet went numb (about twelve minutes). The pain at first was so acute that anything like chatting, yelling, or singing helped. Some of us could be heard screaming for the duration.
“Please,” Kate said. “Distract me. Tell me anything.”
I made fists and bit my lower lip. Little by little, after minutes passed, after hundreds of invisible needles poked into my skin, my feet finally grew numb, so numb that I couldn’t even tell that they were plunged in icy water.
“I found this in the bathroom earlier,” I said, finally.
I slid the crumpled
piece of notebook paper from my pocket and threw it into an arc across the room onto Kate’s lap. I watched as Kate unfolded and read it.
“All bullshit,” she scoffed, turning bright red. “It’s a scare tactic. Someone made up those codes hoping to create chaos. What else is new?”
I hoped that Kate was right, but something in my heart told me otherwise. Nanterre was famous for its mysterious lists and destructive games. Years ago, a Third Division faculty member had warned us against Illumina, where a candle was lighted in front of the door of the two rat-girls who were the most beautiful in the whole school. One year, one of the candles scorched the bottom of a door, filling the hallway with smoke and triggering the fire alarm. The next day, a handful of highly ranked boys were expelled. But this code thing felt different. Like someone had ripped out pages of someone’s journal and posted it for every rat-girl to see. A cryptic warning.
“You and me. Let’s be the way we were,” I pleaded. “Let’s stick together.”
Kate looked at the paper for a long time, then she ripped it apart and dropped the pieces one by one inside her bucket. She stared at her feet and chuckled. “The scraps are floating like boats and the ink is making my ankles turn blue,” she said.
Somehow, though none of this was funny, we laughed.
Before I could ask “Want to practice générales tomorrow like old times?” Monsieur Arnaud barged into our room.
“Time’s up,” he said.
He placed a towel on the floor beside me and I slowly lifted my feet from the ice water. For a second, I thought I might never walk again, but Monsieur Arnaud, as always, wrapped my feet into the towel and vigorously rubbed them until some feeling came back, until my toes hurt so badly that I squeezed my eyes shut and wiped away tears. He did the same thing to Kate and didn’t seem to notice the confetti floating in her water.
When he left, Kate said, “If you were only allowed to feel one, which would you pick, pain or numbness?”
I didn’t want to play Would You anymore. I shrugged.
“Come on. You have to answer,” Kate said.
“Numbness,” I replied.
“Not me,” Kate said. “I’d pick pain any day.”
ten
Kate
M’s new specialness glared at me like the most intense Virginia sun. This morning, for example, at the end of adage class, not fifteen minutes ago, Monsieur Chevalier had dismissed everyone except for Cyrille and Marine, who needed to, supposedly, work on one more series of steps. I tried to stay positive. I even kept on my pointe shoes just in case. What if I was called back into the studio? I had to be ready for something to happen to me.
I still believed deep in my bones that Cyrille’s recent silence and distance had a grand purpose, that soon he would fix things for me. He was The Demigod and his light could melt anyone, including The Witch. Yet everything he did or, worse, didn’t do stung more acutely every day. The moment that hurt me the most—well, there were two—was when he’d ignored me first in the courtyard, and then again in ballet class a few mornings later, when all the girls were leaning against the barres, waiting for center to start. Cyrille glided over—not to The Ruler or even M, his partner—but to Colombe (Number 7) and Marie-Sandrine (Number 6), the two rats closest to me. In his silver tights and black bandana, he murmured something in their ears. Both girls glistened beneath his electrifying gaze. Marie-Sandrine’s posture straightened and Colombe’s legs turned out more than ever before. They sucked their stomachs in. I had to clutch the barre as my eyes outlined the definition of his calf muscles, and I smelled the ambrosial scent of his cologne. The girls nodded at whatever hush-hush words he’d offered them, their cheeks on fire. And their knees, I swear, buckled. He is testing you, I thought. It’s another experiment to see how much you can take. Pretend you don’t care.
After all, hadn’t he whispered in my ear many times before and shown me his precious dance magazines? Hadn’t I lain on his bed and talked about my mother’s absence shaping my life? Or shown him a private back bend? Kissed him on the roof under the stars? And, oh God, the steamy sex in his closet. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! At the memories, my chest filled with new shimmer. Cyrille was waiting for the right time to come out and tell everyone about our love. A scandal for sure—we were breaking Rules 2 and 3—but inevitable. If Cyrille and I ever made it to the stage together, we’d own it. I just had to show miles and miles of patience. After The Closet, our togetherness was necessity. Fate.
I waited in my pointe shoes by the First Division girls’ dressing rooms, not too far from the circular studio, but M and Cyrille were still rehearsing. My feet hurt, so I slid down the wall, sat legs out, then fake-smiled at the Number 1 Second Division rat who curtsied on her way to class. Suzanne De La Croix was the ultimate teacher’s pet, capable of extensions that nearly reached the ceiling and born with astonishing grace, all of which annoyed me. A door creaked. Someone yelled. I leaned forward to better see down the hall, praying that M or Cyrille would be hurrying toward me. But it was only two obnoxious Third Division rat-boys who chased after each other, and then Jean-Paul followed.
“What’s the matter, mon Carambar?” he said, looking at me, his voice dripping sweet. “You seem . . .” He paused. “Heartbroken.”
His face was still flushed from ballet class earlier.
“Is it ranking?” he continued. “Or is it your best friend hanging out with your one-night stand?”
“Don’t you have something else to do right now besides pestering me?”
“Just trying to help, ma sucette,” he said. “This bag is full of miracles.” He crouched down, his backpack swinging between his legs. Reaching his hand in the front pocket, he said, “A gift.” He yanked out a bag full of lollipops, what he’d just pet-named me.
I closed my eyes. “Go away. I’m broke.”
“I said, ‘a gift,’” Jean-Paul repeated. “For my favorite eye candy.” He tossed me the bag, then bowed as if he were onstage. “Till next time,” he said.
“Everything all right, Miss Sanders?” The Witch asked, appearing out of nowhere.
“Peachy,” I said.
But then she added, “For your information, it’s just been decided that First Division générales will be canceled this Friday.”
“Canceled?”
“With the planning of the winter demonstrations, we’ve decided to keep last week’s ratings except for a few adjustments.” The Witch smiled a tight smile. “I just saw Mademoiselle Duval in the studio. She did a beautiful unexpected triple back attitude turn into Monsieur Terrant’s arms. That made her climb right up to Number Two.”
“Two?” I said. “What about my ranking?”
The Witch raised an eyebrow. “Well, let’s see, with Marine now at Number Two and Bessy and Isabelle dropping, you should be back up at Number Three.”
Better, I thought.
But then scanning me, she added, “You will need a weigh-in tomorrow. Mademoiselle Fabienne will open the scale room for you at seven a.m.”
A weigh-in? I’d never been asked to randomly step onto the scale before.
After The Witch was gone, I hugged myself, then thought back on last night. How after Monsieur Arnaud had left, I’d prepared a hot water bottle, opened my comforter, and told M to come over. How despite The Anchoring, I needed her still. We’d sat in my bed the way we used to last year, feet wrapped in thick socks resting on the warm bottle. My dizzy spells and fatigue briefly went away. We gave each other back massages. “You girls are like a pair of shoes, useless when separated,” M’s mother had said to me once. I loved that so much I repeated it to M last night.
She kissed my cheek and said, “Let’s not ever fight again.”
We’d fallen asleep under my turquoise comforter and stayed there, curled up, until morning.
But now that The Witch had ordered a weigh-in and rated M Number 2, my optimism wan
ed. I fled the dance annex and returned to the dorms. On my way through the common room, I noticed new banners hanging from the walls. One of them read: Félicitations Cyrille Terrant et Marine Duval! A rat had painted Marine, or some version of a dancer with dark hair and a very small waist. They’d added a boat anchor and made the letters sparkle gold and silver. The drawing plus the glitter infuriated me.
Inside my room, I drew the shades and sat on the rug in the splits. I was about to unwrap one of Jean-Paul’s lollipops when I spotted a pill at the bottom of the bag. Had he handed it to me on purpose? No. Jean-Paul never gave anyone anything for free. Last year, he’d made me translate obscure Linkin Park song lyrics for packs of cigs. A few days ago, right before class, he’d suggested une pelle, a French kiss, as an exchange for a couple of sodas. I told him I’d get more pleasure rubbing my tongue inside a freezer. I studied the pill. What had he said once, back in September? That they were uppers?
Good.
I had nothing to lose. I popped it, closing my eyes. As I unwrapped a lollipop, silken warmth spread from my throat into my belly, down my thighs to my calves and feet. Clarity bloomed and my emotions slipped away. I sat back, delighting in the sensation. This was far better than weed, wine, cigarettes, or cough syrup. I took a breath, grabbed my laptop, and typed the questions I’d been avoiding for a month and a half.
Can you get pregnant if your period is inconsistent?
Answer: To become pregnant, a woman must ovulate, and ovulation can occur with or without a regular period.
What are early signs of pregnancy?
Answer: Missed period.
Well, I missed my period all the time.
Breast tenderness and growth.
I touched my right breast. Definitely tender, and yes.
Fatigue.
Oh yes.
Frequent urination.
I frowned. Yes.
Nausea.
Only all the time.
Dizziness.
Ditto.
Food aversions or cravings.
