by Charis Marsh
“Lexi, where are you?” Beth came through the door of Alexandra’s bedroom, receiving the full benefit of her raised eyebrows. “Don’t look at me like that. Where is your suitcase?”
“I’m not going.”
Beth stared at her. “What do you mean you aren’t going?”
Alexandra shrugged, staring at her mother and taking her feet out of the salt water. She felt a ripple of fear through her stomach and tried to ignore it. “I told you. I can’t take that much time off.”
“You are going to miss going to Mexico so you can make a point?”
“Mom, it’s not about making a point. That’s a whole week you’re asking me to take off. A whole week of no classes, rehearsals — how am I supposed to catch up? Competition is almost here, I’d have to miss auditions, and I’d probably get kicked out of June show. I’m not going.”
Alexandra had never seen Beth look so angry before. “Alexandra Noelle Dunstan, you are going to come with us, or we will pull you out of dance faster than you can breathe.”
“Really? Would you really do that? How would you explain to everyone then, when I said I had to quit dance because you guys pulled me out after this many years of work?”
“I would tell the truth,” Beth said, her face suddenly extremely ugly from the combination of anger and trying not to cry. “That you are a bulimic, out-of-control mess, and that you needed to get some perspective on life.”
“That’s not fair,” Alexandra whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I want to go. But I can’t take that much time off!”
“Lexi, is this really what you want? To be the sort of person who would miss meeting her relatives for fear of missing a week of dance? This is the only time everyone can come!”
“Mom!” Alexandra looked at her, wishing she would just get it. “Don’t you understand? I won’t have a part in June show. I’ll lose at competition. Everything will be screwed up!”
Beth thought for a moment. “Fine,” she said finally. “You can stay by yourself. But when they come for my birthday in June, you had better be perfect the entire time they are here. Your family wants to meet you, and most of them haven’t seen you since you were a cute little girl. I don’t want their opinion of you to change.” She left, and Alexandra lay face-first on her bed, her hands holding her stomach. She felt sick, but she knew the confrontation had been unavoidable. An entire week! And it probably would end up taking longer. They will decide to go on a road trip, or someone will get sick or something stupid. Lying on her side, she reached out and rescued her book, and started to read about how Paloma Herrera wore nothing on her feet to protect her from her pointe shoes. Alexandra bit her lip. She wore toe-pads, and spacers to separate her feet, and usually toe tape if she had a nasty blister (which was almost always). All right, up. Time to go to school. She sat up and put on her socks, set The Pointe Book down in order to pick up her backpack full of textbooks, and went downstairs. She wanted to eat the doughnut Justin had left on the kitchen counter, but it had too many calories and after her mother’s comment she didn’t feel like throwing it up. Instead, she grabbed a banana and ate it on the way to the bus stop, the cold air making it taste sweeter.
Alexandra ran up to school, unwrapping her coat and her scarf as she walked, hurrying. She was going to be late. She half ran up the stairs, ducked into the bathroom to smooth out her hair, and then slipped into her classroom. Grace had saved her a seat. Mr. Angelo stopped speaking for a moment. “Glad that you could join us, Ms. Dunstan.”
“Sorry.” Alexandra hung her coat on the back of her desk chair so that it would dry and pulled out her notebook, quickly writing down the date. Mr. Angelo was talking about Macbeth again. Alexandra thought he might need psychiatric help; every other grade eleven English class in the school had done Macbeth in one term, but it was second term and Mr. Angelo was still going. Alexandra didn’t know how much more Shakespearean blood-bath analysis she could take. She began to write MACBETH in large, loopy cursive writing.
“Alexandra,” Mr. Angelo called her. “Could you read Lady Macbeth for us?” Alexandra nodded and took the offered book from James Wong, who sat to her left. He pointed to the line where she was to start reading.
“‘Consider it not so deeply.’”
She waited for the cool boy opposite her to finish reading Macbeth’s part. He took longer than needed, acting it out to laughter from the class. Alexandra bit her lip, trying not to giggle. He was one of the theatre kids, and reading aloud was pretty much why he showed up to class.
“These deeds must not be thought/After these ways; so, it will make us mad,” Alexandra enunciated clearly, in her best speaking voice. She looked at Mr. Angelo, and he nodded that yes, she could sit down. Alexandra sat, carefully not looking at everyone. She didn’t like speaking in class at school; she never really knew what everyone thought of her, or if they thought of her at all. She began to draw a flower in her notebook growing out of the name Macbeth as Mr. Angelo continued to speak. She liked Shakespeare; she had a feeling that he didn’t take himself too seriously. And he had a great sense of humour. She zoned in, listening as Anna spoke up to answer one of Mr. Angelo’s many discussion questions.
“Well, I just think that was dumb,” she was saying. “If Macbeth believed that, he must’ve been stupid. Did he grow up under a rock or something?” Alexandra put her head in her hands and rubbed her forehead. Eight-thirty in the morning and she already had a headache.
“Lexi, what do you think?” Mr. Angelo asked.
Alexandra looked up. “Um — I think that Macbeth was misled, but that it was ultimately his own fear at being nobody that made him crazy.” The bell rang, and Alexandra got up, shoving her journal back in the bag as she got up for her next class.
“Hey, Lexi,” Grace asked, leaving Anna and hurrying to catch up to Alexandra. “Do you think I could copy your homework for Bio?”
“Uh —” Alexandra thought. She didn’t think they wouldn’t be doing much in Bio today … “Sorry, Grace, I’m going to the Dance Centre to rehearse.” She turned around and left Grace standing there, looking confused.
Alexandra fled down the winding staircase and out of McKinley, trying not to grin. Grace would get a zero on her assignment, and she knew that Mr. Ng would let her hand it in late if she told him that she had been rehearsing, because he never messed with Super Achiever students. He had once told them that he had hadn’t wanted to be a biology teacher. In answer to what would he like to be instead, he had informed him that he’d like to be a hockey player “but then I can’t stand up on skates and I’m skinny, so that wouldn’t have worked,” he had added mournfully.
Alexandra kept putting weight on her left foot and then taking it off again as she rode on the Canada Line. Her ankle was hurting again, sudden jabbing pain without warning, and she couldn’t tell whether it was going to be okay on pointe today or not. It kept getting better and then worse again, and she couldn’t seem fix it. She’d been putting Tiger Balm on, but it didn’t seem to do anything. She’d gone to the physiotherapist with her mom; the physiotherapist said that Alexandra needed to strengthen her feet and calves and advised her to use a Thera-Band every day. A few weeks after that, Alexandra had gone to St. Paul’s Hospital by herself to get it X-rayed. It showed that a tendon had been seriously overstretched, and the doctor advised her to take at least six weeks off.
Alexandra had rolled her eyes at that advice: it was what doctors always said. “Take some time off, rest it.” If they really didn’t know how to fix it, they asked you to consider quitting dance in favour of swimming. No, there was no way that Alexandra was going to take some time off right before competition and Coppelia casting. There was no realistic hope that the Demidovskis would understand if she took few weeks off, either. They would think she was just being lazy, stupid, or both, and it would definitely affect her future casting. She hadn’t told her mom about the visit to St Paul’s; Beth would have insisted that Alexandra follow the doctor’s advice. She had been
on a good-mother kick recently, and Alexandra really didn’t feel like yet another argument. She got off the bus, signed in, and paid at the front desk of the Dance Centre, then took the elevator up and thankfully stepped in to the huge, empty studio. Suddenly she could breathe properly again. She dropped her bag at the side and did a spontaneous and messy jeté across the floor, landing horribly and not caring. She laughed as she straightened up; her ankle was feeling better today. The clock ticked, and Alexandra got to work. She had an hour before she had to get to her first class of the day at the academy.
Alexandra hurried out of the building, the sweat on her body turning cold the moment she went outside, making her shiver inside her coat. If only she could get her pirouettes cleaner — it seemed to be that she could never land the last one if she made it a quadruple, and a triple was just too lame for a finishing pirouette. She frowned as she thought of Kaitlyn; she’d done nine and landed them effortlessly the other day. And Kaitlyn was two years younger than her … the bus came and Alexandra got on it, making her way absently to a clear seat and taking her phone out of her pocket.
As she passed the meth head sitting in the bench in front she noticed her body. Nice, she thought admiringly. Nothing like meth to make you skinny. Too bad it kills you, too. She watched the girl out of the corner of her eye, admiring the line of her slim shoulder blades. Suddenly the girl turned around, and Alexandra quickly dropped her eyes to the floor.
“I like your eyes,” said the girl, leaning forward to see Alexandra better and nearly toppling out of her seat in the process.
Alexandra gave her a small and what she hoped was a discouraging smile and started playing with her phone.
The girl turned around in her seat to face Alexandra, gazing fascinated at her eyes with their sparkly eyeshadow and eyeliner. “Sparkly …” she said, clutching the back of her seat in excitement. Her thin, white, hands were like small claws, and Alexandra shivered.
“Hmmm,” Alexandra replied. She reached in her bag for her Tylenol since her legs were aching, and then thought better of taking it out. Pills are pills. She sighed and wondered if the meth head was going to stay on the bus long, She didn’t show any signs of moving.
The girl lost interest in Alexandra for a minute, and took off her left shoe. She looked at it warily and then suddenly decided that it was dangerous and kicked it under her seat. She turned back to Alexandra. “What’s your name?”
“Ale … Lexi,” Alexandra said quickly.
“So pretty … like sparkles. You’re pretty,” said the girl, tilting her head from side to side. She began to rock from side to side every time she tilted her head, first slowly and then faster. At that moment the bus driver called out the stop name. To Alexandra’s surprise, he got up out of his seat and walked up to the meth head.
“Hey, you,” he said loudly, trying to snap her out of her rocking trance. The girl ignored him. “You said this was your stop. You said you were getting off at Hastings,” he continued, a little louder. The whole bus turned around to watch, and Alexandra blushed, wishing she could move. The girl was still facing her so everyone was also staring at Alexandra. “You’ve been on this bus for a whole loop now, time to get off,” said the bus driver, more for the other passengers’ benefit than the girl’s since she was obviously not listening to him. “Come on,” he said, grabbing her by the arm. “Off you go.” At this the girl woke up and started screaming expletives at him. “Yes, right,” said the bus driver, unmoved. “Do you want me to call the police? Didn’t think so. Now off you get.” The girl got off, still screaming and now starting to cry.
Alexandra stared after her in fascinated horror. “Wait,” she choked out, “she forgot her shoe …” But it was too late, the bus driver was pulling out and the girl was running down the street with one shoe on, the shoelaces flapping as she went.
“Next stop is Granville and Georgia,” the bus driver called out. “Granville, next stop.”
Alexandra got out her bottle of Tylenol and took two extra-strength tablets, swallowing them without water. The passengers around her stared at her suspiciously, and Alexandra slumped down into her seat, embarrassed. She plugged in her iPod, not wanting to feel them staring at her, listening to Noah and the Whale play “5 Years Time.”
“There’ll be sun, sun, sun,” she sang under her breath, staring out the window. The bus stopped, and Alexandra timed getting out of her seat exactly with the lurch of the bus so she used the momentum to swing out the door. “Thanks,” she called behind her, beginning to walk to the academy.
As Alexandra stretched in the studio she sensed a body hovering over her. She rolled over onto her back, annoyed, and looked up. “What?” she snapped. She saw it was Julian. “What do you want, Jules?”she asked in a nicer voice.
“Oh, hey,” Julian said, sitting down beside her. “Um, I was wondering if maybe next time you dropped in on Leah’s class I could come, too? I really want to work on my contemporary, you know? My ballet’s getting a lot better, but …”
Grace came over and sat by them. “You know if you have ballet, contemporary’s pretty easy,” she said. “At least the contemporary you would do in a ballet company.”
Alexandra nodded while disagreeing. “Not really,” she said. “I mean, yeah, you need ballet for technique, but there is lots you can only get from contemporary.”
Grace laughed, high up in her throat. “Well, you love contemporary, Lexi, so that’s why you think so.”
Julian looked at her. “I like contemporary, too,” he said. “It’s awesome. I don’t just want to be doing the classics my whole life. I want to be able to do new stuff, too.”
“Do you know what I hate?” Grace asked leisurely, sliding into the splits and pulling her back foot up toward her head. “People who train super-hard for contemporary, like they are going to have a career dancing jazz or something. Okay, yeah, if you want to dance on a cruise ship for the rest of your life or something, but really —”
Julian sat up, frowning. “What, are you saying that training for contemporary is a waste of time?”
“No,” Grace said. “I’m saying that training solely for contemporary is a waste of time. It’s just not practical.”
Julian and Alexandra looked at each other, bonded in disbelief. “So,” Alexandra said, “a ballet dancer and a jazz dancer walk into a bar, and the ballet dancer says: ‘you need to pick a more stable career path?’” Julian giggled appreciatively, and Grace looked annoyed.
Mrs. Castillo walked in, and they got up, heading for the barre. “I like your towel,” Alexandra said to Julian as they set their towels and water bottles down at the ends of the barre.
“Thanks,” said Julian, embarrassed. “My dad’s girlfriend Daisy made it. Not the actual towel bit, but the dye.”
Alexandra picked it up and looked at it carefully. It had a tie-dyed blue background with a bright sun in the centre of two trees. “She’s really good,” she commented.
“Yeah, I think so, too.” Julian nodded. “But you might want to put that down, I haven’t washed it since last class.”
“Ew.” Alexandra quickly dropped it as Mrs. Castillo came over and began showing them the first exercise.
“Alexandra!” Mrs. Castillo snapped as Alexandra stretched out her ankle, trying to find a way to roll through without making it hurt. “Must be attention me. Why nobody ever attention to me? No respect. Mr. Moretti, you respect. Mr. And Mrs. Demidovski, you respect. Mrs. Castillo, no respect.”
“We respect you, Mrs. Castillo,” Tristan called out.
Mrs. Castillo’s face lit up and she smiled, breaking into a choky smoker’s laugh. “Good boy, good boy,” she said. She walked over to him and slapped his stomach. “Good lunch?” She looked in the mirror at herself. “Mrs. Castillo is too skinny,” she said mournfully, beginning to laugh again. “I too old, makes me too skinny.” Her students giggled. “Maybe next time I go to the bathroom, fall in the toilet because too skinny,” Mrs. Castillo continued, encouraged by the
ir laughter. “Whoosh! No more Mrs. Castillo.” They giggled still, but a little nervously.
“Don’t fall in the toilet, Mrs. Castillo,” Tristan said charmingly. “We would miss you.”
“Oh, you miss me yelling at you?” Mrs. Castillo asked, her eyebrows raised. “Good. Must be yell if want to be good dancer. Okay, begin.” She clapped her hands together, making a surprisingly loud noise, and George began playing. They began the plies, doing a very improvised version as no one had really gotten the exercise except Aiko, who always paid attention.
Alexandra waited for fifteen minutes after class before calling her mother. “Mom? Is someone coming to pick me up? Because Grace already left, so I can’t get a ride with her now.”
Beth groaned. “Oh, sweetie — I thought your dad was going to pick you up, but I forgot he has a work meeting. Can you take the bus? I’m waiting for Emma to finish practice now.” Alexandra could hear the echoing shouts of Emma’s gymnastics studio in the background, and sighed.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Lame. K, bye.” She hung up the phone and went outside to wait for the bus. Julian was already waiting there, with his homestay brother Leon.
“Hey guys,” she said. She set her heavy bag down on the bench and massaged her sore arm, yawning. Leon nodded. He was too cool to talk; he was in the Youth Company. Alexandra didn’t have much respect for him, he still homestayed with Mr. Yu and was twenty-two years old. He hadn’t even started to audition for anything yet — he had auditioned for Vancouver Ballet and not made it past the second cut. Alexandra had very high standards for other people and she didn’t like it when they didn’t live up to them. Which was why she occasionally listened to “Watching the Wheels Go By,” and comforted herself with the fact that John Lennon had obviously not listened to his own advice; after all, he had been a Beatle, and John Lennon. That sort of thing didn’t happen to people who sat and watched wheels go by.
