Everyone thinks ballet is incredible. They romanticize it. I get it. And I get that I’m spoiled and ungrateful for not shouting about how much I love it from the rooftops.
“You’re not smiling, though,” Leo observes.
“Dancers don’t really smile a whole lot,” I say.
That’s not strictly true. I see the professional company members smiling in rehearsals. Laughing, even. And the other dancers my age at the Academy smile—when they’re not in the building.
“Really?” Leo asks. “That’s depressing. But are you, like, smiling on the inside? Because that was amazing.”
“I didn’t mess anything up, so I feel okay, I guess. Why, how do you feel after you’ve performed?”
“Oh my god, so alive. Like I’m going to blast off into outer space. I also generally feel like puking up my guts. In a happy way. JoyPuke.” He tilts his head thoughtfully. “I should trademark that.”
Maybe I don’t get that feeling because ballet is more physical. At the end of a piece, I’m exhausted and huffing and puffing. Closer to actual puke than JoyPuke. I think I’ve seen it on my classmates’ faces, though. They don’t smile in the studio because they can’t let the ballet masters see if they’re smugly pleased with their performance. We’re all supposed to immediately berate ourselves for what we could have done better, but I see the brightness in their eyes. I think they were smiling on the inside. And my mom definitely was, in all the other YouTube videos where she didn’t fall.
Once I join a company, I’ll probably be smiling on the inside. JoyPuking. Life is like a tricky pas de deux—if you do all the steps right, turn more fouettés, extend your leg a little higher, the audience will clap at the end. Even though I don’t feel fulfilled right now, it’ll happen, after I join a company. If not then, when I make soloist. It’s what’s supposed to happen, if I do everything right.
A thought strikes me.
Was it JoyPuke last night when I was crouched on the floor in my bedroom writing in my notebook?
Leo folds himself down to sit cross-legged on the floor next to me while I stretch out my muscles. I drape in half to touch my toes, folding so far over that I can rest my cheek on my shins. I always think of Astrid when I do this; she squeals at me until I stop, saying my stretchiness freaks her out.
When I come back up, Leo’s ready with another question.
“So if you’re not JoyPuking, what is it, then? Why do you dance?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what I do,” I say. “Ballet Chick, remember?”
Leo rasies an eyebrow.
“It’s like, mine and my mom’s thing,” I add.
She was there for every lesson, every rehearsal. My teachers let her come because most of them shared a stage with her twenty years ago.
My mom always stood on the other side of the studio windows, watching me with this … light. After class, she’d hold my hand on our way out to the car and gush about all the things I’d done right. I snuggled into her side, rooting out the smell of home that clung to her. Someone at school once asked me if ballerinas smell like French perfume and clouds. My mom smelled like oatmeal and leather and hairspray.
Something twists in my chest at the memory. I can see her face so clearly. When she smiles, the skin at the sides of her mouth pulls back like a stage curtain, a grand drape. When I was little, my fingers would always reach out to trace the lines. She served up demure ballerina smiles to everyone else, but my dad and I got the real ones, the ones that revealed her single twisted tooth, the one that got knocked in her childhood and will forever be a shade yellower than the others.
It’s been six days now. Will I start to forget little details about her?
Leo leans his head back against the mirror and closes his eyes, and then he starts to hum.
It’d be rude to interrupt, so I sit awkwardly and listen to the melody he’s working out. Sometimes he tweaks the repeating set of notes. Riffing. Composing. It’s incredible to watch. His thumbs tap softly on his thighs, drumming, and his rings flash under the studio lights. The way his neck is tilted back makes his already obvious Adam’s apple look more pronounced.
Suddenly he opens his eyes. They’re crystal clear under the bright lights. More blue than gray. I feel caught.
“I need my guitar,” he says, voice crackling like a fire that’s about to die out. “Wait here a sec. I want to try something.”
He disappears up the stairs. I pry myself off the floor and hike a leg onto the barre, dipping my supporting knee to stretch my hamstring while I wait. When Leo comes back, he’s holding his guitar. He sits against the mirror again and starts playing the song he was humming.
“Try dancing to this,” he says.
“What?”
“I just want to see what happens.”
“I’m not a choreographer,” I say.
“Just feel it. Do what you want. Loosen up.”
He plays the same intro pattern over and over, staring at me expectantly. Well, goal of the day achieved, because my mind is totally blank now. Like a deer caught in headlights. I poke a foot out and grind the box of my shoe on the floor.
After a while, I do a little adage combination, copying from the center work routine I do every day. It kind of fits. As I add movement to movement, linking steps, something magical happens. I start to add things that aren’t in my classical ballet rep. Stuff from when I learned about modern dance masters like Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey. Some stuff that I’m sure I made up.
As I dance, Leo’s music grows and shifts, evolving with me until it’s soaring like the string section of an orchestra. I do a fierce run of chaînés, spinning, spinning, spinning from one end of the room to the other, and I hear a few bobby pins fly out of my hair and smack the wall. I start laughing and come out of the turns ungracefully. I bend over, my hands on my knees. It’s not that funny, but I’m laughing like it’s the funniest thing in the world.
Leo finishes playing with a flourish.
“Your Madame Butterfly thing was cool, but that was out of this world,” he says, laughing too. “I especially liked the flying hair-thingies at the end there. Lethal.”
I collapse next to him, still snickering. He beams at me, and then we’re both cracking up. The emptiness has finally gotten to us. We’re not laughing about the bobby pins anymore, it just feels like a release.
“That was fun,” I admit, wiping tears from the corners of my eyes.
“It was fun watching you, Ballet Chick.” Leo pushes himself up from the floor and walks over to the sound system. “All right, time for your classic grand thing.”
I look at my bag in the corner. My audition is in twenty-four hours. I really should get back to work.
Should.
But I was working all morning and I was still thinking about the empty. Maybe dancing myself to death isn’t the best idea.
“Actually … let’s go upstairs,” I say.
“What? Don’t you need to practice more?”
“I can do it tonight.”
If he’s right—if we are dead—there might not even be an audition to attend. I can’t let my thoughts snag on that, though, or it’ll bring me plummeting down.
“You know what I kind of feel like?” I say.
“Hmm?”
“Eating one of the enormous stuffed-crust frozen pizzas from my freezer.”
They’re my dad’s Friday night tradition. Sometimes I sidle up next to him and steal slices while he watches his rock documentaries.
Leo grins. “Pizza sounds awesome.”
He fiddles around with the sound system while I take my pointe shoes off. On our way to the door, he bumps my shoulder again. This time I bump back, making him veer off course. We smile at each other, and it would feel comical and cheesy except I’m getting that bunch-release thing again.
And then, out of nowhere, Leo stops walking, puts an arm around me, and pulls me into a hug.
He crushes my ribs in the loop of his arms, and my face smashes agai
nst the cotton of his T-shirt. What little air I can breathe smells of him so intensely that it makes my head swirl, like I’ve just swum a whole lap underwater.
He’s so warm. I let my arms tighten around his waist. He lowers his face into my neck. I hold very still, marveling at heat gathering there as he breathes, at the heaviness of the arms tight around me. Why is he doing this? Yesterday he was recoiling from me, and now he’s playing songs for me, looking at me like I’m all the light in the world, hugging me.
“Hey, are we okay?” he asks.
I’m glad he can’t see my face. “Yeah, of course.”
“So … friends?”
“Sure. Friends.”
Maybe he thinks this is how friends hug?
I’m about to faint. Because he’s shattered through my shields, again. This is the first time touching someone has met my expectations. Exceeded them. I think of the books on my shelf upstairs, the ones Flower Magic was stuffed behind. The ones with hearts in the margins, the ones with dog-eared corners and highlighted passages. The sentences and scenes that shaped my idea of relationships are all gathered there. An accidental first kiss when danger gave the characters courage. The slightest touch that had the power to shut down or wake up a whole body. I was starting to worry that this feeling was fiction. That nothing would live up to the daydream.
Finally Leo steps away. He blinks. I blink back.
He clears his throat. “Right. Pizza.”
“Pizza,” I repeat.
I wave at the stairs in a silent after you. My fingers fumble as I try to find the light switch. The ballet studio plunges into darkness, and I climb up after him.
Okay, so I am SUCKING at the whole “just friends” thing.
I could kick myself. What the hell was that hug?
I shake my head. This girl, seriously. What is it about her? She was just so … ethereal when she was dancing. And after her butterfly dance, when she was sitting next to me against the mirror, flushed and loose, she suddenly leaned forward into some contortionist circus act of a cool-down stretch. I wanted to brush my fingers along the ridged path of her spine, every vertebra so delicate and perfectly aligned. I couldn’t breathe.
The back of her neck was so soft-looking, dewy from the exercise, and a few wisps of hair had escaped from her crispy hairdo thing. What would she look like with her hair down? I’m aching to see it, spread out over a pillow, twined through my fingers.
Restraint, Leo. Just friends. No flirting.
AKA STOP FUCKING THINKING LIKE THIS.
Okay. It’s pretty clear my plan is not working. Whatever’s making me insane about her didn’t magically disappear overnight.
I try to get myself back under control as we climb the stairs to the kitchen, suddenly very glad she’s behind me so she can’t see the blood rushing to my face—or to other, way-less-appropriate parts of me.
Hannah’s halfway to the refrigerator when she suddenly stops, blinking like someone’s shining something bright in her eyes.
“Leo, did you see that?” she asks, eyes locked on the window.
I turn to where she’s looking. “See what?”
Her eyes are trained on her living room window. It’s not raining, but the sky is freakishly dark, the sun obliterated by low, heavy clouds. One of Houston’s torrential summer storms might be on the way. She strains forward, not breathing, not blinking.
Suddenly the grayness is broken by a blur of light, high up in the sky.
“There!” She rushes to the window. I follow her, and we cup our hands on the glass to get a better look.
The light is on the other side of the city, maybe farther. And it’s moving. It’s slow, but it’s definitely moving, sweeping over the underbellies of the clouds. My eyes adjust to the dark, and I realize it’s not a single patch of light—there’s a whole beam. At first, it looks like it’s coming straight down from the sky, but it tilts and moves constantly. Every few seconds, it turns straight toward us, flaring bright white and making my eyes burn.
It makes me supremely uncomfortable.
“What do you think it is?” Hannah whispers, as if the light can hear us.
“I have no idea.”
We keep our hands curled on the glass, watching as the beam skims over the tops of trees and weaves through the dark silhouettes of the buildings downtown.
“Leo? Is it … a searchlight? Like on a helicopter?”
Something in Hannah’s voice makes me turn to look at her. Her eyes are open wide, her face clear and hopeful. “Do you think someone’s looking for us?”
I study the light. It’s too wild, too quick to be a helicopter.
Everything in me is screaming to ignore this. To turn her around and plop her down on the couch and somehow convince her that going out there is the worst idea she’s ever had. To tell her that, no, no one’s looking for us, because we’re dead. But then I look at her face, all upturned with the first glimmer of hope that I’ve seen from her and …
I can’t do it. She thinks this is our ticket out. Our salvation. She still believes this is all going to magically end with some heroic rescue.
“I don’t know what it is, Hannah,” I say softly. “But there’s only one way to find out. Let me get my keys.”
The way she brightens is breathtaking. Look at me, being all unselfish. Putting someone else’s wants before my own. All my exes would be ecstatic, but I’m pretty sure they wanted me to put their wants first, not Hannah’s.
She shifts into gear and flits around the living room to find her phone and her shoes. She’s jittery and less graceful than I’ve ever seen her. I grab my keys from the kitchen counter and follow her out the front. She fumbles with the keypad on her door, punching in the wrong numbers, and then the right ones, and then we’re clambering into Thunderchicken and zooming down the street. I set a course for downtown, heading toward where we saw the light.
The stores and houses and buildings of Houston watch in imposing silence as we race through the city like two little rats in a maze. The beam keeps moving, dancing away, luring us on. We zigzag in its wake.
What’s at the top of the beam? I can’t tell yet. Whatever it is, it must be hiding behind the thick layer of clouds.
When the streets morph into the one-way system in the heart of downtown, something inside me stalls. I lift my foot off the accelerator. Maybe we should turn back.
But then I look over at the bundle of hope in the seat next to me. She’s straining forward, searching the sky, desperate to find this thing. She clocks me watching her and turns to me with an eager smile.
“We might be with our families again soon,” she says.
She really thinks this is the end of all the mystery and the emptiness. For her sake I hope it is.
She turns back to the sky, the smile still on her face. My chest feels weird and swollen at the sight of her happiness, and I wonder if that’s something I’m going to have to figure out later.
The column of light is only a few blocks away from us now. I still can’t see what’s up at the top of it.
“Turn here,” Hannah says. Thunderchicken’s brakes screech, and we swing around a corner. A wide street stretches out in front of us, block after block of traffic lights that get smaller as they fade into the distance. The traffic lights shift through their cycles, green-yellow-red, green-yellow-red.
The beam of light is so close now. I can see it through the gaps between the buildings. We’re closing in.
I turn another corner and slow down, and then there it is. A wide pool of light beaming down.
I put the car in neutral and we tumble out, slamming doors in our haste to look up at the sky.
And that’s when the light swivels, shining directly into our faces again. I flinch, staggering in the interrogation-level light. I have to fight to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head.
I can feel my pupils constricting to pinpricks, and I get the freaky impression that the light is scanning, looking for something.
And th
en the light snaps off.
My eyes burn, and there are starry pops of phantom purple lights everywhere. The street is so dark. Not a single beam of sunlight is getting through the ceiling of heavy clouds above us.
I reach blindly for Hannah’s hand. She’s frozen beside me.
“It’s gone,” she whispers. “I don’t get it.”
We scan the sky, turning in circles, but the light is gone.
It was never a helicopter.
It was never a rescue.
Hannah is glazed over beside me, staring at nothing.
“I’m so sorry, Hannah,” I say, but it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like my insides have fallen out, or maybe hers have, and I’m trying to scoop them up off the ground and push them back inside her.
We shouldn’t have come out here. This is why I don’t do hard shit. Because nothing’s ever guaranteed to end happily anyway.
“Come here,” I say. I wrap an arm around her, and she crumples into me. “It’s no big deal. Nothing’s changed. We’ve still got each other, right?”
She nods.
My eye catches on something moving in the street a few yards away from us. I startle, but it’s just a plastic bag in the gutter, swirling in a little whirlpool of wind.
Wait—wind?
Shit. Not this again.
The wind kicks up, carrying a heavy moisture with it. The air tastes like rain. Maybe she was right about the hurricane. Maybe there’s one coming in from the Gulf. That would explain these sinister clouds.
When she cranes her neck to look behind me, her body goes rigid. “Oh my god, Leo—”
I turn, and everything goes slow motion.
Hurtling toward us is a fucking enormous wall of wind, blasting past traffic lights to bear down on us like some horrible end-of-the-world movie.
There’s no time to hide.
“Holy shit!” I yell.
We grab on to each other as it hits.
I get soaked through in about one-tenth of a second. The first drops of water hurt when they smack us, but then we’re swallowed up by the gale and it’s like being under a powerful sideways shower. But it’s not only water—the wind has swept up all sorts of crap. Something hits my arm with a flat smack of pain, and wet leaves stick to my face. Beside me, Hannah yelps. Has something hurt her?
You & Me at the End of the World Page 11
