by Cara Malone
Melody wouldn’t look at her. All the mirrors in the room made it easy to see her face, though, and it was clear that she was suddenly trying not to cry. “Nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” Jessie offered, worried that she had upset Melody. “I should go.”
She started to turn away again – Ellie would be tearing up the hall any minute, or else she was trapped in her leotard and in need of help. Either way, Jessie needed to get out of this studio. But then she heard Melody’s voice, low as she asked, “Does he know you’re gay?”
Jessie paused in the door, one hand on the frame, and after a second she said quietly, “No.”
Then she met Ellie coming into the lobby – great timing, kid, thanks – and they walked out of the school.
CHAPTER 19
I think I’m in trouble.
That was the content of the note Jessie passed to her best friend, Blaire, in history class the day she finally got up the courage to work out the math on her calendar. It had been two months since she agreed to go on a double-date with Blaire and her boyfriend and his buddy Steve, and three months since her last period.
Blaire passed a note back as soon as their teacher looked away, saying something snarky about how forgetting to study for a test is only a state of emergency in Jessie’s world. Jessie scribbled a plea to meet outside of the building after school – she couldn’t bring herself to write exactly what she was dreading on a piece of paper.
“What’s the big crisis?” Blaire asked as soon as she found Jessie at the end of the day.
“I need you to go to the drug store with me,” Jessie said, her cheeks already turning red. She didn’t want to say what she was about to say, but there was no getting around it. She leaned in and whispered close to Blaire’s ear, “I think I’m pregnant.”
“What?!” Blaire shrieked, and Jessie winced and almost had to cover her ears.
“Shh!” She hissed, and people turned their heads as they walked past the two of them.
“From who?” Blaire whispered. “Not Steve. Not on your first time.”
Jessie could do nothing but shrug pathetically, and Blaire gave her a sympathetic look that bordered on abject horror, putting her arm around Jessie’s shoulder. Jessie leaned into it, picking up the coconut scent of Blaire’s hair as she led them down the steps of the school.
“Well, let’s not get too worried until we’re sure,” Blaire said, trying to sound comforting, but Jessie was plenty worried.
She didn’t even know Steve – not really. She’d only agreed to go on that stupid double date because Blaire wanted another couple to hang out with and it seemed to Jessie like an acceptable sacrifice to make in order to spend more time with her best friend. Blaire had turned into a ghost the moment she started dating Josh, and all Jessie wanted was her friend back. Steve turned out to be a nice guy, but they hadn’t so much as looked at each other in the halls ever since their date and the thought of telling him she was carrying his child made Jessie sick to her stomach. Or maybe those were the pregnancy hormones.
They climbed into Jessie’s Sebring, little specks of rust flaking off from the edges of the doors, and they drove to the drug store down the street from her house. Blaire took one for the team when Jessie blanched at the idea of going up to the counter and plunking down a pregnancy test, and then they went back to Jessie’s house. Mercifully it was empty, and they both scurried upstairs to the bathroom.
Blaire tore open the box and handed Jessie a plastic stick, then pulled out a sheet of instructions.
“Well?” Jessie asked.
“I think you know what you have to do,” Blaire said sympathetically. “After that, we wait five minutes. If you’re… you know… it’ll have two blue lines.”
“Okay,” Jessie said with a huge, shaky sigh. “Turn around.”
Blaire faced the bathtub while Jessie peed on the stick, and then she laid it on a tissue on the counter beside her.
“Now we wait,” she said, lowering the toilet lid and sitting down anxiously. Her heart was slamming against her chest and she didn’t think she could wait the five minutes to find out her fate.
Blaire sat on the edge of the bathtub across from her and when she saw how nervous Jessie was, she took her hand. Jessie looked down at their intertwined fingers – something she never would have dared to do if Blaire hadn’t reached for her first. Jessie felt that touch all the way up her arms – it tingled, warm and pleasant in a way that holding a boy’s hand had never done for her. Steve certainly didn’t have this kind of effect on her – she wouldn’t have slept with him at all if Blaire and Josh hadn’t gone, pawing at each other, into her room at the end of the night and left Steve looking expectantly at her.
At the time she thought it was what a sixteen-year-old girl was supposed to do, and supposed to want to do.
“Jess,” Blaire said softly. “Look at me.”
Her eyes traced up from Blaire’s hands to her eyes, light blue like the sky, and suddenly Jessie was sure that the way she felt whenever she looked into Blaire’s eyes was the way most girls felt about boys. It may have taken her ten years of friendship to come to that conclusion, but as they sat in her bathroom, waiting for a little plastic stick to decide her fate, Jessie realized that she was in love with her best friend.
“We’re going to get through this, no matter what it says,” Blaire said, nodding to the stick.
For an instant, Jessie wondered what would happen if she leaned over and kissed her. And then Blaire picked up the stick, pinching it between the tissue and turning it away from Jessie.
“Are you ready?”
“No,” Jessie said, squeezing Blaire’s hand even tighter and keeping her eyes locked on Blaire’s. If she got so lost in those sky blue eyes, maybe she could fall into them, pause this moment, and never hear the next words out of Blaire’s mouth.
No such luck, though. Jessie was beginning to realize just how unlucky she was.
Blaire took a deep breath, squeezed Jessie’s hand, and looked at the stick. “Two lines.”
Jessie let out a huge exhalation. She didn’t even realize she’d been holding her breath, and suddenly it felt like all the air had gone out of the room.
There you have it, she thought. In the space of five minutes, she figured out why every romantic interaction she’d ever had with a boy felt wrong and she also realized that none of it mattered anymore. She would have to tell Steve about the baby, they would almost definitely get married because that was what pregnant teenagers in Lisbon did, and that would be the end of it.
CHAPTER 20
Melody wasn’t quite sure how her next interaction with Jessie would go after she couldn’t resist asking about her husband, and more importantly after Jessie saw the jagged pink scar on her forearm. She would have given anything to keep it from her – she would have accosted Jessie about the state of her marriage a hundred times if she could have just kept her sleeve from riding up and revealing that.
There were only four people in the whole world who had seen her scar, if she didn’t count the emergency room doctors in New York and the one in Lisbon who removed the stitches about a week after she came home. Her mother and father had seen it while they were changing her bandages in the hospital. Dr. Riley saw it because she insisted that it had been intentional and Melody thought showing her the jagged nature of it would convince her to believe she had the flu and had collapsed down the wall (whole lot of good that did).
And Starla saw it, not because Melody wanted her to but because she was a nosy little kid who thought the world revolved around her and she needed to know exactly how fucked up her big sister was. She hid in the bathroom one day when Melody was getting ready to shower, peeking around the curtain until she pulled her long-sleeve tee shirt over her head and then popping out to ogle the scar and scare the hell out of Melody in the process.
Melody had caught every single one of them glancing surreptitiously at her arm after they’d seen the scar, and she knew when they looked at her
now, they didn’t see Melody the ballerina, or even Melody the failed ballerina. They saw Melody the suicide attempt because not one of them believed her when she said it was an accident. Of course they wouldn’t – not with everything going against her when it happened.
And now Jessie had seen it – not all of its six-inch, keloid-laden glory, but enough.
Melody didn’t even make eye contact with her when she brought Ellie for the Saturday afternoon beginner’s class, finding a reason to turn around at the desk and hide her face until they’d both disappeared into the studio. It was a bit harder to avoid Jessie when it was time for Ellie’s second private lesson, though, and for that Melody wore a thick warm-up hoodie with thumb holes in the cuffs of the sleeves. She used to wear it jogging and she’d probably sweat like hell in, it but at least there was no risk of her sleeve creeping up again.
“Good morning,” she said to Ellie as she came into the studio, summoning every bit of cheer she could muster so Ellie wouldn’t sense the tension between her mother and Melody. “Are you ready to learn the rond de jambe?”
“Are you teaching my daughter nonsense words now?” Jessie asked with a smile as she followed her daughter into the room, and Melody was surprised to find her in a joking mood. No one ever joked with her after they saw the scar – they all assumed she was too fragile for that kind of thing.
“That’s right,” she shot back, “and later we’ll learn the futterwacken.”
“Excuse me?” Jessie asked with a raised eyebrow.
Melody laughed. “Futterwacken. It’s the Mad Hatter’s dance in Alice in Wonderland.”
“Sounds fun,” Ellie said. “I want to do it!”
“Okay,” Melody said with another little laugh. “Rond de jambe first, though.”
Ellie went into the middle of the room and sat down on the floor, ready to run through all of the usual warm-up exercises. The kid was a sponge and there were very few moves that Melody had to teach her more than once – it reminded Melody a lot of her own early ballet lessons.
Ballet was like breathing to her in a lot of ways, natural and effortless. At least, that’s how it felt when she was doing it for fun, and when she was the star ballerina in a small town with not much competition. When she got to New York and had to square off against the cream of the crop, she realized pretty quickly that she still had a lot to learn and it wasn’t nearly so fun or effortless.
Melody taught Ellie a few new moves – futterwacken not included on account of the fact that Melody couldn’t actually remember what it looked like – and Jessie sat in the corner quietly taking notes the whole time, rarely glancing at Melody.
After the lesson ended and Jessie and Ellie dashed out of the studio to drop Ellie off at school, Melody found herself alone in the studio. The next class wasn’t until the afternoon, and she noted with surprise that she didn’t feel the need to immediately peel off her leotard like a parasite clinging to her. Instead, she lingered in the studio for a little while.
She retrieved her phone and watched a couple videos of the futterwacken scene from Alice in Wonderland, walking her way through a few tentative steps as she did so. It was really more of a liquid dancing style, but Melody figured out a few moves she could modify into a short ballet routine. She set her phone down and walked into the center of the room, watching herself in the large, wall-to-wall mirror as she tested them out.
She ran through the routine a couple of times after she decided on the choreography, committing it to memory so she could teach it to Ellie next week, and then she picked up her phone and went into the bathroom to change. It was the first time she’d danced voluntarily since she came home, and she wasn’t quite sure how she felt about it yet.
As she changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater for her shift at the reception desk later in the day, Melody thought again about how much Ellie reminded her of a young version of herself. She remembered those early-morning private lessons well, and that was when the ballet bug bit her. It was hard not to feel special, destined for something greater than an end-of-year recital, when the whole world was asleep but you and your teacher were up before dawn working toward something.
Melody wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that yet, either. Sometimes it felt noble to pass down her ballet knowledge to a newcomer, and other times when she thought about it, she couldn’t get over the fear that she was pushing Ellie toward the path that she’d gone down without warning her of the dangers ahead. For Melody, it started out with a private lesson once a week, and then it was twice a week, and then every day, and then before she knew it her whole world was dance and she didn’t know anything else.
It didn’t seem fair to do that to someone else.
***
Doctor Riley seemed quite interested in the developments at work. Melody avoided telling her about being forced to cover the beginner ballet class a few weeks ago out of fear that she’d see it as a step forward. It had been coercion, plain and simple, regardless of how much Melody ended up enjoying it.
She didn’t even tell her about the private lessons right away, despite the fact that keeping them a secret made Melody feel guilty. Her parents didn’t have an unlimited supply of money to spend on therapy sessions in which she withheld pertinent information. But she was afraid that Dr. Riley would see those private lessons as too much of a breakthrough, and Melody felt just as fucked up as ever.
She couldn’t keep it all bottled up forever though, and the nagging fear that she was contributing to Ellie’s journey down the same path she’d gone down herself was what finally caused Melody to cave. She told Dr. Riley about the private lessons, and then spent a good twenty minutes of her session expounding on her concerns about Ellie.
“I just can’t stop worrying that I’m contributing to someone else’s future mental breakdown,” Melody said, throwing up her hands when she’d said all she could on the matter.
Dr. Riley had listened silently and attentively during Melody’s long rant, and when she finished (exclaiming, “I just can’t stop worrying that I’m contributing to someone else’s future mental breakdown!”) Dr. Riley set her notepad down in her lap and said, “Ellie isn’t you.”
It was a bit curt, and it rankled a little.
“She might not end up being as interested in ballet as you are,” Dr. Riley said, to which Melody broke in with a past-tense correction of were. Dr. Riley modified her statement and went on. “Okay, were. Maybe for Ellie, it doesn’t go beyond the level of hobby, or maybe it does and she has a different set of coping tools than you had available to you. I’ll say it again. Ellie isn’t you.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Dr. Riley challenged. “I think you’re projecting a lot of your own insecurities onto Ellie. How do you feel about the fact that you’re giving private lessons to the daughter of this woman you feel attracted to?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Melody asked.
“I just think it might complicate your feelings about being in the studio,” Dr. Riley said with a shrug. She was trying very hard to be casual, but Melody could tell she was driving at something. After a moment’s pause, during which she was sure Dr. Riley was hoping Melody would jump in and supply her own theory, Dr. Riley asked, “Do you think it’s possible that you’re disguising the apprehension you feel about Jessie as a concern for Ellie’s well-being? Maybe if you focus your energy on Ellie, you won’t have to think about the possibility of truly opening up to Jessie, or even the fact that you’ve already begun to face your fears by going into the studio in the first place.”
“I’m not afraid to open up,” Melody said defensively.
“But you panicked when she saw your scar,” Dr. Riley pointed out. “It sounds like you’re still hiding parts of yourself from her.”
“What difference would it make if I did open up? She’s married.”
“Yes,” Dr. Riley said. “She’s married, and you have talked about her in every one of our sessions since you met her. Whe
ther it’s viable to try to be with her or not, your heart is making its desires known.”
“That’s not fair,” Melody said. “You’re the one who brought her up this time.”
“It sounds like she has a calming effect on you,” Dr. Riley said, ignoring Melody’s accusation.
Melody thought about last year’s dance recital and the panic attack she’d had watching from the wings of the stage. She’d gone outside to get fresh air and slow the racing of her pulse, and when Jessie appeared it was like the whole world slowed down. And then there was the day when she had to cover the beginner ballet class for Mary Beth, and Jessie had brought her racing pulse back down with nothing more than a smile and a few words.
“So what?”
“Sounds like talking to Jessie is a much better way of coping with the stresses of the world than smoking weed,” Dr. Riley said. “Maybe what you’re really worried about isn’t the possibility of Ellie traveling down the same path as you. Maybe you’re worried that the more time you spend in the studio with her, the closer you’ll get to her mother, and getting closer to Jessie just might force you to give up the belief you’ve picked up since you came home that life ends after Pavlova. Does that sound fair?”
“I guess so,” Melody said reluctantly.
“Good,” Dr. Riley said, jotting something quickly on her legal pad. She smiled at Melody as she looked up again and said, “I’d call that progress. Since there’s not a lot you can do about Jessie’s marital status, I think it would be constructive to approach this fear of yours from a different angle. Do you think having a stronger support system would have given you the tools you needed to handle the pressure better when you were in New York?”
“Maybe.”
“I want to give you a homework assignment, then,” Dr. Riley said, sitting forward in her chair. Melody could tell she was excited about whatever she was about to present. “I want you to think about the kind of teacher and mentor you would have wanted when you were younger, and then work on being that for Ellie.”
