“The parade goes right past here,” he says. From the bags he pulls cartons of stir-fried vegetables, plain white rice. Pink box of almond cookies. “So, now, what’s your deal with Chinese food? Which, this isn’t even—this is American Chinese food.”
“It’s not the Chinese part; it’s the fried part.”
“Thought so.”
“Not sure how to navigate food. Lately. Or ever.”
“Okay. Well. It’s here if you want it.”
“Thank you.” He tosses me a bottle of water and breaks apart disposable wooden chopsticks.
“Talk to Kate lately?”
“She’s gone.”
“New York?”
I nod.
“Oh, wow,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“No, I mean sympathy. I’m sorry. For the loss.”
“I’m not like that,” I say. “What I said to her.”
“You were sticking up for yourself. She wasn’t being the nicest.”
“She’s not like that, either,” I say. “Not at all. Something’s wrong.”
“What is?”
“I don’t know. Her parents are kind of awful, but I’m too wrapped up in my own stupid tragedy to pay attention to anyone else’s and offer help. So.”
“Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Take all the blame. Belittle your sadness.”
“Because…other people have real problems. People are sick. And starving. And they have terrible families. I’m in perfect health with a family who loves me, and I’m moping about ballet. And not just moping—I’m fully agonizing. I’m destroyed. I don’t know what to do without it, and that’s…” I’m getting worked up to cry. Again.
“Okay,” he says. “Yes, you’re lucky you’re middle-class and white, and you’ve got a great family, and they paid for classes when you were little—fine. But it’s not luck that you’ve worked your ass off for the past fourteen years. If you were Chinese, my mom would be in love with you. She’d be planning the wedding.”
Drums and bells crash in the street below.
“That’s the second marriage reference you’ve made in the space of an hour.”
“Harp, it’s a huge, catastrophic fuck-up you’re getting through. It’s okay to be sad about it.”
“Can we ever talk about you?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You were premed. Now you make games. Your mom seems kind of racist. That it?”
He puts a bunch of rice into the vegetable container.
“I love science. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. My parents really wanted me to be a doctor. But it turns out? I also really love sitting around in my boxer shorts playing Halo.”
“I thought I made that up. Is that a thing?”
“Hell yes. It’s just reality.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s my guilt—I could be dedicating my life to helping people, healing them. And I choose video games?”
“So go back to med school.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You’d think. I was going to take just a semester off when Lucas first offered. Then it turns out that nearly every single minute of every day, I am so happy at work. Even when it’s really hard—especially when it’s hard.”
“Wow.”
“I know! And they do this thing, with Make-A-Wish—you know, where kids are really sick and they can have a wish granted, like the thing they love most in life to happen just once?”
“Yeah?”
“So, some of the kids choose to come see us making games. That’s their whole wish in the entire world—to watch us drawing, or see how we build the levels or whatever. A kid came in a few months ago, and she’s bald and super little, and you just think—if you could trade places. But the whole time she was there, she was so happy. And I thought, that’s a worthwhile thing; making something that makes people happy—that matters, too. That’s a life.”
The parade is starting. It is crawling along the wide streets below us, music and lights, convertible cars with political candidates waving from jump seats. Firecrackers.
“This is the Year of the Sheep,” he says.
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s a really good year. Fortune-full.”
“It’s going great so far.”
He smiles kindly, puts his hand on my knee. “And you were born in the Year of the Tiger.”
“I know. I’ve seen the paper placemats in restaurants.”
“So you know you’re spazzy and can’t settle down in relationships, but you’re an incredibly hard worker?”
“You’re making that up.”
“I’m a Rat. Cheerful. Impatient. Supremely talented in a million ways.”
“Of course.”
“Harper.”
“Owen.”
“Tell me this is none of my business and to shut the hell up and I will, but—running away to Antarctica…doesn’t seem like it’s going to solve anything. I mean, isn’t the whole issue that you love to dance? Isn’t that the point? Why can’t you just…always dance?
An enormous flatbed goes past, covered in little kids and poster-paint signs reading, WAH MEI SCHOOL.
“My mom,” Owen says, pointing. “She jumps on midroute. That’s her school. Mom! Mom!” She waves, smiles, looks up, and see us. Sees me and frowns.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “She’ll love our kids—the Chinese half at least.”
“Not even a ring on my finger and you’ve got me popping out kids. Plural.”
“I sent you to Tiffany. There could have been a ring, but nooo—oh, look, there’s Josie! There she is! Josie!”
“Where?”
“There, right there below us!”
“I can’t see past the Miss Chinatown float. I don’t see where you’re pointing.”
Miss Chinatown looks up, sees Owen, and waves.
“Oh…,” I say. “Right. Okay.”
“And she’s still premed.”
“Of course.”
“Plus her boyfriend is totally Chinese.”
“Well, sure. And you brought me to your childhood home to meet your family because you like to stir the pot.”
“What pot?”
“It means I think my being white is a thing with you.”
“A thing?”
“A novelty. A way to stay the black sheep.”
“ ‘Black sheep’? Now that’s racist.”
“No, it isn’t! That’s a saying!”
“Oh my God. Okay.”
“It is.”
“Harper,” he says. “Do you have to do this?”
“I need to.”
“Why?”
“I’m a Scott.”
“Are you scared?”
The dragon music is starting. The gorgeous silk-and-paper dragon puppet is snaking its way around the street, undulating and dancing.
An empty stomach makes a fierce dog, Scott said. My life is empty.
“No,” I say. “I’m not scared. At all.”
He leans close to me. “It’s obvious the biggest competition I have for your affection is San Francisco, and believe me, San Francisco doesn’t want you to go.”
“Don’t,” I beg. “Please. This isn’t easy.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t not say this. Please don’t leave. I don’t want you to go. You can figure it out here. Your family will help you—I’ll help you.”
“I’m trying to save myself. I’m so lost. Please don’t—”
“I am completely selfish. Stay with me.”
My head is light. Tingly. I’m barely breathing. Firecrackers explode in the street below us. I tilt my head up to the sky. No stars; too many lights.
“I wish I could,” I admit.
“You can! I just found you. Please don’t go.”
“I have to,” I say. “Already gone.”
“Stay. Please.”
Nothing to say to that. So I don’t.
I only kiss him back.
- - -
In the San Francisco airport there is a yoga room, and also there are therapy dogs walking around with trainers, and the dogs wear vests that read, PET ME. These things are supposed to calm anxious travelers. But I am not anxious. I am eager. Mom, on the other hand, has been in the yoga room for forty-five minutes, and the last time we saw her, she was practically French-kissing an Australian shepherd and holding on to his coat for dear life, and then the trainer awkwardly eased him away from Mom’s grip, while Dad backed Mom slowly toward the Cinnabon.
Luke is here. And Hannah, and Willa. Who has not forgiven me. She keeps asking if she can “help” by “holding” my boarding pass and ticket while eyeing the garbage can.
An unread letter from Owen, delivered by Luke, is in my backpack, but Owen is not here.
Because I asked him not to be. Because being near him would make it impossible for me to leave.
Kate is in New York.
I am alone.
“So, when does the last mail flight get to The Ice?” Mom asks for the bazillionth time.
“End of March. Don’t send anything later than next week. I won’t get it till August.”
“And you’ll be there when?”
“Three days. I’ll call from the hotel. And then I’ll email. Okay?”
Hannah and Dad and Luke hug me, Mom clutches me once more, and then I have to get in line. I take off my shoes and pull out my phone and passport. Willa makes a last dash to put her arms around my legs.
I pry her arms apart. “I have to go,” I whisper. “I’ll bring you a penguin, okay? Willster?” She’s crying. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sorry. I’ll come back. I promise. Okay? I promise.”
“Bring me a polar bear.”
I get on my knees and hold her tight. “No polar bears,” I whisper. “That’s the North Pole.”
North in the Arctic—a word derived from the Greek Arktos, meaning “bear.” So Antarctica means “no bears.”
An entire continent named for what it lacks.
I am nothing now. I am only what I lack.
No bears. No ballet.
Willa runs back to Hannah, who picks her up, and they wave and walk away.
I am going. To be in the dark and quiet. To be frozen. To Winter Over.
There are some hard-core veteran Winter Overers who would love it if the Internet had never been invented. “Antarctica has lost its sense of isolation,” they complain, isolation being the reason so many people come here year after year. Solitude. Escape from the rest of humanity. From life.
I’m starting to sympathize with them.
Ballerina Comes Home
It took moving 3,000 miles away to New York City for Katherine Grey to realize, “San Francisco is my home. It’s where I’m meant to be. This city is in my blood!” She laughs, as some of this San Francisco blood spills from an open blister on her foot and onto the studio floor of Grey’s lifelong ballet teacher, Simone Beaulieu.
“Kate could never be anything else,” Beaulieu says, intently watching Grey’s lightning-fast turns across the floor of her West Portal dance studio. “She was born to this.”
Which makes it no surprise the seventeen-year-old was chosen earlier this year by New York’s world-famous American Ballet Theatre to be an apprentice company member, a coveted position most dancers only dream of.
“But as soon as I got there, though the training was wonderful, my homesickness turned to something deeper,” Grey says.
Oh, really. Perhaps it’s the deep realization you’ve betrayed your best friend and lied to her for ten years. Or it could be you got a bad street-vendor pretzel. Who knows.
“I can dance anywhere. But I couldn’t belong everywhere,” a feeling Grey says she was willing to ignore, and she threw herself fully into participating with daily rehearsals at ABT.
“The managing director of the San Francisco Ballet was in town. He’d seen me at a competition earlier in the season and liked what he saw.” Then came San Francisco’s unique move of facilitating negotiations to get Grey out of her nine-month contract with ABT and offering her a two-year corps position contract with the San Francisco Ballet instead. Which Grey was “thrilled to gratefully accept!”
“Everything I’ve ever loved has always been here in San Francisco, in West Portal. Now I can say that for certain.”
“Harp?”
Charlotte is awake but still in my bed, beneath every blanket I could find. I close her laptop and reprimand myself yet again for being weak—I have got to stay the hell off Google and stop dumping entire containers of rock salt onto these wounds.
I go to the chair I’ve set up beside her. “Hey,” I say. “What do you need?”
She closes her eyes, her arm over her face. “It’s a million degrees in here. Can I get some of these covers off?” She shoves them aside and I fold them at the foot of the bed. “Thank you for staying. You don’t need to. I’m used to it—I’m so sorry I ruined your night.”
“You saved my night,” I sigh. I’m nursing a huge headache, my eyeballs are parched, I’m wrecked recalling alternately first how impossibly close I came to spending the night with Aiden and then plunging my thoughts right back into how much I love Owen’s laugh, his beautiful eyes, his intelligence, his kindness, his voice, sitting together by the bridge above the ocean and the lights and sounds of the New Year parade—
Poor Charlotte moans pitifully from the covers, sick and miserable.
“I’d almost rather have anything—strep throat, bladder infection—than nausea. I hate it so much!” she whines.
There’s a tap at the door, and I step into the hall, where Aiden hands me saltine crackers, a liter bottle of flat ginger ale, and a cup of ice.
“She okay?”
“Just the flu. She’ll make it. But I’m staying with her, okay? Sorry.”
He pulls me to him, hugs me in my far-less-sexy sweatpants and T-shirt ensemble. “Me too. I’m really sad our slumber party got hijacked.”
I nod into his chest, thinking miserably of Owen, awash in guilt, deserving of how awful my head feels, and so grateful I found Charlotte when I did—but then look what Aiden does. Brings her soda and crackers, kindness and care for us both.
“Thank you,” I say. “This will really help.”
“Here, I’ve got these,” Vivian says, suddenly standing beside Aiden, her face hidden behind an armful of folded blankets she’s found in Charlotte’s room.
“Oh my gosh, Vivian, thank you.”
Aiden’s eyes are wide. “Is this Tickle-Fight-in-Panties Night?!”
“Perv,” Vivian says, and shuts the door.
“Sorry!” I whisper to Aiden. “Thank you, thank you, call me later!” I slip into the room and lock the door behind me.
Charlotte sits up.
“I found these,” Vivian says, and piles them on top of the stack at the foot of the bed.
Charlotte falls back against the pillows. “I am the worst mentor ever. Holy crap, I’m going to get sued. I’ll be thrown in jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors, and I’ll deserve it. This is so bad….”
“Oh, relax,” Vivian says, dropping onto her bed. “You’re a science teacher, not a den mother. No one’s going to find out.”
Charlotte and I stare at her.
“What? Harper, you’re not going to tell anyone here. You’re not telling your parents, right?”
“Of course not, no!”
“Me neither,” she says to Charlotte. “It was nearly impossible to persuade them to let me come here. I’m not about to prove them right about how McMurdo pretends to be a science station but in reality is nothing more than a sex den of debauchery. So there you go. No one will find out Charlotte’s a South Pole dancer, and no one’s going to know Harper got drunk and made out with some dude in the hallway. All is well, and the world will go on turning.”
“Vivian,” I say, “I like you in a crisis.”
“This
is not a crisis!” Charlotte wails. “Wait—oh God! Harper, did you tell me in the bathroom that you’re drunk? Are you drunk?”
“Not anymore.”
“Oh, sweetheart, please,” she begs. “You can’t, you cannot do that. Promise me you won’t—”
“Trust me,” I say. “I feel terrible. I hated it. And my parents will never find out about that, either.”
“Please just let your brain develop some more before you screw with it, okay? It is my fault; I’m your supervisor. Your mom would never forgive me. But also, Harper, my God! You know better! You’ve got to use the common sense I know you have. Was Aiden, too?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think that guy can get drunk.”
She rolls her eyes. “I’ll talk to his supervisor. This is why no one wanted to offer these grants. You can’t have teenagers in this kind of situation. Where the hell did he get the drinks?”
“From the bar, I’m guessing.”
“Was that him out there just now?”
I nod, pour the ginger ale over the ice, and it foams up a little.
“You tell him it’s the flu?”
“Of course!”
She closes her eyes again. “This is so dumb.”
“None of his business. No one’s but yours. Drink this.”
“Well, mine and the medical staff who aren’t equipped for childbirth.
“How many…like, how far along…?”
“Five, maybe six months.”
“How long have you known?”
She counts in her head. “Eight…teen weeks? My period is never regular in the winter. Sometimes it never comes at all. Core temperature can get so low it messes with it. But apparently not enough.” She pulls the covers back up around her.
“Girls at my school got knocked up all the time,” Vivian says, reaching for some saltines. “At least you’re an adult.”
I frown. “They did?”
“Sure. I mean, two or three a year, but there were only, like, five hundred kids in the whole school, so that’s a lot. Statistically.”
“In Minnesota?”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, in St. Paul. People have sex there. Haven’t you seen Purple Rain?”
“I thought that was Minneapolis,” Charlotte says.
Up to This Pointe Page 20
