Rose Sees Red

by Cecil Castellucci

  I noticed that she was wearing pants instead of a skirt. That was something new. I had never once, in the two years she lived next door to me, seen her wear pants.

  As a dancer, I always sized up everyone’s legs, and she had good, long legs. I would’ve killed for legs like that.

  I imagined her dancing the combinations that we’d had in class that week. I imagined her getting through them flawlessly. She looked like a star.

  “I’ve always wondered about your room,” she said. “I can only see a part of it, you know. The rest of it is exactly how I thought it would be. It’s so American girl.”

  Sometimes, when you don’t know someone except for what you’ve gleaned through a bedroom window, you get a distorted view of what they are like. Yrena thought that I was a typical American girl, but the truth was that there was no such thing as a typical American girl. I was very typical for myself, but that was it.

  I couldn’t tell from her accent if her thinking that my room was so American girl was a compliment or a dis. I suspected it to be a dis. I didn’t need to be dissed in my own room. Not when I had just been scared that she might be a pervert.

  “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “You have many things that you don’t need,” she said.

  Then she went over to my vanity and fingered the new pair of Freed of London pointe shoes I had lying there because I had to break them in.

  Then she went to the wall, where she gently handled the pointe shoes that I had tacked on there. Those were the special ones, signed by dancers I admired: Natalia Makarova, Suzanne Farrell, and Gelsey Kirkland. I had gotten them after shows that I had seen when I was a little girl. It was a dorky thing to do, maybe, but those dancers were my heroes and those shoes had touched the stage that I wanted to dance on.

  She moved on to the wicker basket on the floor where I kept every single pair of pointe shoes I’d ever had. Most of the shoes were trashed, but I couldn’t seem to throw them away. She picked through them, turning each shoe over to examine the stitching, the shanks, the bend, the wear. It made me self-conscious, like she was reading my fortune. If she looked too closely, she’d know everything there was to know about me. That I wanted to shine, but I didn’t.

  “Why are you going through my stuff?” I asked.

  “Your right leg is stronger than your left. I am the opposite,” she said. Her English was not bad, and her accent made her say things in a charming singsong way.

  Right then, something switched. It went from her picking through the things in my room as though it were the most natural thing in the world to this dancer shorthand. Something about Yrena standing there seemed familiar. Maybe it was something about dancers when they got together. I watched as she looked around the room like she wanted to do some dance moves to demonstrate her weak leg, but there was no space on the floor on account of my room being a pigsty.

  She gave up trying to show me and came over to the bed and plopped down very gracefully next to me, like Odile dying in Swan Lake. Then she put her arms around me and gave me a quick embrace.

  A hug, from someone who appreciated the things in my room. She looked at me and stuck her tongue out and crossed her eyes, and for some reason that just about made my heart crack open.

  I didn’t know her at all, and even though she had broken into my room, nosed through all of my stuff, and was acting like we were bosom buddies for no good reason, I liked her.

  “This is so fun!” she said. “To finally be in your room! To finally speak with you!”

  I didn’t know what kind of fun I was supposed to be having in this situation. Maybe a little bit like how I felt at Viva’s with Caitlin and Callisto. It was confusing to suddenly be saying hello to my next-door neighbor for the first time, even though it didn’t feel like the first time. It was confusing to suddenly act like we’d really known each other for the past two years when we most definitely had not.

  I wondered what Yrena wanted.

  “What do you want?” I said, trying not to sound rude, because I wasn’t trying to be. I was trying to be open, because she was so open. Her face, her spirit, her excitement, were so open. It was infectious. She was sitting there on my bed, almost bouncing up and down, like a little kid.

  I started to bounce, too. With anticipation. We both started to giggle. When you giggle, it’s different from laughing. Giggling is like bubbles that lift you up, no matter how hard or dark your spirit is.

  “I have always wanted to come into your room,” she said. “It has been a great mystery to me since I moved here. I have often seen you in your room through your window and wondered about you.”

  I understood what she meant completely. She wasn’t judging me—it was just like she said, she was genuinely interested. I was a great mystery.

  “You never close your curtains,” I said. “I always close my curtains because of the streetlamp. Doesn’t it shine into your room, too?”

  I never saw her curtains closed, not even when I came home late at night. It was weird. And she always seemed to have a light on.

  “Are you afraid of the dark?” I asked. I had often wondered if maybe she was afraid of the dark.

  “No,” Yrena said. “I like to always be able to look outside.”

  “But there’s not much to see outside,” I said.

  She threw her hands up in the air.

  “There are a million things to see!”

  “Like what?”

  Yrena stood up and pulled me over to my window.

  “Birds! People! Clouds! Life!”

  She was waving her arms around at everything. And when she said it, it sounded exciting.

  “Do you know that you are the closest I’ve ever had to having an American friend?” Yrena said. “I mean to say, I always thought that we could be friends, even though you are American.”

  Then she put her hand over her mouth and kind of slapped her lips.

  “I don’t mean that we can’t be friends because you are American!”

  “I didn’t think you meant that,” I said.

  “I am not like my father! My father would say that.” Yrena looked genuinely mad at herself for this.

  “It’s silly,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”

  I didn’t want her to worry. I didn’t want her to feel bad. I didn’t want her to be embarrassed.

  I wanted to know more.

  “Honestly, I never even knew that you spoke English.”

  “I do speak English. I have watched American television! It is a good skill to have. I speak French and Italian, too.”

  I would have to remember to mention that to Todd. He’d be stoked to know that he got something right, and to learn something new about Yrena.

  She smiled at me. She had a gap between her two front teeth, and even though she was smiling, there was a kind of sadness about her that felt familiar to me. Her sadness seemed wistful. Nostalgic. Fragile. Like what I liked most about a beautiful performance. Something delicate and intensely human.

  My sadness tended to repel, to alienate, to isolate. I tried to smile brighter.

  It was nice to have someone sitting next to me to talk to.

  I sighed.

  She sighed back.

  I didn’t want her to have to go home. I looked toward the door because I could hear the garage opening and closing, which meant that either another of Todd’s friends or the pizza had arrived. Yrena stood up and looked apologetic.

  “You must want me to go so that you can go to the party,” she said.

  “The party?”

  And then, just because I did have a party I could go to, and I wanted Yrena to think I was cool, I said, in a kind of big, kind of braggy voice, “I’m going to meet my friends Callisto and Caitlin at a huge party downtown. You should come with me.”

  I didn’t know why I said it, except that it felt good to say it. It felt good to invite her. Thrilling. Daring. Out of control. My pulse quickened, like when I had to do the combination in class by myself, wi
th all of those eyes staring at me. I got nervous. So nervous.

  To calm myself a bit, I started getting ready, as if I really was going to go to the party and Yrena was really coming with me. She followed me around my room as I gathered things up. I put on my shoes. I put on a little makeup. But just before I started brushing my hair, Yrena spoke.

  “Oh. I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Oh. I see,” I said.

  Rejected. Raw. That little spark that I had felt had tricked me into stepping out, but I had been slapped back into place. I was disappointed. I hardened. Something had changed between us. I had misread the cues. I had gone left instead of right.

  I put the brush down.

  “I thought you would go to the party that happens every Friday in your garage,” Yrena said.

  “What party?”

  “I thought maybe since it was just downstairs, that I could go there with you,” she said sincerely.

  “I think you’ve made a mistake. There is no party at my house.”

  When I looked up at her I could see that she looked sorry. Vulnerable.

  “Sometimes, I am at my window and I see the boys going into the garage. And sometimes there is pizza. It looks like a big American party. I have always wanted to go. To be invited.”

  She was talking about my brother’s D&D game, which was about as much of a rager as a mid-afternoon grandpa nap. I realized that it could be hugely misinterpreted as a party, if you didn’t know all the facts. I felt a weight lift off of me. She wasn’t rejecting me. She just couldn’t leave the Bronx.

  “That’s not a party!” I told her. “My brother has his Dungeons and Dragons night every Friday. Trust me, you don’t want to go there.”

  “Dungeons and Dragons?” Yrena asked, in a way that made it clear that geeky role-playing games with multi-sided dice hadn’t yet made it to Moscow.

  “It’s a game where you pretend that you are a wizard or a fighter or something and you battle orcs and hunt for treasure and play with dice,” I tried to explain.

  “A game party?” She actually looked kind of impressed and interested. “My parents and I play card games together. It is fun!”

  “Dungeons and Dragons is not cool,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, looking a bit disappointed. “I don’t know what is cool or not cool.”

  That floored me. I would never admit that I didn’t know what was cool or not. That kind of truth could only lead to more humiliation and alienation. I felt protective of Yrena; someone needed to show her how to be a teenager in America, or she would never survive. I knew I was barely surviving myself, but at least I had observed what to do. How to be. I would never consider myself an expert of cool. I didn’t have my own opinions; I was never sure of them. In the past, when we were friends, I had always followed whatever Daisy said. And now I just listened to what everyone around me said was cool at school and tried to keep up. It was funny how some people just seemed to know what was cool and what wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t cool. But somehow, at that moment, I was the expert in the room.

  “Dungeons and Dragons: not cool,” I said again. Of that, at least, I was certain. I knew Todd would turn my life into one of his beloved slasher movies if he ever learned that Yrena had wanted to party with him and that I had convinced her not to be trapped in his nerd lair. There was just no way I was going to introduce Yrena to the role-playing rivals.

  “So, there is not a party there every weekend?”

  “It is definitely not a party,” I said.

  “I always thought that your brother’s Friday parties were proof of teenage American decadence! I always wondered what it was like.”

  She said “teenage American decadence” with great joy, not like it was a bad thing. Like it was something that her parents said all the time to warn her.

  “Well, I’m sure they wish it was,” I said. “But it is most definitely proof of teenage American loserdom.”

  Yrena looked down at her jeans and started picking on a stray thread. She was doing that thing that I knew I had done a million times, where you tried to readjust your thoughts when you realized that everything you had previously thought about something was totally wrong.

  She had probably written up a whole story in her head about me and my brother. She had probably thought she was being daring hanging out with me in my bedroom and asking to go to the party downstairs.

  And what had I done? I had burst her bubble. I had let her down.

  What did Yrena want? She just wanted something to do. I could come up with something to do.

  “Do you like ice cream?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Who doesn’t?”

  “We could go up the street to Zips and get an ice cream.”

  “Okay.”

  I went to open my bedroom door, but Yrena whistled to me and motioned to the window and started to climb through it, disappearing outside.

  I didn’t stop to think about it. I didn’t think it was weird. I just followed her out the window in my pink slip and backward sweater.

  It was a funny thing, climbing out of a bedroom window. It got you out of the house, just like a door did, but somehow it made you look at your own house differently, as though the use of the window had just expanded into something more profound.

  A window could be an exit.

  Audition

  I had two states of being. When I was on pointe and when I was in sneakers.

  When I was on pointe, the world was heightened. I had a voice. I was really me.

  And when I was in sneakers, I was nothing. I was a mouse.

  I didn’t want to be a mouse forever.

  This was why, as eighth grade drew to a close, I’d booked myself an audition at the High School of Performing Arts. I dusted off my ballet shoes and cobbled together an audition piece using parts from an old recital I had done when I was twelve. I bribed Todd with homemade chocolate chip cookies for time in the garage to practice my moves.

  I did it in secret. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. Not even my parents. I did it like I was ashamed. Like if I told anyone—especially Daisy—I would be convinced to quit.

  What was I thinking? That I could be a dancer?

  Yes.

  When I got to the school, the building looked ominous. It was nestled on the street just up the road from Times Square, which was a scary mess. I found myself in front of an old, run-down brown building.

  I made my way upstairs to the dance department. I saw Stanley, from school, but he was auditioning for the drama department and the music department, so I didn’t say hello. I knew he wouldn’t rat me out to my friends because he didn’t mingle in Daisy’s circle.

  I pinned the number that the audition check-in girl handed me onto my bodysuit and sat on the floor in my tights, stretching out against the mirror as I watched the other dancers in my group auditioning. They were good. They looked good. They looked cool. They looked skinny. I was woefully out of shape, my muscles tighter than they used to be. I stretched a little harder, but I didn’t want to overdo it.

  But even though I had quit dancing, even though my dancing was going to be rusty, at that moment I felt like a dancer.

  I knew it the way that a bird knows how to fly when it is pushed out of its nest. The way that a baby penguin knows how to swim. How a flower knows to bloom in spring.

  “Numbers five through ten, please take center,” the woman with the accent and the cane yelled. She was small and hunched and her hair was shockingly short and white.

  I was number nine, so I got up and took a place on the floor in the back row.

  But suddenly, I didn’t want to be seen, even if I was going to give it my best. Suddenly I felt shy.

  The woman showed us the combination and we learned it quickly and did it. I thought perhaps we’d sit down like the other group had after they’d done it once all the way through.

  But no. “This group again. And this time, let us have the two reluctant young ladies in the back
do it in the front,” the woman said, banging her cane on the floor.

  (Later, I would learn that she limped because two of her toes were cut off, but at this moment I had forgotten why it always seemed as though ballet teachers were old as time and strangely misshapen.)

  I moved to the front row. The piano player started to play, and I danced.

  I was terrible. I stumbled. I missed a step, and even though I was still doing the combination, I figured I’d failed the audition already. I stopped trying. I knew what my fate was. It was the zoned school for me.

  Everyone in the room could see that I was not up to par. I could feel my heart, and how much I wanted it to go into my feet. But my heart wouldn’t comply. I was scared. My heart was pulling away from me rather than going where it was supposed to.

  I danced as though disconnected. And the harder I tried to reach for it, the farther it went away from me. My fear had won.

  When they called numbers to stay behind, my number wasn’t called. I knew that meant that I could go home. I knew that meant that I hadn’t gotten a callback.

  “Wasn’t that so fun!” a girl next to me said as she put on her street clothes. “I hope I get in. This is my dream school!”

  I knew for sure that she wasn’t going to get in, because I had watched her and she was a bad dancer. I knew I wasn’t that bad. I could blame my rejection on being rusty, out of shape, and mediocre at the audition.

  But I couldn’t absolve myself of the fact that none of this mattered, if you danced with no spark. If you kept something to yourself. That was probably worse than being bad.

  That girl was lucky. It was better to be like her and to just have no talent at all than to have just a little bit of talent and not be able to even let it out.

  I barraged myself. Maybe if I had practiced more in the garage…Maybe if I’d taken a few dance classes after school to help me get my dance back on…Maybe if I’d used different music in my solo piece…

  There I was in the locker room, changing into my street clothes, when it hit me for real that I had totally blown it. I wanted to go to Performing Arts. Not a zoned school, and definitely not Bronx Science. I didn’t want four more years of all of those people.