Rose Sees Red

by Cecil Castellucci

  I slammed the locker shut with my hand. It popped back open and hit me in the forehead.

  I was alone then, in the back corner so none of the other girls who had auditioned with me could see. Some of them must have been upset, too. Or maybe they didn’t realize that they had been cut yet. I could tell they had some hope they were clinging to that they were going to get in because a few of them were chattering as they left the dressing room, like excited birds. They would go home and wonder and wait for their letter and be surprised or bummed out when it was a rejection.

  I waited a bit until they had left and then I started crying. I didn’t want anyone to see that I was upset. There were mirrors everywhere and I caught sight of myself, and was amazed because I didn’t recognize myself.

  Where had the real me gone? There I was, crying, in secret, dressed in street clothes that Daisy had made me buy at the Galleria. Why was I wearing this Fiorucci sweatshirt? I didn’t even like it.

  Seeing myself in all of those mirrors, so sad and in an outfit that I didn’t like, that wasn’t even me, made it more upsetting, so I pulled my sweatshirt up over my face so I couldn’t see anything at all.

  I waited until the whole locker room was silent and then I went out in the hallway.

  I stopped to look at the bulletin board with pictures of the dance department that I would never be in.

  That was when I saw her coming toward me, holding a sandwich bag under her arm and a to-go coffee cup in her hand—the woman with the limp who had auditioned me.

  “You. Didn’t I cut you an hour ago?” she asked.

  I felt embarrassed.

  I nodded.

  “Why aren’t you gone yet? There is no loitering.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to speak in case I started crying again. I couldn’t look at her face because it was so severe. She was all pointy angles, high forehead, purple lipstick, and that shock of extremely short, extremely white hair.

  “You are out of shape, and you haven’t danced in a long time, I think,” she said.

  I shook my head from side to side. No. I hadn’t.

  “You do not want to leave now, but you should have not wanted to leave when you were auditioning.”

  I nodded in agreement, because she was right.

  “Do you remember the combination?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Ah, she speaks,” the woman said to the empty hall, as though there were a large audience around her and she was onstage. “Do it for me now.”

  “Here?” I said.

  “Yes. Here.”

  “I’m not dressed right,” I said.

  “Does that matter? No. It does not. I asked you to dance for me. Dance does not care about clothes.”

  I put down my shoulder bag and took off my jacket and put them on the floor under the bulletin board. And then I did the combination. I channeled all my anger, all my disappointment, all of my simmering into the combination. I attacked it.

  No errors. Not bad. Not great. But not bad. Definitely better than in the audition room.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  I nodded. I did feel better.

  “Sometimes a combination is best remembered a little bit after it is learned.”

  “Muscle memory,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Watch your back leg—you tend to drag it and you are very out of shape,” she said. And then she turned and retreated down the hallway.

  When my letter arrived, I figured it was too thin to be an acceptance letter. I figured I must have been rejected.

  But when I opened it, I had gotten in.

  The first thing I did was take dance classes to get back into shape.

  The second thing I did was try to figure out how I was going to tell Daisy that I was going to be a dancer.

  You’d think that telling someone the truth would be easy. But it was harder than I thought, because I had quit dancing. Forever quit. Never-going-back quit. Totally-swore-up-and-down quit.

  I got in to Science, too, but I knew there was no way that I was going to go.

  Daisy was so excited.

  “We’re going to go down to Canal Street and get cool clothes. We’re going to henna our hair. We’re going to get ourselves summer boyfriends at the Mockridge pool for practice.”

  She had big plans for us at Science. She kept saying how we were going to reinvent ourselves over the summer and be the coolest freshman girls when we got there.

  I let Daisy go on about our reinvention all summer. I went down to Canal Street and bought more things I didn’t like. I wore my matching swimsuit to the Mockridge pool and pretended to have a crush on Danny Wasserman.

  I waited until two weeks before school started to tell her. And even then it wasn’t planned. I was at her house, sleeping over. She had gotten a letter telling her what homeroom she was in and she wanted to know if we were going to be together.

  “I’m not going to Science,” I said.

  “What?” Daisy said. She was putting on purple eye shadow even though we weren’t planning on going anywhere. It was a thing we did, experiment with crazy makeup when we had sleepovers. It was another thing that I didn’t like to do. Daisy would bring over piles of magazines and her hand was guided by the New Wave look she found in them. She wanted to cultivate a style for high school.

  “I thought you got in? I saw your acceptance!”

  “I did get in,” I said. “But I’m not going.”

  “We have a plan,” she said. The shadow made her eyes look bruised. “We have to stick together. Just tell your parents you won’t go to private school.”

  I sucked in my cheeks and started applying makeup, too.

  “I’m not going to private school. I’m going to Performing Arts.”

  “What?” Daisy said, holding her blush brush midair. She only had one cheek done. “You can’t just decide to go there. You have to audition to get in. Besides, you know who is going there? Stanley. And he’s gross. Gross people go there.”

  It was ironic how she said she was all about the strange and different. That’s what she liked best in the magazines. But there it was something contained and frozen on the pages, in its assigned role of the weird. It couldn’t get loose and do something unexpected. She obviously couldn’t stand someone in real life going off script.

  “I auditioned and I got in.”

  “But you didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But you tell me everything,” she said. “Best friends don’t keep secrets.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I was afraid to tell you.”

  She stopped looking at me and only looked at her own image in the mirror. She resumed making herself up.

  “Why?” she said slowly.

  “I thought you’d laugh at me.”

  “Well, what talent do you have?” she asked, and to make it worse, now she was laughing, like she didn’t know.

  “Dance.”

  Daisy’s eyes narrowed. Her cheeks were hot-pink triangles. She looked sharp and geometric.

  “You know what your problem is?” she said. “You’re a liar.”

  She threw the makeup brush at the mirror, snatched her bag off the floor, and pushed past me.

  I grabbed her arm. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Just because we’re not going to the same school doesn’t mean that we can’t be friends.”

  I wondered if I looked as surreal as she did, with wild-colored spots on my face, or if it was just the scene that she was making that made everything look absurd.

  “Friends don’t betray friends like that,” she said, shaking me off. “We had a plan.”

  “I didn’t betray you,” I said. “I just made a different choice than what you wanted.”

  “We had a deal,” she said.

  And right at that moment, I wavered. My resolve broke. My knees were weak.

  “Maybe I could change my plans,” I said. “Maybe I can just go to Bronx Science.”<
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  “No,” she said. “It’s too late. I can never trust you again. You’ve ruined everything, and I will never be your friend again.”

  “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  I begged her all the way down the stairs. All the way to the front door. All the way to the corner.

  And then she turned around and spit at me so I would stop following her.

  And that was the moment when I thought that maybe I shouldn’t have any friends at all.

  East Meets West

  It was dark outside, so I didn’t notice them until we got to the crosswalk on Mosholu Avenue. They walked under the streetlamp. Two men. They both had suits on. One was in front, the other trailing behind, both of them following us, but not together.

  “KGB or CIA?” I said automatically to Yrena, like I always did to Todd.

  She looked over her shoulder at them.

  “You can tell by their shoes,” she said.

  I looked at the men’s shoes.

  “The black ones, KGB. The sneakers, CIA,” I said.

  “Yes, I think so, too,” she said. “They are not interested in you. It’s normal for them to follow us. It is not a big deal.”

  “Is that why you climbed through my window? To evade them?”

  “I thought perhaps we had escaped them by going through the window,” she said. “It’s fun to try to escape them.”

  “Will we get in trouble?” I asked. I wasn’t too worried. More curious than anything else.

  “Only if we share state secrets,” she said.

  “Well, it’s best to take the price tag off the bottom of a toe shoe,” I said. “Otherwise, when you perform, it’s distracting.”

  “That’s it,” Yrena said, throwing her arms up in the air. “We’re certainly on a watch list now.”

  “What a drag,” I said.

  Then we laughed. Because at the time it was funny. I mean, what would two girls like us ever be on a watch list for? Exchanging microfilm in our sugar cones?

  When we got to Zips, I ordered a mint chocolate chip ice cream sundae and Yrena ordered a strawberry one.

  “What is your high school like?” Yrena asked. “Do you have a boyfriend? Is there a football team? Do your parents let you wear makeup?”

  “I go to a special school,” I said. “A school for performing arts.”

  “For dance?” Yrena asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So it’s not like a regular American high school. We don’t have gym class.”

  “No cheerleaders?” Yrena seemed saddened by this.

  “No,” I said. “Dance class, academics, and the occasional hot lunch.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me about cheerleaders. And football.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. We don’t have anything like they do in a normal high school. I mean, I guess maybe I’m missing out on a regular high school experience.”

  “Will you feel strange later on in life?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’m kind of glad. Besides, isn’t every school a bit different?”

  Yrena shrugged.

  “Well. At least we have a senior prom.”

  “That’s a dance,” Yrena said.

  “Yes.”

  “We have dances. Although they try to keep it the same, my school here in America is different than back home.”

  “So I guess every school is different and the same.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I thought about that for a minute. It was comforting to know that you could always find something in common with someone else.

  “How long have you been dancing?” I asked.

  “I took ballet class because all little girls take ballet,” Yrena said flatly.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “I do not have a boyfriend.” Yrena sighed. “My father says I am too young to go on dates.” She took a spoonful of her ice cream and sucked on the spoon thoughtfully. “I will tell you a secret. I am hoping that because my breasts have grown so much—they are really quite big—that they will not take me back at the ballet school.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You have some of the best schools in the world.”

  “How long have you been dancing?” she asked.

  “Since I was four.”

  “Me, since I was three. But I do not want to dance. I want to quit.”

  “I thought for you Russians, dancing was in your DNA.”

  “I thought for you Americans, every girl was a cheerleader in love with a football player.”

  Sometimes it takes someone saying something stupid to make you realize that what you said was stupid.

  “I quit dancing once,” I said. “But it didn’t stick.”

  “You are lucky,” Yrena said. “My ballet master says that if you want to know if you are really a dancer, you should try quitting. If you can’t, then you are a dancer.”

  “I didn’t want to quit because I hated dancing. I quit because I just wanted to fit in more than I wanted to dance.”

  Yrena reached across the table, took my hand in hers, and squeezed it, as though she wanted me to know how much she understood what I was saying. It felt good to be so completely understood, so completely trusted.

  “I want to be a normal girl,” she said. “Do normal things. Not be special. Just a normal Russian teenager.”

  It was true—Yrena didn’t seem typical. She was living in America, climbing into people’s windows, wanting to go to Todd’s D&D party. I wondered what a normal Russian teenager looked like, because it didn’t seem like one was sitting in front of me, any more than a typical American girl was sitting in front of her.

  I went back to the question: Aren’t we all different and the same?

  “I told myself that I was over ballet,” I said. “Not serious about it anymore. Tired of the endless repetition.”

  “Tired of the discipline,” Yrena said.

  “Tired of the aching muscles.”

  “Of the broken toes. The swollen feet.”

  We both said it. And in a way, despite our being from different places, Yrena kind of got it.

  But I couldn’t tell how Yrena felt about dancing. She seemed to love dancing as much as I did. But she seemed to hate it more than I did, too.

  It was funny how two such different things could be true at the same time. I was tired of those things.

  “I told myself all that and it made it easier to quit, and when I did, I had friends,” I said.

  “I don’t have many friends since we moved to America,” Yrena said.

  She said it kind of matter-of-factly. And I thought about it, and how it must be hard for her, only having the other Soviets that were here in New York to socialize with. Just enough to fill an apartment building. I could barely find anyone to fit in with at school, and that was a building full of kids.

  I brought the subject back to dance.

  “I don’t think I’m very good. There is always someone better than me in dance class,” I said.

  “There is always someone better,” Yrena said. “Anywhere.”

  I wondered if I was better than anyone in class. From the way Ms. Zina barked at me, it didn’t seem possible.

  “I am always so relieved when I meet someone who is more talented than I am,” Yrena went on. “I am like, ‘Go! Win the competition, I will gladly come in second place!’ Sometimes, I do come in second place, and my parents and teachers are disappointed. But secretly I am so happy. Unless I get competitive and I push myself harder. Then I get angry at myself for trying and succeeding.”

  “I’d give anything to go to one of those schools in Russia,” I said. “Maybe it would give me an edge.”

  “You would do well there. They like passion. I can tell that you dance with passion.”

  “How do you know?”

  “From your shoes,” she said. “And I can see it in your walk. In the way that you are sitting.”


  The little bell over the door rang, and when I looked up, I noticed that those same two men had come inside. First one. Then the other. They were probably bored standing outside waiting for us to finish up. They ordered ice cream. They didn’t sit with each other. Each sat at his own table, equally looking at each other, eyeballing us, and licking their cones. The KGB guy looked at Yrena and jutted his chin out at her as if to say I’m watching you.

  “Creepy,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “They will make sure that I go home soon.”

  “Are you afraid?” I asked.

  “Not today.”

  I could see myself inviting her over to my house to hang out for the rest of the night. Or another night. We could order our own pizza. We could talk more.

  “Well, maybe we should go home,” I said.

  I was a little bit wigged out by the suits because they were watching us and it was kind of intense. It made me aware of my every action. It felt weird putting the spoon in my mouth, so I finally just pushed my plate away from me.

  Yrena, though, liked to take her time. It was a few more minutes until she’d finished hers and we went outside.

  “I never believed that those guys hanging around our street were really KGB or CIA,” I confessed. “Todd, my brother, always says that our neighborhood is so safe because of that.”

  “It is true,” Yrena said. “That is why I’ve never had a real American night out. Not that I even want one. They are always watching us—where we go, who we talk to. My parents more so than me.”

  The two suits watched us through the glass window and we watched them back as they got up from their respective tables. They were now hanging back a little. They sort of looked sorry about the fact that they were tailing us.

  “Well, I will walk back to the house. Have fun at your party,” Yrena said. “I’ll wait with you for the bus.”

  She walked me to the bus stop, and as we were standing there, I tried to figure out a way to tell her that I wasn’t going to go to the party. I was going to step back into the shadows.

  “You are exactly as nice as I thought you would be,” she said.

  “Maybe we could hang out again sometime,” I said.

  Yrena got a weird look on her face that I didn’t understand. She was struggling with something.