The Year My Sister Got Lucky

by Aimee Friedman

  “Of course not.” Michaela gives me a small smile. “I’m not you.”

  “I resent that,” I say. But I sit down beside her once more.

  “Maybe I’m still in shock,” she offers with a shrug.

  “Very possible,” I say, and we both laugh a little. Then I reach over and retrieve the laptop from Michaela’s lap. Together, we stare and stare at the tiny spot marked FIR LAKE until I can feel my eyes smarting.

  “Fir Lake,” I say for the second time that night, and shake my head in disbelief. I imagine glassy water and rocky mountains; old, spooky houses decorated with cobwebs; giant, horned insects. All I know of nature is contained in the neat spaces of city parks, with their paved roads and ornate benches. My favorite book growing up was Eloise, because I, too, was a “city child.” I still am, and so is Michaela. How am I — how are we — going to exist in a place called Fir Lake, when we’ve lived all our lives in apartment 4G, on 5TH Street, here in the East Village?

  “It’s not hicks-in-the-sticks middle of nowhere,” Michaela says, clearly reading my mind. “It’s a small town. They have their own high school right in the village, and Mom enrolled us there for the beginning of this year —”

  “No,” I tell her. I can’t hear anymore. We’re already enrolled in a new school? I’ve been on pins and needles to start at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts — Michaela’s school — in September. Yes, it’s true: I was dorkily excited about high school. Now, I’m filled with the deepest dread. Then I think of dance school, and all the friends and teachers I’ll need to say good-bye to, and suddenly I’m too exhausted to think anymore. I close my eyes.

  Wordlessly, Michaela shuts off her lamp, and the room is comfortingly dark once again. Going back to my own bed seems like too much of an effort, and Michaela seems to understand, because she clears a space for me beside her. We flop down onto our backs, staring up at the Ethan Stiefel poster. This time, when Michaela sighs, it’s not her big-sister sigh. It’s just a sigh.

  “Hey, Mickey? I’m sorry,” I say. Mickey is the name I gave my sister when I was four and she was seven, and I couldn’t pronounce “Mick-ah-ella.” My sister always called me by my real name — Katya — until I started school and my teachers (God bless them) transformed me into normal, American “Katie.” I’m still Katya to my mother, no matter how much I beg her to make the switch. “Sorry I yelled at you,” I add.

  Michaela takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

  I nod against the cool pillow, feeling safe beside my sister. Even the heat seems less brutal here, and Michaela smells soft and familiar, like the powder she puts on after she showers.

  “This isn’t the end of the world, right?” I say, trying to convince myself. “Us, moving?”

  “No,” Michaela replies after a minute. “It could be the beginning.”

  And before I can ask her what she means by that, she’s shut her eyes and fallen asleep.

  Fir Lake is the first thing I think when I wake up the next morning. Leotard is the second, because one has just been thrown in my face.

  “Get up!” Michaela calls, and I lift my head to see her standing in front of our mirror. She’s dressed in her burgundy leotard with spaghetti straps (what the Advanced Girls wear), pale pink tights, and black leg warmers. Her bulging Capezio tote bag rests at her feet, stuffed with her toe shoes, lamb’s wool, extra ribbons and elastic, and the filmy pink skirt she’s going to tie around her waist once she gets to class. She is furiously twining her hair into a bun on top of her head. “If we’re late, Svetlana is going to eat me for breakfast,” she adds, sounding truly concerned that this might happen.

  “You’re too skinny — you wouldn’t make a good meal,” I mumble, pushing the leotard’s shiny black material off my cheek. I’m hot and my mouth is cottony. I don’t even know what time I drifted off last night, but my eyelids feel like paperweights. I am so not a morning person.

  “Very funny.” Michaela touches her tongue to her upper lip as she pushes a sharp-toothed pin through her bun, forcing it to stay in place. She’s already wearing her Ballet Face — a serious, professional expression that makes her seem very different from the close, cuddly Michaela of last night.

  Last night.

  I roll out of Michaela’s bed, suddenly eager to start the day. I can hear my parents in the kitchen, Dad fiddling with the espresso machine while Mom gripes about some spelling error in The New York Times. I know I promised Michaela I wouldn’t give her away, but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask Mom and Dad a few leading questions. I yawn and loosen my hair from its band, letting my thick dark curls spring free. Getting them into a respectable bun every morning is a task worthy of Hercules.

  Or worthy of Michaela, a can of hair spray, and several torture weapons disguised as pins.

  This morning, though, I need to build in extra time for the parental chitchat. Quick as can be, I strip, grab my tights from off the floor, tug them on, and step into the black leotard Michaela helpfully threw at me. This is my gear, my uniform, and in some ways, it feels more comfortable than the boxers and tank I wore to bed. I fling on what us dancers call “street clothes” — a denim pencil skirt, a thin yellow T-shirt with the words MUSEUM OF MODERN ART across the front, and my silver flats. Finally, I bind my hair up into a sloppy bun before heading for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Michaela gasps. “I need to fix your hair! Claude will chop your head off if he sees you looking like that.”

  Michaela believes that all ballet instructors are capable of inhuman violence.

  I pull my black tote off the hook on the door — I packed my ballet slippers and water bottle last night — and turn the knob. “I have business to take care of,” I reply casually, then dash out of the room before she can stop me.

  “Katie! You promised!”

  Really, we know each other way too well.

  My parents glance up, all innocence, when I skid into the kitchen. My mom is standing at the counter, pouring milk into her coffee, and Dad is carefully pulling his charred bagel out of the toaster. Our kitchen is so narrow that my parents’ backs are pressed together, and if anyone tried to open the refrigerator door right now, there would be a terrible accident.

  “Katya, what is the matter? Why haven’t you girls left yet? You know how angry Svetlana gets when Michaela is tardy.” My mother shakes her dark bangs out of her eyes, glances down at her wristwatch, and clucks her tongue to show me how disappointed she is.

  “Morning, kiddo.” My dad cheerfully drops a kiss on my forehead as he squeezes his way out of the kitchen with his bagel in hand; it’s obvious his writing is going well today. But I grab his arm before he can escape.

  “If something, um, really important was going to happen to our family, you and Mom would tell me, right?” I ask my father, widening my eyes at him meaningfully. I hear the clink of my mother’s spoon as she stirs the milk into her coffee.

  My dad blinks once, twice, then gives a hearty nod. “Of course I would, love,” he says, his face breaking into a smile. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get started on my third chapter while the opening line’s still fresh in my head.”

  I frown. The annoying thing is, he hasn’t blown me off: My dad is really just that spacey. As Dad ambles off, he nearly collides with Michaela, who is running full tilt toward the kitchen, dressed in her street clothes. He greets her, then heads into my parents’ bedroom while Michaela joins me on the threshold, shooting me an am-I-going-to-have-to-kill-you? look.

  “Michaela, why did you tell your sister about our move when I explicitly asked you not to?” our mother asks coolly, and both Michaela and I turn to face her, openmouthed. “Stop looking at me so surprised,” Mom says to me with her crooked smile. “I understood very well what you were asking, Katya. I am not your father.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Michaela says softly, and bows her head. “But I realized that it wouldn’t be fair —”

  “Whoever
said life was fair?” Mom asks, which is, hands down, her favorite expression. It’s been drilled into my brain since childhood, right along with the fact that Anna Karenina is the best novel ever written and that American kids never learn proper geography. Normally, I don’t notice my mom’s accent, but I hear it when she speaks that phrase. It’s the way she says was, as if it’s spelled with a v instead of a w.

  “I’m sorry,” Michaela says again, her eyes downcast.

  “I’m not,” I mutter. “I have a right to know things. It’s like I’m not a citizen in this house.” I’m hoping Mom will warm up to the word citizen, since she only recently became one.

  But Mom barely seems to hear me. She comes forward and puts her hands on Michaela’s shoulders, looking my sister in the eye. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she says, her voice smooth as milk now, when before it was as sharp as black coffee. “I spoke to the lawyer this morning, and it’s all been finalized.” She checks her watch once again. “But we’ll talk about this later. Go on now, both of you.” She squeezes Michaela’s shoulder. “Show Svetlana how you’ve been practicing your pirouettes.”

  I wonder if, when my mother looks at my sister, she remembers herself as a teenager, all dressed up for her dance class. Back in Saint Petersburg, the snowy city where she grew up, my mom studied dance at a super-prestigious school that spit most of its students out into the Kirov Ballet. But one day my mom’s teacher pulled her aside and told her that really, she didn’t have a dancer’s figure, and she should probably give up on the dream and just become a schoolteacher or something. I totally inherited my mom’s body — not too tall, with breasts that sprung up overnight, and hips that wiggle even when I don’t want them to. I have “curves,” like my closest dance-school friend, Trini Cortez, says. In America, you can still have curves and become a real ballet dancer. At least, I hope so. Otherwise I’m out of luck.

  Since Mom is Mom, she gritted her teeth and burned her toe shoes and studied until she became a professor of literature. Schoolteacher wouldn’t have been good enough for her. Then she came all the way to America to teach at New York University, married a semi-famous American writer, and had two daughters, whom she enrolled in ballet lessons as soon as they could walk.

  I use the story of my mom’s life to explain to my friends at regular school why ballet is “such a big deal” to my family. I’m not sure that kids who have ordinary American mothers could ever understand. In Russia, ballet means so much — it’s more than just tutus and little girls wanting to look pretty. It’s considered the highest of high-art forms, and there, nobody would beat up a boy because he decided to wear tights. I’ve only been to Russia once, and I don’t even speak the language, but sometimes I like to imagine myself there, wearing a fur hood, and running tragically across a stone bridge in toe shoes while a beautiful boy-dancer named Sasha chases after me. Maybe it will happen one day.

  “So it’s true, then,” I say to my mom as she ushers me and Michaela to the door. Deep down, there was still a lingering piece of me that hoped Fir Lake was all a giant misunderstanding. Perhaps our parents had decided to purchase a vacation home there — not that we have the money for that sort of thing — and Michaela had interpreted it all wrong. But Michaela isn’t like me; she doesn’t invent stories.

  “This is a dream opportunity,” Mom tells me briskly. “You’ll see how much happier we’ll all be, once I have a higher salary, and we have more space, and —” she lowers her voice and glances over her shoulder — “it will be nice for your father to have a change of scene, to write his books in the fresh air.”

  “We’re happy here,” I protest, looking around our small, cluttered living room, with its modernist paintings on the wall, towering bookshelves, and view onto the bars and restaurants of 1ST Avenue. Dad writes in the bedroom or in Starbucks, Michaela and I lounge in our room, Mom has her office at NYU. Who needs fresh air?

  “There’s even a dance school in town,” Mom adds, her eyes intent. “We made sure of that.” She kisses Michaela on the cheek as my sister leaves the apartment, and she quickly kisses me, too, but the gesture feels meaningless and mindless — like an afterthought.

  “Mom and Dad can’t stand me,” I announce once Michaela and I are walking toward the Astor Place subway station. Pounding the pavement all around us are young women in strappy heels, clutching sweating cups of iced coffee; guys in blue button-down shirts arguing into their cell phones; rope-thin models trotting along in chunky platforms; a grungy-looking man playing a harmonica while jingling a hat full of change.

  Michaela rolls her eyes. “Please, Katie. You don’t see it, but you’re so their favorite.”

  “You are,” I reply automatically. This is an old, old debate. And though I let Michaela win sometimes, I know I’m always right. Someone deaf, dumb, and blind could see how much our parents — especially our mom — prefer Michaela.

  “I’m not in the mood today.” Michaela cuts the discussion short as we pass by the skater kids and pierced punks loitering around the cube near St. Mark’s Place. But then she links her arm through mine, to show that she’s not really mad — just worried about being late.

  Stink and steam are rising up from the garbage bags heaped on the street corners — a real New York summer smell — and I take a deep breath, gross as it is. I feel like I’m looking at everything harder and closer this morning: the silver skyscrapers glinting in the distance, the yellow taxicab traffic inching toward Broadway, the chattering crowd of girls in black leggings and wedge heels standing outside the Public Theater. They must be lining up for Shakespeare in the Park tickets. I fight down a lump in my throat and remind myself that we’re not leaving this minute.

  A cloud of heat envelops us as we descend the steps into the subway. On the platform, Michaela and I walk past the newsstand guy, who waves at us. He has no idea what our names are, but he “knows” us, the way that people in the city know each other. I’m sure he thinks of us as the ballet sisters, since we’re always walking by him in our tights, with our hair up and our feet turned out (we can’t help it — we don’t know how to walk any other way). We don’t know anything about him, either, other than the fact that he has a bushy mustache and will give us a discount on Dentyne Ice if we ask for it nicely.

  “Where’s the train?” Michaela asks under her breath, tapping one foot as she gazes down the length of the pitch-black tunnel. “We’ll never make it at this rate.” It usually takes us about forty minutes to get to dance school, and we have the whole journey down pat — ride the 6 train to Grand Central Station, transfer for the shuttle to Times Square, then catch the 1 train, and get out at West 66TH Street. It’s a bit of a hike, but I kind of like all the switching of trains, the hurrying through stations, soaking up the mad energy, being part of the crush.

  “Don’t stand so close to the edge,” I warn Michaela, taking her wrist. Our parents enjoy scaring us with stories of lunatics who push people onto the tracks. These are the things, the rules, you learn when you’re a city child: Watch your back; keep your bag tucked under your arm; avoid making eye contact.

  I wonder what the rules are upstate, in the country. Keep an eye out for rabid foxes? Avoid creepy men in overalls who go by the name “Farmer Joe”? I’m considering these possible terrors when I notice a small shape dart across the tracks.

  And I shriek.

  The woman standing next to me, who is wearing head-to-toe black, including giant sunglasses, looks up from her BlackBerry and scowls.

  “Rat!” I clap a hand to my mouth. “Michaela, there’s a rat —”

  “It’s a mouse,” Michaela corrects me, trying to wrestle her wrist out of my death grip. “What’s with you? It’s not like you haven’t seen one before.”

  I don’t answer. The rat — I know it’s a rat — pauses on the tracks and turns its rodent-y little head in my direction. Its beady red eyes seem to glow at me, and then it turns and sprints away, a second before the train squeals into the station.

  “It’s an
omen,” I tell Michaela as the train doors part, blowing freezing air out at us. “Don’t you know that? An omen of … doom.”

  “Good God, Katie.” Michaela lets out the mother of all big-sister sighs.

  I bite my lip as we’re pushed onto the train by a swarm of impatient bodies. Everyone has their little New York superstitions, and mine is that rats in the subway equal bad luck. Last night I suspected it, but now I know for sure: The move to Fir Lake is going to be a disaster.

  Forty minutes later, Michaela and I have gone from the realm of rats to the hushed, cream-and-rose-colored world of the Anna Pavlova Academy of Ballet. The dressing room is empty as we hurriedly shed our street clothes, and my sister and I wave to each other as we dash into our respective studios.

  “Katie Wilder,” my teacher, the great Claude Durand, pronounces.

  When the great Claude Durand speaks your full name, it can be very good or very bad. Once, once, after I performed a decent arabesque, he smiled, patted my arm, and said, “Oui, Katie Wilder!” My heart sang that day, even though Claude’s smile can be frightening (apparently they don’t have proper dental care in Paris).

  Today, Claude is standing in the center of the wide, airy studio, wearing his usual navy-blue leotard and rolled-up gray sweatpants, and glowering as he strokes his neat white goatee. Beams of sunlight fall through the tall windows, lighting up the nine girls standing at the barre: my Lower Intermediate classmates. They are all dressed in black leotards, pink tights, split-sole Sansha slippers, and high, tight buns. Seeing them like this, I can understand why we’re called bunheads.

  Our eye-patch–wearing pianist, Alfredo, is at the white baby grand, cracking his knuckles. Clearly, they were about to begin before I rudely burst in. And, when I glance into the wall of mirrors, I notice that — as Michaela predicted — my bun is coming undone, rebel curls crowding around my ears in a most attractive way.

  Okay. It’s bad.