Pointe

by Brandy Colbert

  “That’s nice,” I say, laughing as we walk back into the hallway.

  “Yeah.” He cracks a smile. “She’s . . . Like I said, I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive her for making me come live with her, but she’s not so bad. She gives me my space.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Her sister’s, down in Lincoln.” He stops at the doorway to the kitchen. “You want something to drink? Or eat? I can’t cook but she left some lasagna.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Already ate.”

  And it’s true, even if dinner was only three bites of pasta that I swallowed, four that I spit into my napkin, and the rest pushed around my plate until my parents had cleaned theirs.

  “Or toast.” He nods at the little silver toaster plugged in on the counter. “I make perfect toast.”

  “As impressive as that is, I’ll pass this time.” Again, I examine every crevice of the room because I still find it hard to believe I’m standing in Hosea Roth’s yellow-and-blue kitchen, holding his hand. My eyes stop on him. “But I would like to hear you play.”

  “You’ve heard me play lots of times,” he says in a strange voice with a strange look. One I’ve never seen on him. Flustered.

  “Yeah, the stuff we’ve danced to for a million years.” I shake my head as I move back to the living room. “I want to hear your music.”

  He stands in place so long, I wonder if he heard my response. Then he follows me, eyes the piano for a bit before he slides onto the bench, as if it’s an impostor or he’s sitting down for his first lesson. I perch on the edge of the couch as he turns and says, “Whatever I play sounds like shit on this thing. It’s really cheap and out of tune, just so you know.”

  He could probably play “Chopsticks” for an hour straight and I’d be thrilled.

  “Stop stalling,” I tease. I’m a little nervous, too, though, and I don’t know why. I guess because I don’t know what to expect. All he’s ever played in front of me is Tchaikovsky and Minkus and Gershwin—the music we know by heart, can play with our feet. Maybe I won’t like his music as much.

  He twists his wrists, stretches his fingers, and without warning he launches into a piece so startlingly gorgeous that I slide from the arm of the couch into the cushion. I watch his fingers move deftly over the keys, stare at the back muscles straining under his shirt as he pours every last bit of himself into his music. It is a cross between contemporary and classical, interwoven with surprising patches of dark chords that resonate down to my core.

  I wonder what he thinks about as his fingers dance across the keys. If, like he said back in the gazebo at Klein’s house, he’s thinking about how his song makes me feel, if I’ll be that one person in three hundred who is unduly affected by his talent.

  I look at his jaw from the side, set in its hard lines as his creativity flows through him. I pretend that he will never play this song for anyone but me. I could sit in this tiny living room and listen to him make music forever. But then he’s finished and the room is silent and when he turns around I don’t know what to say.

  “What do you think?” he finally says. And I can’t believe how anxious he sounds, how nervous he looks when his eyes meet mine.

  “That was your song?” I stand up, smooth my hand down over the front of my top.

  “Yeah. I mean, I composed it. Yeah,” he says again. Then, as he stands, too: “Did you like it?”

  “Not liked. Love.” I take a couple of steps toward him, which in this little room means two more will bring us close enough to touch.

  “You could be famous,” I say softly. “If other people heard you play—”

  “I’m not that good. I’m not anywhere close to being that good.” He actually blushes, his cheeks flushed by my words.

  I decide that particular shade of pink is outstanding.

  He looks away and then down at the floor. “I still have so much to learn and I need to save up for a better piano and—”

  “You’ll find a way. You’re special,” I say. “I can’t believe nobody knows this about you.”

  “It’s enough that you know.” He sticks his hands into his pockets and he’s still not quite looking at me. “It wouldn’t be fair if you didn’t. I get to watch you dance all the time and you’re pretty much perfect out there.”

  “I’m not as good as Josh. He’s the best. Ruthie’s really good, too. And I still have so much to work on before my auditions—”

  “You look perfect to me.” His eyes lock onto mine again with such intensity it almost frightens me. “Everything about you is graceful.”

  This time I turn my head because I don’t know how to look at him after he’s said something like that. He closes the space between us and still I don’t look at him, don’t move even an inch. My breath quickens the closer he gets and then he’s in front of me. Blocking the light, reaching out to me, tracing his fingertips along my cheekbone. My eyes roam over the loose strands of hair that frame his face. He swallows and I watch his Adam’s apple bob, wonder if he’d like it if I kissed him there.

  Somewhere along the way we slipped from want to need and it’s in every part of our kiss. In the way he bites down lightly on my bottom lip, gently coaxing my mouth open. It’s in the way my hands press into his back, always pulling him toward me, always wanting him closer. I savor it all—the quick catches of breath, the warmth of his lips, the sugar-sweet taste of cloves on his tongue.

  The need is why I take his hand without question, why I follow him down the hallway, why I find myself undressing him moments later. We take turns. His black T-shirt. My cardigan and tank. I feel a tiny bit of relief as my fingers brush against the top of his jeans and find buttons in place of a zipper. He lets me unclasp my bra and he stares as I do it and I hope he’s not disappointed, that he doesn’t care I have little use for one. But I relax as he swallows, as he meets my eyes and tells me I’m beautiful.

  We lie down on his bed and he pulls me close, slides my body across the cool, soft comforter. His hair hangs in front of him, tickles my collarbone and teases my skin like the silky strokes of a paintbrush. And I can’t believe how much room we have without the confines of a car. How much softer his bed is than a backseat, how his piano hands sloping along my spine are such a nice change from a door handle digging into my back.

  He is gentle with me, so much gentler than I thought anyone could ever be. His lips travel across my neck, my shoulder, my navel, and when he stops to ask me if I’m okay, I take his face in my hands and I kiss him. Hard, so he won’t see the tears in my eyes. No one has ever asked me that.

  It’s uncomfortable at times, but it’s never unbearable. I keep waiting for his rhythm to change, for him to treat me like the rag doll I sometimes felt like with Chris. But Hosea is sweet—the whole time. He interrupts his kisses to ask if this feels good or that feels better, to make sure I don’t want to stop at any point. He is extraordinary and right now, tonight, he is mine.

  Afterward, I go to the bathroom and I sit on the toilet and I cry. Shoulder-racking sobs that I bury in my hands and hide under the rush of the faucet. I can’t let him hear me but I can’t lie there with him, hold it in while he is so kind. Stroking my hair and kissing my neck and saying how happy I make him. I press a pink hand towel to my mouth and I choke down sobs, because tonight can’t last forever and he’s not mine.

  Not really.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE LAST TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL SNEAK UP ON ME SO fast that I gasp when I look at the calendar and see I have twelve days left.

  Because of winter break, it’s the first time I’ve been in the studio with Hosea since we slept together, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so conscious of someone in the room. Every shift on the piano bench, every turn of the sheet music, every twitch of his wrist makes me think of being with him.

  Ruthie can tell something is up. She keeps eyeing me durin
g class, which doesn’t help, because my timing is already off. I can’t focus when I keep wondering if Hosea sees me now and thinks of what my feet really look like under these shoes. I tried to keep them out of view that night, but he looked at them as we were getting dressed.

  My feet should be displayed on a warning poster in a podiatrist’s office. They’re hideous. I can’t remember the last time the skin on them wasn’t thick and dry, hardened by calluses and blisters. My toenails are obscenely short because if I let them grow out even a bit, I will pay for it. Not to mention the scars from where the skin has cut open and bled and healed itself. If I end up in a professional company, I will give up the chance of ever having semi-normal feet.

  I asked him not to look at them, but he wrapped his hand around my ankle, pulled my foot onto his lap. He slid his palm over the top of my foot, brushed his thumb along the slope of my arch. I let out a breath without making a sound. His long, beautiful fingers were touching my deformed feet when all I’d ever wanted was to hide them. He curved his fingers around my toes, pressed lightly on a callus as he said they show I’m committed to my craft. Then he leaned in and kissed me and as I kissed him back, I wished so much for time to stop. Just a few extra minutes where everything was good and special and ours.

  After class, I time how long I’m in the dressing room perfectly because Hosea is just walking through the lobby as I enter from the hallway. The only person standing around is the girl at the front desk, and she’s older, not interested in what we’re doing. So I hurry to catch up to him, put my hand on his arm.

  He looks surprised to see me, even though we just spent an hour and a half in the same room. Though he’s been as close to me as only one other person. Ever. Closer, even, if you count our emotional connection. Something I never had with Chris, not if I’m honest with myself. How can you have a true connection with someone if everything they ever told you was a lie?

  “Hi,” he says. And he smiles, but I don’t miss the hesitation behind it because—right. We’re at the studio. In public. I glance back at the girl behind the front desk. She’s not even looking at us, but we still have to be careful. Even a city as big as Chicago is a small world; people know each other and things could get back to Ellie easier than we think.

  So I take my hand off his arm and I keep space between us as we walk out to the street. Around the corner, where the only people who can see us are ducking in and out of the adjacent drugstore. It snowed a couple of days over winter break and most of it has melted in the city, but not all of it. Little snowbanks still sit against some of the buildings, blackened from cigarette butts and garbage and dirt from the city streets.

  “Hi,” he says again, and he kisses me swiftly on the lips now that we’re kind of in the clear. “How are you?”

  “Tired. But good.” I shrug. “How are you?”

  If good means sweating through my sheets and waking up with night terrors, wondering how I’ll know what to say in my testimony. If it means staring at Donovan’s house way too long and too often, wondering if he’ll talk to me if I go back and try again. If it means only eating enough to stave off suspicion and pinching my side until pain rips through me each time I even think about food, then yes. I’m good.

  “I’m good, too,” he says, nodding. “Fine.”

  This all seems so oddly formal. He’s seen me naked. Run his hands all over me, kissed me until I was weak against him. But now he looks at me expectantly, like I should have something specific to say if I want to approach him.

  “Are you, um . . . Are you going to winter formal?”

  It’s the first thing that pops to mind. I hadn’t been thinking about it. Not really. But it’s next Friday, and people are making plans and I want to know his.

  “I don’t want to. I mean, I wouldn’t, but Ellie—she really wants to go since it’s our last year.” He sighs. “So I told her I would.”

  “Oh.” God. Of course he’s going with her. “Right.”

  “Look, I hate these things,” he says. My eyes fixate on the piece of hair hanging in his face, next to his ear. The same ear that I’ve kissed. “I wish I didn’t have to go . . . I wish I could be with you instead.”

  “You could,” I say. With so much hopefulness it makes me sick.

  He pushes his boot against a pile of hard, grimy snow. “You know I can’t cancel on her now. She . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence and when I don’t say anything, he says, “I should get going.”

  Sort of distractedly.

  Sort of in a way that squeezes my heart.

  And it must be all over my face, because there’s a rueful note to his tone as he says, “I have to meet Ellie. I’d give you a ride to your car, but—”

  “I don’t need a ride.” I dig my gloves from my pockets so I’ll have something to do besides think about how I just sounded too proud.

  “Theo.”

  I’m not fooling either one of us, so I stop fiddling with my gloves and look at him.

  “This doesn’t change anything, okay?” His gray eyes are tender as they meet my gaze. “I want to see you as much as possible, but she can’t know about us.”

  Right. I told him I could handle this. I promised I could share. So when he says, “We’re still cool?” I nod and let him hug me and I squeeze my eyes closed very, very tight as my nose presses into his chest.

  And it’s a good thing I manage to keep it together as I walk back around the building after we’ve said our goodbyes, because I forgot my dance bag. I’ll have to go back in the studio and I can’t let anyone there see me cry. I’ve always prided myself on not crying so they won’t see me as weak. Especially Marisa. And it’s hard to keep it in sometimes, but I’m not about to break my fourteen-year streak now.

  I run into Ruthie at the door. My dance bag is saddled over her right arm, on top of her own, and her face lights up when she sees me. “Oh, good. I was just about to call you. I wasn’t sure if you’d already left . . .”

  She looks around vaguely, but she’s obviously looking for Hosea. I don’t take the bait. Instead, I take my bag from her and I say, “Thanks, Ruthie,” and when she offers me a ride I say yes right away.

  Ruthie lives in River Forest, the next town over from Ashland Hills, so I’m not that far out of her way. Besides, the walk to the station would be brutal—I’ve only been outside for a few minutes and my toes are already going numb.

  Ruthie and I start walking across the lot and down the street toward her car. I expect the first question out of her mouth to be about Hosea, but she surprises me when she says, “Do you ever think about giving up on this? All of it?”

  I stare at her in stunned silence for a second. “Ballet?”

  “Well, I don’t mean soccer.” Ruthie retrieves a pair of red wool gloves from her coat. “Yes, ballet. The summer intensives, the hours in the studio . . . What would you do if you didn’t dance?”

  I give her a funny look. “Nothing, I guess. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “Me either.” Ruthie clicks the remote on her car and we get in after it beeps at us. Then she turns on the heater and buckles her seat belt. “Is that weird? That we don’t know how to do anything else?”

  I shrug, reach behind me to pull my own seat belt across my chest. “I don’t think so.”

  “It just seems like everyone else has been involved in, like, a million things since we were kids,” she says, waving her hands in front of the vents as she waits for the car to warm up. “Sports and music and clubs.”

  “Yeah, but they always end up dropping them to focus on something,” I say. “We just knew what we wanted to do a long time ago.”

  “But what if we were meant to do something else? We’ll never know.” She pauses, runs a hand through her golden curls as she looks at me. “Don’t you ever wonder if you should have been . . . I don’t know, a gymnast or a volleyball player or something?
”

  “Is this about summer intensives?” I look at the key chain dangling from Ruthie’s rearview mirror. A single, miniature satin pointe shoe, as perfectly sculpted as the ones we wear in class.

  Ruthie checks her mirrors, turns on her lights, and pulls out of the metered space on the street. “No. I don’t know. I want it. I really do. But what if I fail? Or what if I make it and I’m the worst one in my program? Everyone will think it’s a pity spot and no one will ever take me seriously.”

  “Ruthie.” I roll my eyes. “You’d never be a pity spot. I don’t even think they give out pity spots. Tons of people audition every year. They don’t have the room.”

  “I’m not sure how much that means, coming from the teacher’s pet.”

  I say nothing and she’s silent for a while. Pulling her curls out in a straight line and letting them spring back to her head. Flipping through songs on the radio for so long I want to slap her hand away from the dial. I’ve started to think she’s forgotten I’m in the car at all when she says, “At least ballet will get me out of this place. I don’t care if I have to dance for a company in the fucking Appalachian Mountains. I’m leaving.”

  “What happened now?”

  “Nothing new,” she sighs. “I’m just tired of always being on everyone’s bad side. I need a fresh start.”

  “Just one more year of high school,” I say. “Unless you make it into preprofessional and then you can leave even sooner.”

  “But what if I don’t?” Ruthie’s eyes are on the road ahead, but I can see the fear behind them and the thought of Ruthie being scared scares me. I didn’t think she was afraid of anyone or anything in the world. “What if I don’t get in anywhere? Not even a summer program? Then what? I stick around here and go to DePaul and meet even more people I hate? I can’t do that, Cartwright. I can’t.”

  “I’m scared, too.” I flick my index finger against the pointe shoe hanging from the mirror, watch it bob back and forth as we travel along the dark expressway. “Really scared.”