“I got something from Julia today,” I say. “In the mail.”
“What?” Everett says. “They’re about to introduce me, Syl. I can’t hear you.”
I know he can’t. The noise on the line sounds like a thousand people each crumpling a sheet of paper into a ball. But I keep talking anyway. “I saw Little Red Riding Hood. On the street. And Rapunzel in the subway. She looked scared.”
“I’m sorry, Sylvie,” Everett says. “I know you’re talking but I can’t understand the words. Can I call you back later?”
“Okay,” I say.
“Syl? I’m assuming you’re saying yes. Love you, kid.”
The crowd noise stops with a click and I’m left with the near silence of the roof and the sky above me, now fully charcoal-colored. It feels different up here than it did a few minutes ago, when Sadie was here. More lonely, sure—there’s nothing like being the only girl on a roof in the middle of New York City—but there’s something else too.
Above me, there’s a fluttery racket as a flock of pigeons appears out of nowhere. They land in a semicircle around my lawn chair and start a sort of feathery muttering, pecking at the roof. They move closer, one peck at a time.
“Um, hello,” I say. The birds tip their faces up toward me, first one with white-edged feathers by my feet and then the others. They stop cooing. They stop moving too.
It’s like they’re pretending to be bird statues, or they’re waiting for me to say something. But I have no bird-worthy pronouncements.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I say to them. “Except that this is getting ridiculous. A bit over the top, if you ask me.” I look up toward the sky, toward the rest of the universe spreading out there somewhere, and I wave my hand a little like I’m trying to catch someone’s attention. Who, I have no idea.
“If you’re trying to tell me something, just say it! Quit sending weird omens.” The pigeons start cooing again, agreeing or disagreeing. I don’t want them here, staring at me with their beady bird eyes, so I look down at them and whisper, “Shoo.”
They’re unmoved. This is basically the fox all over again. I say it louder, in what I think is a slight Australian nature-show accent. Then I straight-up shout it: “SHOO!” I stand up and wave my arms and they scatter across the roof, then take off all at once into the near-dark sky.
I pick up the fairy tale book and follow them to the edge of the roof, where I face north and watch the river disappear toward the Bronx. The Hudson flows in both directions, Sadie told me once. I don’t know how that works, but I’m glad something else is as confused as I am.
I lean against the scratchy stone wall and open the cover. I flip through the pages and land on the back endpapers.
What I see makes me gasp. There’s a sketch I’ve never seen on the final page, a five-petaled flower drawn in pencil. And on each of the petals, a name.
Starting with mine.
Sixteen Candles
Sylvie IS SPELLED OUT IN Julia’s perfect script, tiny letters filling in the top petal space.
I don’t know how I didn’t notice this earlier, but I must have never opened to the back endpapers. I mean, why would I? There was nothing in this spot when I used to own this book. I’ve been through every page at least a hundred times in my life. The endpapers used to be blank except for the pale gold filigree tracing the borders. They were just clean paper, empty space. And now they’re not.
I look at the other names.
Grace
Rose
Thatcher
Daniela
My heartbeat picks up speed, thumping in my chest. Grace, Julia’s best friend and fellow dancer. Rose, our cousin and Julia’s childhood partner in crime. Thatcher, her idiot ex-boyfriend. I don’t know who Daniela is.
Let’s review, Junior Detectives. My sister left a year ago, hasn’t called since, and now has sent me a book from my childhood—a book I lost in another country (Canada, fine, but still) five years ago—with some weird flower list in the back.
What does it mean?
I have no freaking clue.
I turn my face upward, above the tops of buildings. I want to stare at the blank New York sky, see nothing for a few minutes. Clear my head of all the Julia. Light pollution will take care of all that. But when I look up, the sky isn’t blank. It’s full of stars, and not just random ones. They’re a constellation, my favorite one: Ursa Major, the Great Bear.
It’s named for Callisto, a mortal girl from a Greek myth who got into trouble in a way that was completely not her fault (the asshole king-god Zeus fell in lust with her, and she didn’t want anything to do with him). She was turned into a bear, and then, later, when she almost got shot by her son (long story), she was saved by being transformed into a bunch of stars. My mother used to tell me that story when she’d take me out to look at the stars, and I loved it, even though it was sad. The Big Dipper is inside this constellation, so it’s easy to find. I can see it now, handle and all.
There’s another Adirondack chair over here, and before I think twice I drop the fairy tale book on its seat and step up onto its flat armrest, first one foot and then the other. From there it’s easy: I step straight onto the foot-wide guard wall. I want to get closer to the stars. The ones that have been put here just for me, maybe.
My bones are humming. I don’t look down, though I know the penthouse floor’s narrow patio is below me, and beyond that a thirteen-story drop to the grassy lawn. I look out over the blue-black river toward New Jersey, the shadowy trees on its shore. I look at Ursa Major, which isn’t even twinkling, just burning straight through the black sky. I balance. I breathe. My bones go quiet, my heart shifts down a gear. It feels as if I’ve cast a spell. I haven’t felt this calm in months, but I’m not like the people who jump off the bridge. I don’t want to fall. I just want to stand at the edge.
My sister was the one who taught me how gravity works. She came to my ballet class for a demonstration when I was ten, maybe, all of us Level Threes dressed in identical black leotards, our legs like long petals in our pale pink tights. Julia was seventeen and had just joined the studio company after eleven years at the Academy. She stood in front of the mirror, making two Julias back to back, each in an ivory leotard and sheer pink skirt. Her friend Henry smiled next to her, a head taller, so handsome he practically glowed.
“Here’s what you need to know,” Julia said. She paused and looked at us, and we all leaned forward. We were holding our breath, waiting for her to tell us.
“The thing that lets us dance is gravity,” she said, and her words sounded like a poem. “Everything we do is completely dependent on it. We need to be tethered to the earth”—she pliéd then, sweeping her arms toward the floor—“in order to leave it.” Henry stepped behind her, placing his hands on either side of her rib cage. He lifted her straight up in the air.
She slowly raised her arms to fifth position and smiled. “Dancers, if you can get gravity to work for you, you’re golden.”
Henry lowered her down so slowly that she might have been a chiffon scarf dropped from a skyscraper.
“You can also do it on your own.” She smiled right at me and took a running start into a grand jeté. When she leapt into the air she moved as fluidly as a boat’s white sail in the wind. She made no sound when she landed. The girl next to me breathed in sharply. I think my classmates were still naïve enough to believe that Jules was magical, that she really did do this effortlessly, but I had seen her sweat through enough technique classes to know the truth. As breathtaking as she was as a dancer, it wasn’t effortless. It was hard. But somehow, for me, that made it even better.
“Gravity is a force,” Julia said, “but it’s also a promise. As in, What goes up must come down. It lets you know what will happen next.” She smiled her slow-as-syrup smile, and my classmates clapped.
Back then I accepted what she said as truth, but now I wonder what she meant. Sure: if you drop something, it’ll fall. But if Julia could have seen her future, w
ouldn’t she have found a way to get a different ending? Wouldn’t she have made gravity promise her something else?
The sky now is lead-colored, dull except for those bear stars. Below them, the world tilts: the river, the shadowy trees, the lights suspended over the bridge. The door creaks open behind me now, across the roof, but I barely notice. I hear the swish of traffic on the bridge but I don’t move. I can’t move, maybe: I’m balanced here so perfectly on the twenty-six bones in each of my feet. Gravity, it turns out, is the one thing you can depend on.
“Syl.” This is Tommy, somewhere behind me. His voice is like a trapdoor opening, an offer of escape that I’m not sure I want. “I’m going to get you down,” he says.
“All right,” I say. I don’t really have a choice.
He puts his hands on either side of my rib cage just like he does in class. I close my eyes as he lifts me up a few inches so my feet clear the wall, then lowers me to the roof.
It’s only when I feel my bare feet touch the roof that I start shivering. It’s like my bones are vibrating, my cells shaking loose, and I’m not sure what I’m afraid of. What I just did—what could have happened—or the fact that I liked it?
Tommy wraps his arms around me. I let him.
“What are you even doing?” he whispers right into my ear.
“I don’t know,” I say. And then, “Balancing.”
Tommy takes a long breath, lets it out slowly. “Please don’t,” he says.
I want to say something—I was fine up there or maybe I think there’s something wrong with me—but instead I just say, “Okay.” Over Tommy’s shoulder I can see the stars in Ursa Major wink out, one by one, leaving the sky charcoal gray and blank. Tears fill my eyes.
I don’t know what any of this means.
The door creaks again, I hear Sadie, across the roof. Tommy lets me go. I turn toward Sadie and see that she’s carrying a flaming cake.
“Way to abandon me, Tommy,” she says. “It was a bitch getting the stairway door open after I lit the candles.”
“Sorry,” Tommy says. His voice sounds wrong. Crooked, like a door hanging off its hinges.
Sadie looks at me, her brow furrowed. She’s trying to figure out what just happened, but for some reason, she doesn’t ask. It’s like none of us can manage to talk to each other about the things we don’t understand. Our voices might as well have been taken by a sea witch somewhere, or given to an enchanted bird. Everything is off-kilter, messed up.
“Well,” Sadie says. “Now she needs to take care of these candles.”
“I can do that,” I say. I step close enough that I can feel their heat on my face. There are sixteen candles, their fires flickering in the wind.
“Make a wish,” Tommy says. He’s standing close to me.
I wish the same wish I’ve wished for a year. I wish the thing I was going to stop wishing, the wish I was going to give up. Because if the world is going magic, I might as well lean into it. I bend over the tiny flames and blow.
Heartbeats/Hoofbeats
MY MOTHER KNOCKS ON MY bedroom door early, when I’m still asleep. I hear the knocking as pure rhythm, and I start counting the beat in my head. I feel my tiny dog Pavlova stir next to my head. When I open my eyes, my mother is right next to my bed in slim black cigarette pants and a blue sleeveless shell. She sits on the edge of the mattress, the picture of elegance.
“We’re leaving for the airport,” she says, smoothing my sheet with her hand. “What do you want me to bring back?”
I answer, “Chocolate,” at the same time she says, “Postcards?” She laughs.
When I was small, my mother would bring back a stack of postcards for me from wherever they traveled, and I’d tape them up on my wall. They’re still here, actually, behind my open closet door: white horses in Irish fields, the headless white-marble statue of Nike in the Louvre, an azure-blue parrot in a Costa Rican forest. Every once in a while, the tape comes loose and one of those vacation spots flutters to the floor. Sometimes I stick it back up and sometimes I don’t.
“Maybe a little of both,” my mother says.
Pavlova steps across me to settle in my mother’s lap. My mother pets her absentmindedly.
“Be careful while we’re gone,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. The memory of last night floats up, the terrifying freedom of standing at the edge of the roof. I will it away.
When my mom was pregnant with me, the doctors were scared because I wasn’t gaining weight the way I was supposed to. In the month before I was born I had to have my heart rate monitored once each week. My mother leaned back in a recliner as soft as a cloud, she’s told me, and the nurse strapped a belt with a little box around her belly. Julia came with her sometimes. She was seven years old then, and my mother told me she’d sit on the arm of the recliner and together she and my mother would listen to my heart thump.
“It sounded like galloping,” my mother told me once. “Like hoofbeats in an old Western. And when I sat there, hearing that, I knew you were safe.”
Here’s what I want to ask her now: Is there anything I can listen to that will tell me we’re safe?
The fairy tale book is on my bedside table, and my mother places her hand on its cover. Open it, I say to her silently. She doesn’t.
“You’ll have a good time at camp, right?” she says.
This is a question, obviously. And I should answer it honestly, tell her that I don’t want to go, that I’m not sure I even want to dance at all anymore. At least not right now. But then she says that same thing again, this time without the question mark. She answers herself.
“You’ll have a good time,” she says.
“I know,” I lie.
She hugs me. “I love you, Sylvie.”
“I love you too, Mom.” I take a quick breath, let it out.
My mother smiles at me and presses her palm to my cheek. Then she leaves, shutting my door with a gentle click.
My lie stays in the room with me.
Someday My Princess Will Come
I’M LYING FLAT ON TOP of my comforter, staring up at the weird crack in the ceiling that’s shaped like a mountain range. After yesterday I’m in no hurry to go outside. Maybe ever again. I have St. Vincent on the stereo, soundtrack for the world’s dazzling peculiarity. I’m planning to stay in this position for quite some time, or at least until my Thai food delivery gets here.
My phone rings.
“Let’s go,” Sadie says when I answer, instead of hello.
“Go where?” I say.
“Out.” She says this as if the answer is obvious. “Let’s take a walk in the park, and then we’ll go to the High Line. Aryanna and Amal will be there. And maybe some other people. Plus,” here she switches to a stage whisper, “I texted Tennis Dude and he said he’d come.”
Tennis Dude is Sadie’s latest crush, a guy who, it would seem, plays tennis. (Maybe I do have detective skills.) I haven’t had a conversation with him yet, but I have seen him carrying a racket. So he lives up to his name.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I wasn’t planning on going out today.” Next to me on the couch, Pavlova rolls over on her back and groans. She agrees, clearly.
Sadie sighs. “You only have a few days left before you’re off to camp, and then intensives. This is your summer, Sylvie. It’s about four days long.”
She’s right. But I feel safer inside my apartment, away from the pigeons and the foxes and the strange maybe-magic girls.
Sadie’s still talking. “If you don’t meet me,” she says, “I’m staging a rescue. I’m just going to break in.”
“To my building?”
She waits. “Well, Rafael and Tony would let me past the lobby, right?”
Our doormen love Sadie, because everyone loves Sadie. “Probably.”
“So really, I just need to get into your apartment,” Sadie says. “I’ve been working on my lock-picking skills, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll drag you out by your hair if necessary.”
I sigh theatrically. “Great.”
“Seriously,” Sadie says, “I don’t know what is up with you lately. I’m just trying to save you from yourself.”
“My hero,” I say. And then, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Sadie says. “Just get ready. I’ll be out in front of your apartment in an hour.”
“Just enough time to eat my red curry,” I say.
“Go for it,” Sadie says. “But be ready.”
When I hang up, I lean back on a pillow and look at the ceiling. If Sadie were here right now, and I told her what was going on, she’d look for clues. She’d look at the fairy tale book. The list. That’s where she’d start. With a visit to Grace, maybe. Or by asking Rose.
I take out my phone and type a text to my cousin.
Have you seen Julia since she left here last summer?
I stare at the words for a moment like they’re an incantation, a spell that could solve this whole thing.
Then I press Send.
If the Shoe Fits
THERE’S A GIRL ON THE path in front of us, and she’s running. She appears from behind some shrubbery in a hydrangea-blue dress and silver heels, followed close behind by a guy in a suit. I see the flash of his violet tie before they turn and run, laughing.
When I see her, my skin prickles as if someone just tossed a handful of glitter down my shirt. Sadie and I are wandering through the park, half-heartedly heading to the High Line. Or at least I’m half-hearted about it. Sadie actually wants to go.
“Race you to Strawberry Fields!” the girl calls.
“Too far!” says the guy, but the girl is still booking it, her red hair streaming behind her like the tail of a comet. She stumbles a little and loses one shoe. He passes in front of her. She keeps going.
A few steps later she takes off her other shoe. She keeps that one in her hand, pumping her arms as she sprints barefoot across the lawn, catching up with the guy. The other shoe stays where she left it, in the grass.
The Looking Glass Page 5
