“Allie!” he says. “We have guests. Can you show Sylvie to Bluebell Cabin?” He looks at me. “It’s empty,” he says. “All yours.” He points to Pavlova. “Along with this little dude.”
“Dudette,” I say.
“Oh, sorry,” Knox says, not really to me but to my dog.
“Hey,” Allie says. She puts out her hand and I shake it. “Alexandra Kim,” she says. “But you can call me Allie.”
“I’m Sylvie Blake,” I say. “Friend of Knox’s friend Jack.”
She smiles. “Then you’re a friend of mine.” She points toward a cabin with a blue-painted sign. “Let’s go drop your bag before dinner.”
At the cabin, Allie holds the door open for me.
“It’s a little dusty,” she says. “We’re not using it this summer.” The inside of the cabin is all wood, trimmed in bluebell blue. It’s so cozy and sweet I almost swoon. When Allie leads me to an empty cot on the far side of the room, I drop my bag on the floor and sit down on the mattress.
“You look like you’ve had a day,” Allie says. She sits down on the cot opposite from me.
“You could say that.”
She tilts her head. “Are you on some kind of quest?”
I laugh. “I guess so. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “You just have that look about you.”
“I have the look of not having showered in a while, I think.”
She smiles. “Well, you can certainly do that here. I’ll show you where.”
I absentmindedly scratch my tattoo, and I see Allie’s eyes are on it.
“You have a tattoo?” she says. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” I say.
“You’re a badass. Let me see.”
I hold my wrist out to her.
“‘Twenty-six bones’?”
“The number in each of our feet.” I lift one of mine as if to demonstrate. “I’m a ballet dancer.”
“Oh, I’ve heard.” Allie smiles. “So who’s Jack to you?”
You ask a lot of questions, I think. But Allie seems so nice, so interested, that I don’t have a reason to avoid her.
“Jack is my—” I struggle to finish this sentence. My what? Driver? Chauffeur, maybe, if you want to get all fancy-French about it? My traveling companion, as Knox said? My friend?
I settle on the clearest answer. The old one.
“My best friend’s brother,” I say. “He’s giving me a ride.”
Allie nods, slowly like she’s considering things. “That’s all?”
I pause for a moment. “Pretty much,” I say.
When Allie leaves to go wrangle some campers, I sit down on the edge of the cabin steps. There’s a trellis to my right, wound with red honeysuckle, and all the air around smells fruity and warm and honeyed. A girl with wildly curly hair sits down against the opposite railing.
“I’m Celia,” she says in that up-front, just-so-you-know way little kids often have. “Can I pet your dog?”
“Sure.” Pavlova trots across the stair and puts her head under the girl’s hand. As always, she takes an active role in her own petting.
It’s so calm and quiet here that I feel far from my old life, far from my search from Julia. Just now, I wouldn’t mind settling into the empty cabin and staying for the rest of the week. Building bonfires and playing capture the flag and doing whatever else you do at normal camp. Or maybe going to Richmond and eating a fancy meal at Mr. Allister’s restaurant, Sadie and Jack and I all lit by candlelight. I wouldn’t even mind eventually going home, as much as that surprises me.
The honeysuckle’s perfume is so sweet and heavy that I feel a little drunk. I hear a low sound suddenly, a whirring. When I turn, there’s a hummingbird to my left, hovering in front of a honeysuckle cluster. I hold my breath. The bird is tiny, iridescent green with a bright red throat. Its wings move so fast they’re a blur.
“That’s a hummingbird,” Celia says.
“I know,” I say, half whispering.
“Hummingbird hearts beat twelve hundred times a minute,” she says softly. “Did you know that?” I shake my head, still watching. I can’t take my eyes off this bird.
“That’s really fast,” Celia says.
I’m nodding. “It sure is.”
Three more birds rise over the top of the trellis, float slowly down and start their own dance with the blossoms. I look at Celia and she’s just watching them. She doesn’t look especially impressed.
“Is this normal?” I say.
She nods. “Yeah, they love the honeysuckle. We get tons of them around here.”
“You’re lucky.”
Jack appears now around the honeysuckle.
“Don’t scare the hummingbirds away!” I say.
He takes a step back. “I’ll do my best,” he says.
I wave him forward. “This is my friend Jack,” I say. “Jack, this is Celia.”
“Hey,” Celia says, then looks at me, considering something. “I hear you’re a ballerina,” she says.
“Boy, word sure travels fast around here,” I say.
“Will you dance for us?”
I lean back on the stairs. “Oh, I don’t know.”
Jack is smiling. “Uh, I may have neglected to mention, it’s part of why they’re letting us stay. I told them you’d perform for the camp, so I think you have to now.”
“Shit,” I say, and Jack keeps smiling.
Track 21:
Songbird
AFTER DINNER, MOST OF THE camp sits out on the lawn in front of the main cabin, which has a wide front porch. I sit on the porch stairs with my nearly wrecked pointe shoes, the ribbons between my fingers. I look out on all those kids in their flower-fronted T-shirts, the other counselors, plus Allie and Knox and Jack up front. Allie waves to me, grinning. I lift my hand in reply.
I used to get nervous before dancing, but since Julia’s gone, I don’t. Or maybe it’s that I feel nervous all the time—that galaxy feeling—so I don’t notice anymore. I feel a little weird about this, the same sort of weird I felt about doing the lift with Tommy in the meadow near Fancy Dance Camp, but I don’t really mind. Especially since the girls sitting closest are watching me tie up my shoes so intently they must be trying to memorize how to do it themselves.
I’ve decided to dance my solo from Chrysanthemum, the one I’ve been practicing for two months. The one Julia danced years ago, for which Miriam’s sewing my costume. Later this summer, I’ll dance it in front of a bunch of very rich donors in hopes that they’ll give the Academy more money. To be honest, I’d rather be dancing here. I’ve pulled the song up on my cell phone, and I step out on the porch to it playing on the small camp speakers along with the crickets outside, the creak of the floorboards, the hum of the porch light above me.
I’ve practiced this dance hundreds of times, but on the uneven floorboards of a cabin porch it’s so different. It feels different, in my feet and my legs and my arms and my heart. My body is a little looser than normal, but I still have to keep an eye on the floor in a way that I wouldn’t if I were in the studio, or on a real stage. I don’t even go up on pointe at first. I dance on the balls of my feet instead, which feels safer, closer to the ground.
When I first saw Julia perform this onstage I’d already seen her dance it in the studio a dozen times, and when she danced, it was so hard to stay in my seat. I knew the choreography, and I wanted to do it too. Of course I didn’t know that by the time Miss Diana would choose me to dance it, Julia wouldn’t be dancing at all. Until today, dancing it made me feel like a ghost.
Ballet, Miss Diana would say, is about the relationship between movement and stillness. It’s about those twenty-six bones. That galaxy-spinning feeling comes back now in a way I can use. I’m powered by it, actually. When I dance, there’s a place to put that spinny, vibrating feeling. Maybe that’s why I like it.
Or maybe I like it because it’s incredible to see the looks on the faces of the audience, to do something th
at they absolutely believe is magic. Right now, I can see the kids on the lawn in flashes, and Knox and Allie and Jack behind them. Jack, who right at this moment might understand me more than anyone else does, because he’s been there with me with Rose and Thatcher, and because, right now, he’s seeing this.
So I make a deal with gravity, mid-dance on this creaky porch. I convince it to let me go. I rise up arabesque on pointe and then I start the series of fouettés that ends the dance, sixteen of them in a row. So many fewer than I did in the studio with Tommy the other day, but here on the porch, getting through them without losing my balance feels like a victory. It’s totally different: the wind and the leftover light of evening and the smell of grass and old wood. The crickets and the floorboards and the kids, who aren’t talking at all but who I can hear gasp from time to time. Just like my classmates and I did years ago, when Julia came to teach us about gravity.
When I finish, breathless and panting, I look up and I see Jack looking at me like he’s never seen me before, over the heads of the kids, who’ve crowded toward me on the porch.
“It wasn’t perfect,” I say to him.
He’s grinning. “You’re impossible,” he says. His smile could light a whole house, and I feel mine glowing too. So I sit straight down on the porch bench.
I untie my shoes and set them down next to me. Normally I don’t love strangers seeing my feet with their blisters and busted toenails, but for some reason I don’t completely mind today. It feels like one kind of truth I can tell these kids, especially the girls.
“Ballet is hard on the feet when you do it as much as I do,” I say, raising one foot. “It hurts.”
Jack is down on one knee on the ground with my pointe shoe in his hand. He’s looking at it, examining it, really, his engineer brain trying to take it apart. Those particular shoes are pretty gross, which makes it embarrassing. But there’s something really sweet about it, as if he’s holding a part of me. As if he’s trying to figure out how I work too.
Knox sits on my other side and sighs loudly. I look at him.
“He’s got it bad, you know,” he says. A half-dozen birds shoot up in the sky behind him like someone’s tossed a handful of confetti. I watch them arc off in different directions, then I look back at Knox.
“Got what?”
Knox just looks at me then, a small smile on his lips. When I figure out what he means I blush so hard I can feel my cheeks warm.
“Go easy on him, okay?” Knox looks at me then, and I can see that his eyes are kind. I’m smiling before I realize it, and my heart’s beating so fast it might as well be a hummingbird’s.
Track 22:
Angel
BLUEBELL CABIN IS LIT GOLD by the paper lampshade in the center of the ceiling, and I’m alone for the first time in days. Well, Pavlova’s here, but she’s asleep on one of the empty cots. Jack’s across the yard in a staff cabin, bunking with the camp cook, I think.
There’s a moth circling the lantern, all flutter and lit-up wings. Every once in a while it lands on the paper sphere and folds and unfolds its wings a few times, but it always takes off again. The problem is that it can’t get close enough. The problem is, if it did, it would burn up.
Somehow everything feels like it’s about Julia, in ways that are impossible to explain.
My phone dings, saving me from my moth-watching. It’s Jack.
Want to take a walk?
I answer before I have time to think about it.
When I close Bluebell’s door behind me, Jack is already standing down on the grass. I guess he knew I was going to say yes.
“Should we try the woods?” he says. “Knox says there’s a path that leads to some clearings. He says it’s a pretty walk.”
What else did he say? I wonder, but I just say okay. We start walking. I don’t know if we’re supposed to be holding hands or what. I don’t know what’s supposed to be happening.
The sky above us is pitch-black and star-dusted, but I can only see a narrow strip of it between the tops of trees. Here I am in the middle of the actual woods—a strange thing for a city girl, period, and even worse when you consider what’s been happening to me lately—but I don’t even mind. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, but for once I’m not scared.
When we come out into a clearing, it’s like we’ve walked into a bowl filled with sugar-stars and sky. It’s breathtaking, and by that I mean it literally takes my breath. I stand there, staring, and then I hear Jack’s voice.
“Come here,” he says. He’s maybe twenty feet away, his back to me, looking up toward the sky. I walk toward him.
“Over there,” he says. “See that light?” He points to the sky and I do see it, a bright white light traveling slowly, steadily across the sky.
“Airplane?” I ask.
“No.” He turns to me, smiling. “That’s the International Space Station.”
“Really?” I look back at the light. It doesn’t look like a space station. It looks like a plain old white dot. Another thing that must be magic but is real at the same time. “How do you know?”
Jack taps his pocket. “I get alerts by text when it’s going to be visible.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“It’s less nerdy than it sounds,” he says, still looking up. He glances down, then, smiling. “Or maybe it’s not. But it amazes me, every time I see it. There are people living on it, orbiting the earth, and they don’t know we’re down here. Well, they know lots of us are, but they don’t know about us. Specifically.” He looks at me. He might be blushing.
“I get it,” I say. My voice is soft. We both look back up, just as the space station passes to the edge of the sky-bowl.
“West-northwest to northeast,” Jack says. “Four minutes.”
When it’s gone, I sit down in the grass. I don’t know what else to do. Jack sits down too.
“You don’t want to be an astronaut?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I want to design things. Bridges. Like Sadie said.”
I nod. “So what’s the deal with you and UVA?”
“My dad. I don’t want to be near him.”
“You’re going to let your dad ruin that for you?”
Jack shrugs. “He’s a jerk. I don’t want to give him the idea that he’s forgiven.”
I roll a leaf between my fingers. “It doesn’t mean you can’t be in the same state as him.”
“He’ll think he owns me again.” Jack picks up a twig and pulls a piece of bark from it. He puts it back down. “He’ll want me to come for dinner all the time. I don’t even want to go once.”
“You can say no to a dinner invitation,” I say. “You don’t have to say no to the college acceptance.”
“I already deferred,” Jack says. “It’s over.”
“You didn’t just turn them down?”
“Sadie wouldn’t let me.”
I know as well as anyone how hard it is to say no to Sadie, but this seems like a sign that he doesn’t want to give up.
“Maybe you’ll change your mind someday,” I say.
Jack shakes his head. “I won’t. He lied too much.”
That word—lied—echoes around my head. Julia lied over and over, near the end. About everything. Once upon a time I believed Julia even when she told me a girl could sleep a hundred years and wake up happy, or be cut, still alive, right out of a wolf’s belly. But by the night she left, it had been a long time since I believed much of anything Julia said. That she was fine. That she was going to rehab again. That she hadn’t taken my mother’s gold necklace, the one with the star-shaped charm I had always loved, and sold it to buy her pills.
This is when I decide to tell Jack about the fairy tales.
“I want to tell you something,” I say to him.
“Okay,” says Jack.
“But it’s going to make me sound loopy.”
He smiles. “Even better.”
A firefly blinks at the far side of the clearing, behind Jack. He can’t se
e it, and I don’t point it out. I watch for a moment as it blinks itself into existence every few seconds, in different spots. Then I push on. “I’ve been seeing things,” I say.
Jack’s face doesn’t change. “What kind of things?”
I’m not sure where to start. “It’s hard to explain,” I say. “There was a fox, and a bluebird, some pigeons on the roof of your building. All those seagulls back in Jersey.”
Jack is looking at me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“I mean, you saw those, right?”
“Sure,” he says. “Of course. But I don’t know what you mean. Those are just animals.”
“Not ‘just,’” I say. “There were girls too.”
“Girls?”
“Girls in trouble.” I know he has no idea what I’m talking about, so I need to show him the book. It’s in my bag, which is slung crosswise over my body, because I can’t bear to leave the book behind. I take it out. “Julia sent me this.”
I give it to him. He holds it in his hands. More fireflies appear behind him, sparks in the air. The clearing—or one side of it—is alight. Warmth spreads from my belly to my arm to my wrist. My tattoo throbs.
“The book,” he says. “Sadie told me about that. But not the other stuff.”
“She said the bluebird was a sign from the universe,” I say. “That I was supposed to go see Julia.”
Jack flips through the pages of the book. He still doesn’t notice the fireflies, blinking their glowing selves at each other.
“What if it’s not the universe?” he asks.
“What?”
“Sending messages. What if it’s your subconscious? Maybe you were missing Julia so much you just started noticing these things that were already around you. Your brain sees them as fairy tales.”
“I didn’t imagine the birds,” I say. And I’m not imagining these fireflies, I think.
“I know. But seagulls can be aggressive when they think you might feed them.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “What’s the difference between coincidence and magic anyway? Both are unexplainable.”
The Looking Glass Page 17
