Last Wishes

by Victoria Schwab

  It wasn’t until Friday that she found out what Sara’s secret was.

  After practice, Miss Annette dismissed the other dancers, but told Mikayla and Sara to stay behind.

  “Girls,” she said, clasping her hands. “My golden girls.”

  Mikayla frowned. That had always been Miss Annette’s name for her.

  “Tomorrow,” she went on, “is an important day for both of you.”

  Mikayla felt herself freeze. Both of them?

  “What do you mean?” asked Mikayla.

  “Oh, you must have missed it while you were home sick,” said Sara. “I got an invitation to audition at Drexton.”

  Mikayla’s stomach turned. She looked to Miss Annette for an explanation. The invitations had all gone out weeks ago. Their teacher must have pulled strings to get Sara a last-minute chance.

  “I couldn’t exactly put all my eggs in one basket,” explained Miss Annette, gesturing to Mikayla’s ankle, “especially an injured one. My school has a reputation to maintain.”

  Mikayla swallowed hard. For the last six years a Filigree dancer had taken the coveted opening spot at Drexton, and Miss Annette obviously wasn’t taking any chances. Which meant she no longer thought Mikayla was gold.

  Sara’s smile spread, and Mikayla felt tears burning her eyes. She didn’t let them show, not even as she walked out of the studio, changed, and left with Sara.

  “I guess we’ll finally see what all those medals have bought you,” said Sara when they were alone on the sidewalk. “Or if they were all a waste.”

  Mikayla fumed all the way to the subway.

  She had always assumed she was Miss Annette’s only candidate. It never occurred to her that Miss Annette would make sure Sara got an invitation.

  Mikayla was the best dancer at Filigree. She’d sacrificed everything to stay the best.

  But Sara had been working just as hard to close the gap. It wouldn’t take much for them to switch places, for Mikayla to be the one walking away with silver. But for the Drexton audition, there was no silver, no second best. It was all or nothing.

  She couldn’t lose, not now.

  She had to be best.

  She had to be gold.

  Aria found Mikayla in her basement that night, soaked in sweat and grimacing every time she spun on her bad ankle.

  “She’s been down there all evening,” Mikayla’s mom had said as she opened the front door for Aria. “She won’t come up. I know she’s nervous about tomorrow, but still. You’d think it was a matter of life and death.”

  “I think to Mikayla it sometimes feels that way.”

  Now, Aria stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched Mikayla finish her routine.

  Aria felt like the last week had never happened. The girl Mikayla had been, the one she was becoming again — fun-loving, whimsical — was gone, all Aria’s progress washed away. What had happened?

  The song ended, and Mikayla stood for a moment, breathless, before walking over to the music player and starting the song over. She took a pose and was about to go again when she saw Aria. She straightened, and the music played without her.

  “Hey,” said Aria.

  “Hey,” said Mikayla, clearly distracted.

  “Why don’t you take a break?” said Aria.

  “I can’t,” said Mikayla.

  “It’s a nice night,” pressed Aria, “and I bet you’ll feel better if we —”

  “I said I can’t,” protested Mikayla, her face hardening. “I need to practice. It’s still not —”

  “Perfect?” said Aria with a sad smile. “I thought we talked about that word.”

  “Not now, Aria,” said Mikayla darkly.

  Aria braved a step forward into the room. “Why are you so upset?”

  When Mikayla didn’t answer, Aria crossed the small room and put her hands on Mikayla’s shoulders. “Look at me,” she said, even though she wished she could say, “Look at you.” She wished there was some kind of magic to show a person multiple versions of themselves, so Mikayla could see what all this pressure was doing to erase the beautiful, happy girl she’d become. “This is why you didn’t want to go back, remember?”

  But Mikayla shrugged her off. “I’m just nervous,” she said.

  “Well, all you can do is your best.”

  “But what if it’s not good enough?” asked Mikayla, her voice on the edge of tears.

  Aria held out her hands. “Then it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Mikayla rubbed at her face, clearly frustrated. “Sara’s auditioning.”

  Aria didn’t understand. “So?”

  “So she’s good, Aria. She’s amazing. And she hasn’t spent the last week injured! She could take the spot at Drexton instead.”

  Aria sighed. “Maybe she should.”

  Mikayla gasped and put a hand to her cheek, as though Aria had hit her. “How can you say that?”

  “I just mean” — Aria took a deep breath — “maybe it would be better. You don’t want this, Mikayla. Not really.” Once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop. “I know you want to make your parents proud, but you don’t want to go to Drexton, and you’re going to be miserable if you get in, and you might be disappointed if you don’t, but maybe then you’ll accept that this isn’t healthy, and finally give yourself a break. Not from dance, necessarily, but from this. The pressure and the feeling like nothing is good enough. Like you’re not good enough. So, yeah,” she said, looking Mikayla in the eye. “You’re the best dancer I’ve ever seen, and there’s no question you deserve to get into Drexton. But I think you deserve to be happy, too. So for that reason, I hope Sara gets the spot.”

  Mikayla stared at Aria long and hard. And then her face changed, morphed from sadness and frustration to anger. Her blue smoke was so thick it looked like it could choke someone.

  “Get out,” she snapped.

  “Mikayla,” started Aria, but the other girl threw up her hand and pointed at the door.

  “You obviously don’t get it. You’re not helping anything, not helping me, so just go away.”

  Aria recoiled. She could feel Mikayla’s order, the same way a person might feel a bucket of cold water. It was tangible, real, and Aria felt her shadow shift beneath her feet.

  She retreated through the door and up the stairs, and the last thing she saw was Mikayla turning away before Aria’s shadow came to life and swallowed her whole.

  Aria didn’t know that someone could banish a guardian angel.

  It wasn’t the only time she’d been told to go away, but the first time it happened, with Gabby, she thought she’d disappeared out of sheer embarrassment. Now, as she sat on a bench in a subway station, she wondered if human girls had some magic of their own.

  When the train came, Aria got on. She didn’t know where she was going. She just wanted to be going somewhere. She’d spent quite a lot of time on the trains the last few nights, and something about the motion helped her think. Aria leaned her head back against the seat.

  She wished there was something she could do to keep Mikayla from going to the audition, but she couldn’t think of anything, besides pushing the girl down some stairs, and that didn’t seem very angelic.

  The problem, Aria was beginning to realize, was that even though Mikayla’s accident had given her something that she needed — a break, a chance to step back — it had only been because of an accident. And if Aria had learned anything from helping Gabby and Caroline, and from trying to help Mikayla, it was that people had to choose change. Aria couldn’t choose for them. When it came to whether or not to stop dancing, Mikayla needed to make the decision for herself.

  Aria felt a pang in her chest. She’d felt it before, the sinking weight that came when someone she was trying to help was about to do something wrong, and she had to let them do it.

  Because sometimes people had to make the wrong decision first, so they could make the right one later.

  That was life, thought Aria. Choice after choice after choice, some of the
m wrong, and some of them right, and all of them important.

  Aria told herself it would all work out. But the truth was, she didn’t know what would happen. Didn’t know how she could help change Mikayla’s path.

  And then she looked up and noticed another girl on the train. She looked to be a couple years older than Aria, maybe about fourteen or fifteen. She was pretty, with curly brown hair and a band of freckles across her nose.

  The girl had big headphones on, music whispering out into the subway car. But that wasn’t what caught Aria’s attention.

  No, it was the girl’s charm bracelet, a red one, laced with a handful of tiny gold feathers.

  Aria straightened in her seat when she saw it.

  Because the girl wasn’t just a girl.

  She was an angel.

  Aria thought of the teenage boy back in Gabby’s hospital, the one with the green bracelet and the black feathers. She wondered how many kinds of angel there were. As many as there were colors in a box of crayons? Or more?

  Aria wondered if this teenage angel was riding the subway just to think, like Aria, or if she was on her way to help someone.

  And then, as the train slowed, the girl looked up, straight at Aria, and she winked.

  Which wouldn’t be that strange, except that Aria was invisible.

  Aria sat there, stunned, as the girl stepped off the train. Then she found herself scrambling to her feet and following the girl out, ducking through the doors just before they slid shut. She trailed the girl through the subway station, up to the street and down the block, drawn along by some invisible rope, the same way she was pulled toward those she was supposed to help.

  “Hey, wait!” Aria called, running to catch up.

  But the girl rounded a corner, and by the time Aria rounded it, too, the other angel was gone, and she was alone on the street. Aria turned in a circle, looking for her, but the angel had simply vanished.

  Aria stood there on the sidewalk, trying to get her bearings. Where was she? What was she doing here? And then she heard the music overhead.

  She looked up to see light two stories up, a row of floor-to-ceiling windows revealing an adult dance class.

  Great, thought Aria. Just what she and Mikayla needed. More dance.

  But something about this place was different. It wasn’t like Filigree. The adults were dancing in pairs, spinning across the floor with their hands on waists and shoulders, smiling and laughing. Having fun.

  The sign in front said PARK SLOPE COMMUNITY DANCE CENTER.

  Aria climbed a short set of steps to the front door, where a poster announced:

  ALL AGES WELCOME.

  ALL LEVELS WELCOME.

  UNDER 13 DANCE FREE UP TO 4X/WEEK.

  A folder taped to the wall by the door held pamphlets, and Aria took one, opening it to find a calendar listing different classes on different days. Everything from jazz to modern to hip-hop and freestyle. On the back of the brochure was a quote from the owner, a woman named Philippa Rask.

  Dance is expression, it read. Dance is motion and emotion. There are no mistakes, so long as you dance what you feel.

  Aria smiled.

  Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe this was exactly what Mikayla needed.

  Aria pocketed a brochure. Then she looked over her shoulder, half expecting the girl with the freckles and the red bracelet to be standing there.

  Aria didn’t know if guardian angels had guardian angels of their own. But if they did, she had a feeling she’d met hers tonight.

  The day of the Drexton audition, Mikayla woke up feeling horrible. Her body ached from practicing too long — her shoulders were stiff, her legs sore, her ankle tender. But she felt even worse about yelling at Aria. Mikayla was still annoyed at her friend for not understanding, but her head was also full of thoughts and questions and fears.

  She couldn’t afford to think about failing, or her dad’s unemployment, or the boxes, which just kept multiplying. Nor could she think about the fact that maybe she was mad at Aria because Aria was right.

  She couldn’t afford to think about anything but Drexton.

  Her mom tried to get her to eat breakfast, but she wasn’t hungry. She took a few bites of French toast and fed the rest to Chow, who seemed perfectly happy to take it off her hands. Her dad, normally hunched over his laptop, was dressed and ready to go. He and her mom would be accompanying Mikayla to the audition.

  They took the subway into Manhattan, Mikayla’s stomach in a knot the whole time. Before she knew it, they were walking down Broadway toward Drexton Academy.

  “You’re quiet, hon,” said her mom, rubbing her shoulder.

  Mikayla managed a smile. “Just nervous.”

  “You’ve got this,” said her mom.

  “You’re going to do great,” said her dad.

  Finally Mikayla said, “It’s not the end of the world, if I don’t get in.” Her voice was quiet and shaky.

  “You will,” said her dad.

  “But if I don’t —”

  “It’s okay to be nervous,” said her mom. “But think positive.”

  Mikayla opened and closed her mouth to say something, but it was clear they wouldn’t hear her.

  “Just stay focused.”

  “Listen to the music.”

  “Make us proud.”

  “We’re already proud.”

  “We’re always proud.”

  Mikayla swallowed as they reached the steps of Drexton.

  It loomed overhead, a large white stone building with its emblem — a cursive D and A intertwined to look like dancers locked in an embrace — on a marble pillar out front.

  Beneath the dancing letters ran the Drexton Academy motto:

  EAT SLEEP BREATHE DANCE.

  The first three words were set in smaller type above the fourth, to emphasize the last word’s importance.

  And leaning up against that pillar, beneath the motto, was a girl whose hair shone copper in the sunlight. Aria! She was dressed in her usual colorful style — green pants and a purple-and-blue striped shirt.

  Mikayla expected to feel anger rising up in her chest, but she was surprised to feel a sudden wave of relief instead.

  “What are you doing here?” she cried.

  Aria smiled. “I wanted to come and wish you good luck.”

  Mikayla crossed her arms. “Do you still want Sara to win?”

  Aria’s smile softened, but didn’t disappear. “I want you to be happy,” she said. “So if this is what you want, if winning the spot here will make that happen, then I hope you get it.” She sounded like she really meant it. “I believe in you.”

  Mikayla looked down at their feet. The laces on her sneakers were white. Aria’s were purple. “I’m sorry I got so mad at you,” Mikayla whispered.

  “It’s all right,” said Aria, and something about those three simple words helped Mikayla breathe again. Then Aria surprised her by throwing her arms around Mikayla’s shoulders. Mikayla felt something well up in her, her fear and her doubts and everything she couldn’t afford to face. She swallowed hard.

  “Mikayla,” said her mom. “We better get inside.”

  Mikayla pulled away. “I have to go.”

  “Can I come over after?” asked Aria.

  “Yeah,” said Mikayla.

  Aria smiled. “Good luck,” she said, stepping out of the way. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  The holding room was packed.

  Mikayla hadn’t expected there to be so many other kids, girls and boys, all warming up, all waiting, and wanting. Their nervous energy and their stretching made a kind of rhythm in the room. Tap tap woosh. They were all contemporary dancers, like Mikayla, and they were all good.

  How many spots had Drexton opened up? One? Two? Three?

  Suddenly Mikayla realized that Sara wasn’t the only one she had to beat.

  As if on cue, she spotted the other Filigree girl across the room, her blond hair pinned back, wearing her signature green leotard. She watched a
s Sara did a quadruple pirouette, nailing the turn Mikayla had struggled over. Their eyes met, and Sara smiled tightly.

  Mikayla’s stomach jumped just as a man in a suit and a thin woman with a bun appeared before a set of wooden doors.

  The man had a walking stick and he rapped it against the marble floor, the sharp sound echoing even in the crowded space.

  “Parents, friends, and anyone who’s not auditioning today, please wait in the foyer. Dancers, stay here.”

  Mikayla’s parents gave her a last hug and a kiss and retreated into the outer room. Mikayla was secretly glad when they were gone. Her face was starting to hurt from holding up the smile, and the moment they were out the door she let it fall away,

  “Gather round,” said the twiglike woman. “You’ve all been invited to audition today for a spot here at Drexton. When your name is called, you will come through this door behind us, introduce yourself, turn on your music, and perform your piece.”

  “But before we begin calling names,” said the man, “we want all of you to understand what it means to be a Drexton dancer. As our motto suggests, we expect our performers to eat, sleep, and breathe dance. Every moment of the day. Every day of the week. That is the kind of dedication it takes to make it in this industry. And there’s always someone ready to take your place.”

  Mikayla’s chest tightened. Aria’s voice echoed in her head. What happens once you get in?

  “If you do not have what it takes,” cut in the woman, “leave.” No one moved. The man and woman smiled, even though they didn’t seem happy. “Very well, let’s begin.”

  Mikayla stood against the far wall, watching as dancer after dancer vanished into the audition room, the crowd thinning. When Sara was called, Mikayla forced herself to go over and wish her good luck. She’d expected a snarky reply, but Sara must have been just as scared as Mikayla was, because she only said, “You too.”

  Then it happened. “Mikayla Stevens!” the woman with the clipboard shouted. Her name had been called.

  This was it.

  Mikayla was terrified, and she realized in that moment, just before she pushed open the doors, that she didn’t know what she was more afraid of: messing up or getting in.