You in Five Acts

by Una LaMarche

  “You could get drunk,” Liv suggested.

  “Fine,” you said, “Aside from getting wasted or breaking a leg or something, there’s nothing I can do between now and then to seriously change whatever I’m going to do in that room.”

  “Are you saying it’s fated?” Liv asked, peering over at Ethan and Dave’s tête-à-tête. “What the fuck are they still talking about?”

  “Nah, I don’t buy into fate,” you said. “I just mean you can’t prepare past a certain point.

  “Are you kidding?” I looked at you incredulously. “I feel like I can’t prepare enough.” Ballet was all about drills and repetition. There was no room for whimsy.

  “I just mean . . .” You squinted up into the bright winter sun. “Like, you have to learn the steps and then trust that they’ll be there when the time comes.”

  “I wish I could switch brains with you,” I sighed.

  “You’d be downgrading.” You grinned, showcasing two deep dimples. “But sure.”

  “Shut up, they’re coming back,” Liv stage-whispered, immediately pretending to be engrossed in her phone.

  “They?” I glanced up to see Ethan practically running toward us, trailed by a reluctant-looking Dave. He looked straight at me and I lost my breath.

  “Relax,” you laughed. “He’s just a pretty white boy. I hear they’re very tame.”

  “Remember,” Liv said under her breath, “We have to balance out Ethan’s bullshit by being cool.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t love him,” I said, relishing the opportunity to tease her back for once. Even though it was easy to make Ethan the scapegoat of the group, he was smart and funny and even kind of good-looking when he wasn’t frowning like the world was about to end. And as much as Liv gave him shit, I knew she cared what he thought of her. Once, when she was drunk, she’d told me he was the only person she’d ever met who might be an actual genius.

  “Whatever,” Liv sighed as Ethan and Dave reached the bench.

  Up close, Dave was taller than Wikipedia had given him credit for, and hotter than seemed fair to the rest of the gene pool. He gave us a tight smile when Ethan introduced him.

  “Dave, this is Liv, Diego, and Joy,” Ethan said. “Liv you might recognize from her appearance in Law and Order: SVU as Teen Girl Number Three, and Diego and Joy you probably saw on the landing page of JanusConservatory.com.”

  It was true, that was the only fame we could claim to date—the year before, a photographer had come to school for a week to “capture life on campus,” according to the release form our parents had to sign, and a shot of you, me, and a few other dancers lined up at the barre during group class had made it onto the website. We were in profile, eyes focused, spines straight, left arms extended in tendu. Words floated above our heads: WHERE TALENT MEETS OPPORTUNITY. Based on the graphic design, you were talent, and I was opportunity.

  Opportunity. The fact of the Showcase auditions, which I had blissfully forgotten about for approximately two minutes, settled back into its permanent spot at the forefront of my brain, and a fresh wave of nausea washed over me.

  “Hey,” I said to Dave, when it seemed like my turn. With game like that, it was downright shocking I was still a virgin.

  “Dave has graciously agreed to audition for my play,” Ethan told us, beaming.

  “It didn’t really feel like I had a choice,” Dave said, shoving his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. His lips turned up in a little half-smile while he read our faces, trying to figure out if it was cool to rib on Ethan within the first ten seconds of meeting us.

  It was.

  “I’ll be there, too,” Liv said. Her mouth glistened with a fresh coat of gloss I hadn’t even seen her apply. “So if you need someone to shield you from the drama-department drama, let me know.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said. “I literally haven’t met anyone yet.” He looked around the square, shivering. “Is this, like, the lunch hangout?”

  “For a select group of masochists,” Ethan said through clenched teeth.

  “It’s only the most beautiful place in Manhattan,” you said, nudging my shoulder. I looked up at Dave, trying to think of something witty to say, but his eyes were on Liv.

  “I’m having a party tonight,” she said, leaning into you casually—a physical checkmate. “You should come.”

  “Cool,” Dave murmured noncommittally.

  “OK, well, I for one am freezing my nuts off, so can we please move this lovefest indoors?” Ethan asked.

  There were murmurs of agreement, the shuffling of books and bags, the metallic swish of zippers.

  “Are you OK?” you asked. I looked up; the others were waiting impatiently.

  I shook my head, tucking my knees up under my chin. Getting off the bench suddenly felt huge, like a step I wasn’t ready for. I knew you were right—that there was nothing I could do to predict what was about to happen in the audition room. But it didn’t make me feel calm; it just made me feel powerless. I wanted to fast-forward, skip ahead to when everything had already been decided. (If I could go back, I would stop time, just so you know. Freeze us forever when we were all together, when nothing had broken. I’d give it all up to go back to that day.) “I need a minute,” I said.

  “You know you’re gonna own that audition,” you whispered, crouching down next to me. “You’re gonna blow the doors off that room.”

  “Yeah?” I smiled.

  “Yeah. And someday—” you pointed to the banner stretched across the front of Avery Fisher Hall, advertising the New York City Ballet’s production of Sleeping Beauty “—that’s gonna be us.”

  “I’m holding you to that,” I said.

  “Hurry up!” Liv yelled. But I still wasn’t ready.

  It never got old: the theaters rising up out of the square like mid-century modern monoliths; the twinkling lights, like distant stars; the water that leapt tirelessly behind us even when temperatures dropped below freezing; the tourists crossing back and forth, arguing in foreign tongues, snapping pictures of our city; the dancers we could sometimes spot with their telltale duffle bags and muscular calves, walking quickly with spines so straight they could balance plates on their heads. It felt like the center of the universe, especially with those tiles that radiated out to the edges of the square, drawing paths to the door of each theater, fifty feet and a million dreams away. The future seemed tangible and invisible all at once back then, like a specter, like a promise. Like seeing your breath on a cold day.

  There one second, and then—gone.

  Chapter Two

  January 6

  127 days left

  I LOCKED EYES with myself in the mirror, scanning my features for signs of tension. Another thing Ms. Adair was always telling me was that my face hardened when I danced. “Make it look joyful, Joy,” she would say with an audible smirk, and it was all I could do not to rise up en pointe and give her a joyful double finger.

  While the professional ballet track had its moments of rapture, it was anything but easy. As my parents liked to remind me, it was essentially a full-time job exempt from child-labor laws: four hours of intensive classes every morning, followed by afternoon academics, followed by another two hours of rehearsal and conditioning, followed by homework, followed by stretching, alternating applications of ice and heat, and then, finally sleep—which was the only part of the routine that was optional. Add to that sore muscles, bruises, tendonitis, bunions, blisters, rubbed-off skin, black toenails, aching feet covered in callouses, and you had a recipe for exhaustion, fierce drive and competition, and sometimes flat-out resentment.

  But Ms. Adair was right: ballet was about appearances—people wanted to see the sleek swan floating on the lake, not the crazy paddling beneath the surface. The hard part wasn’t supposed to show, and my expression gave me away every time. When left to their own devices, my eyebrows knit together,
my lips thinned out, my nostrils flared. I looked like I was trying to move something with my mind, or solve an advanced calculus problem. But it seemed impossible not to tense up when the whole point of ballet was being in control—I never understood how anyone could expect the real estate above my neck to look all slaphappy when I was concentrating so intently on keeping everything below positioned perfectly. I shook out my muscles and did a few warm-up plié relevés, forcing a wide smile on every exhale. (Ms. Adair also liked to tell me that smiling, even when I didn’t feel like it, could stimulate feelings of elation. So far, it wasn’t working.)

  “OK, you look insane.”

  I hadn’t even noticed you walk over, but suddenly there you were in the mirror, leaning against the wall behind me in your warm-up sweats and JANUS FOOTBALL ringer T-shirt (which was ironic since our school had no organized sports unless you counted the tap elective). You broke into a grin that slowly morphed into a cartoonish grimace, like something you’d see on a deranged clown.

  “That supposed to be me?” I spun around, my arms crossing into say-that-to-my-face position. Somewhere nearby I heard girls giggling, but I couldn’t tell if it was at me or for you. Either way, you didn’t seem to notice.

  “You just don’t have to try so hard,” you said. “Don’t think about your face, I can tell it’s psyching you out.” I pursed my lips and looked around the room I had been intentionally turning my back on for the past ten minutes. It was warm and stuffy from so many bodies in motion. All around the barre, which spanned three walls, girls—and the few and far between boys—were stretching, practicing, whispering excitedly as they massaged their legs and stretched their feet and wrestled their pointe shoes into submission. None of them had to dye their ribbons and straps to match their skin tone. They didn’t have to specialty-order mocha-colored tights online because none of the dance supply companies considered “brown” a variation on “nude.” You were right; I didn’t have to try so hard. I had to try twice as hard, every day, just to get half as far.

  When I was ten, my mom had clipped an article from the New York Times that still clung to our refrigerator, held up by two novelty magnets from our family trip to the Grand Canyon. Where are all the black swans? the headline asked. I swallowed hard, looked back at you, and practiced my fake smile. Wherever they were, they weren’t in the room with me. I was paddling all by myself.

  The accompanist, Mr. Stratechuck, started warming up at the piano then, banging out an off-key version of the overture from La Sylphide, which drowned out the nervous chatter. Every single senior ballet major was gunning for the same coveted Showcase solos. Janus was the kind of place that only took students who were already the best in their classes. “Look left and look right,” Ms. Adair had told us on the first day of orientation. “The days of being teacher’s pet are over. Now you really have something to prove.”

  “Hey, zombie.” Your voice swam up through the clang of piano keys and I realized that I’d forgotten you were there, for the second time in as many minutes.

  “Sorry,” I said, unconvincingly—because I wasn’t. “I’m just trying to relax.”

  “You better.” You leaned in and gripped my arms, the corners of your mouth curled in a teasing smile. “’Cause if I end up with Lollipop in the pas de deux, I’ll never forgive you.”

  I glanced quickly to my left, where Lolly Andersen was admiring her form en pointe, her sleek auburn hair swept back in a chignon so tight it threatened to drag her eyebrows right off her face. Lolly had what most people considered the ideal ballet body, as pale and fat-free as a diet vanilla yogurt. She thought she was hot shit because she’d understudied a Marzipan in The Nutcracker when she was twelve. She was a self-described “bunhead,” which is why, I guess, she thought it was her place to tell me, in the locker room freshman year, that I had “more of a modern dancer’s body,” before trying to touch my hair without asking. I’d never forgiven her.

  “If that happens, I really will look like this—permanently,” I said, baring my teeth in a psychotic fake smile. You had to press your lips together to keep from laughing.

  “Good,” you said. “You and me, blowin’ up like spotlights, right?” I can’t remember when you’d started saying that, but it was an inside joke by then. You held up a closed fist and I bumped it, both of us sending our fingers splaying out backward like fireworks. It was never a question whether you’d get a lead in Showcase. I, on the other hand, was a long shot. I’d seen the performance every single year, so I knew the kinds of girls they picked to do dance solos: the willowy, flat-chested ones with the perfect form and delicate bones and all the stage presence of a feather. Not the ones with strong, curvy thighs or breasts that had to be squished into too-tight leotards so they wouldn’t “be a distraction.” Being a distraction meant that a part of your body was acting like a curve instead of a line—or that your skin didn’t match your tights, or that your short, natural hair refused to transform into a gleaming, flat-ironed Barbie bun. I heard it a lot, and every time it made my blood boil. Nobody had ever told me outright, You shouldn’t be here, but I’d gotten wise to their code words. I knew what they meant.

  Still—“Just like spotlights,” I said, holding my breath.

  • • •

  At 4:30 P.M. sharp the teachers filed in and we all sat down along the periphery of the room. I ended up between Lolly and Eunice Lee, but both of them immediately turned away from me to whisper to the person on their other side. Not about me—at least, I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell who rejected who first, me or them. All I know is I came in on the first day, kept my head down, clung to Liv in between classes like an oxygen tank, and then showed up on the second day to find everyone had found their people already, and that there was no room for me. Except with you.

  I caught your eye across the room and, when I was sure none of the instructors were looking, mimed a silent scream. You shook your head and then pointed at me, nodding. You got this.

  “So,” Ms. Adair said, letting the word hang in the air for a while, suspended on the tension. “Welcome to the last audition of your Janus career.” There was some scattered murmuring and a few weak claps until you let out a jubilant howl that got the whole room laughing.

  “Thank you, Diego,” Ms. Adair said with a slightly annoyed smile. “This is a cause for celebration. You’ve all come incredibly far in your training, and now is your chance to show it off.” She drew in a dramatic breath that seemed to pull an invisible string through her spine, raising her up a few inches. Her skin was almost translucent, the veins weaving like wires over the muscles in her arms and legs. When she wore all black, which was most of the time, it gave her the look of an extremely toned vampire.

  Sofia Adair had been a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and had taken over the department hell-bent on making Janus competitive with her own alma mater, the company’s feeder school. (The reason she didn’t just teach there, according to gossip, was a stormy affair with a fellow principal dancer that had ended badly and led to a falling-out with ballet master Peter Martins.) She liked to constantly remind us that we were “dancing uphill” as far as professional recruitment was concerned.

  “We’re going to be brutal today,” she said. “If we see something that needs work, we’ll tell you, because our goal for May is across-the-board flawlessness.” Ms. Adair glanced at me as she said that last word, drawing it out in a hiss like water on a hot pan, and I instinctively sucked in my stomach and drew back my shoulders. They were, I’d been repeatedly told, “problem areas” that I needed to “work on lengthening.” In ballet-speak, that meant thin out. But I was built like my mom, a high school track star, tall and strong, all muscle except for the places my grandma awkwardly called my “womanly parts.” Sometimes it felt like the only thing that could make me rise in my teachers’ esteem was to reduce myself. That didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem fair.

  I looked over at Mr. Dyshlenk
o, crammed onto a folding chair by the piano, and caught him subtly but unmistakably rolling his eyes. He was a former member of the Bolshoi Ballet who looked like an angry, aging Ken doll and who liked to yell at people for being too perfect. “Dance is about expressing the passion of the human spirit!” he had told us one time when we got paired for a sophomore recital. “You’ve got to have blood in your veins to move, so feel it pulsing! You should look like tortured lovers, not robots! If I want to look at robots I can watch the E! channel.” But I hardly ever got to take class with him; he was mainly dedicated to training the boys or working on the Showcase pas de deux. Since Ms. Adair was my advisor and the teacher for Pointe as well as Ballet 7 and 8, the highest-level classes Janus offered, I mostly worked with her. I knew this was supposed to make me feel lucky, but I didn’t feel lucky. Ms. Adair demanded surgical precision. She liked her dancing bloodless.

  “We know what you’re capable of by now,” she went on, taking her sweet time walking in a slow circle around the room, her slippers landing soundlessly on the shiny hardwood floor. “We’ve all had a chance to teach you intimately, and we know your technical strengths and weaknesses. Today is about showing us what you want to do. That’s the reasoning behind the free dance format of the audition. We want to see who you really are as a dancer so that we can place you in the best role to fit your talent.”

  If I’d had anyone to talk to, I would have whispered, Bullshit. But I didn’t, and anyway, there wasn’t time. Ms. Adair clapped her hands together and gestured to Mr. Stratechuck, who winked at us and started playing the theme from Jaws as she walked back to her seat. The teachers clicked their pens and rustled their notebooks, the nervous whispers faded to a dead silence, and then, just like that, it was happening. Something like fate, and I had a front-row seat.