by Una LaMarche
“I am, I am. Right. OK. I want to see something other than my mother’s face as she lay dying,” I said, the words tumbling out too fast again. “I want to touch something—” You. I wanted to run across the room and touch you, hold your hand, lean on your shoulder, raise my fingers up to your chin and pull you down toward me and kiss you, breathe you in. “—other than a sewing needle,” I finished, feeling my face flush.
“I think we can stop,” you said.
“No! I want to keep going.” This time my voice came out louder than I’d meant it to, almost a shout. You took a step back.
“OK, you seem weird . . . I don’t think you should . . .”
“Just let me finish!” I cried, my eyes suddenly filling with tears. “I want to finish my monologue!”
I’m not sure what made me break—why that moment was the tipping point when I’d been teetering on the edge for months—but something just swelled up inside, so fast I barely saw before it broke the surface. I was scared (my first thought, a whisper in the dark: Did I take too much?) and deeply, deeply sad—and embarrassed, a little—but mostly, against all odds, I was grateful. Because finally, even if Ethan didn’t, I understood what Viola was feeling on that bridge, and why she had run there. For the first time, maybe in my whole life, I could say lines and actually mean them.
“I want to feel something more powerful than I am,” I said, my breath coming in gasps, the tears blurring my vision. I was glad I couldn’t see you. “I want to feel the current dragging me under. I want to feel something that makes me know I was alive once. I just want—” My voice broke then, because I couldn’t stand it anymore, how true it was, and I didn’t care anymore who knew.
“I just want to feel something real.”
My hands flew to my face and then I was sobbing, big wracking gasps that rolled in waves down my body, pulling me toward the floor, where I would have gone if you hadn’t stopped me, wrapping your arms around me, squeezing like a tourniquet with your face bowed into my hair, whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
And then I was leaning into your shoulder, and then I was looking into your eyes, and I don’t think I pulled you and I don’t think you pulled me, but something pulled us together, because then we were kissing, stumbling, until my back found the wall and your hands found my face, my neck, my breasts, my waist. I tasted the salt of my tears on your tongue and arched toward you, my fingers slipping under your shirt, splaying open on the taut, warm skin of your stomach. It was breathless and sudden, like a fall in the seconds before you hit the ground. I remember the urgency of it more than anything. It felt like if we stopped, we might die.
It felt like our time had run out before it started.
Intermission
Joy
Chapter Nineteen
April 16
27 days left
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BABY!”
Mom beamed at me from across the table, her face partially obscured by a candle sticking out of a wedge of tiramisu. We were at V&T Pizza—my favorite restaurant since I was old enough to behave well enough to be taken out to eat—and the whole Sunday dinner-rush crowd was singing to me as I held my breath and pinched my face in my best impression of a smile. I didn’t want to seem surly or ungrateful, but I hated being serenaded, which my parents knew but were willfully, gleefully ignoring. Eighteen was special, they insisted. Adulthood was something to celebrate.
I might have been in a more celebratory mood if the fourth chair at our table hadn’t been empty. It had been sort of last-minute, sure, but Liv could have at least texted me back. Our impromptu dinner date on Friday had gone pretty well—aside from her throwing down a fistful of twenties and running out before the check arrived—so when I messaged her later that night to ask if she would come out for my birthday (no official party this year, not that she’d offered to throw me one and not that I would have wanted her to after the last party at her apartment), I thought she’d say yes. Or, at least, I thought she’d say something. But two more texts and not so much as a flimsy excuse accompanied by a frowny emoji shedding a single tear, so apparently we were back to not really talking.
“Come on, honey,” Dad said. “Quit stalling and blow out the damn thing before you set the tablecloth on fire!” My eyes snapped back into focus just in time to see the tiramisu listing to one side as the candle started melting the chocolate powder on top. I blew it out in a quick, perfunctory burst, and everyone clapped.
“So, what did you wish for?” Mom asked, propping her chin up with her fingertips, her hands pressed together in prayer position. It was the stance she took whenever she expected a thoughtful answer, but I wasn’t in the mood. Underneath the tablecloth, under my jeans, I could feel my ankle pulsing angrily against the layers of Ace bandages, which had stopped working weeks back. I was in trouble and I knew it. Walking without limping took more effort than performing on stage ever had.
“What do you think?” I asked, digging into the dessert with my fork, instantly turning the artful layers of sponge cake and mascarpone into an amorphous mush. As I raised it to my mouth, I could see my parents exchange a look, like, here we go again, which is exactly what I was thinking. Because, seriously, what did they expect me to say? That I suddenly wanted to become a dance professor instead of actually dancing? That I’d fallen and hit my head during a leap and woken up with a passion for microbiology? Or maybe I should have just made like a Miss America contestant and asked for world peace.
“You know we’re excited about your performance . . .” Dad started unconvincingly, looking at Mom in a way that made me realize they’d probably planned this out; they each had lines and he was telling her to wait for her cue.
“Great!” I said brightly, taking another bite. In fact, I pulled the plate all the way over from the center of the table. If I was going to have to sit through a birthday lecture, then they weren’t getting one goddamn bite of my birthday tiramisu.
“. . . but we want you to be prepared for every outcome,” he went on.
“It’s very likely,” Mom jumped in, “that even if you win an apprenticeship, it will be hard to move up the ranks in a company. It’s extremely competitive. I’ve been looking at the statistics.”
“I know the numbers,” I said. I fought the urge to roll my eyes and instead stared down at the wobbly mess on my plate, imagining Miss Adair watching the scene unfold with an I-told-you-so smirk. You need to trim down before May. I lay down my fork and swallowed, suddenly feeling uncomfortably full.
“We just want to make sure you consider all of your options,” Dad said. “You’re eighteen now, which means that you get to make your own decisions about your future . . .”
“And we just want to make sure they’re the right ones,” Mom said.
I wanted to tell them that I was making decisions already. That I didn’t need their permission anymore, and that I didn’t want their advice. The thought gave me a buoy of self-confidence.
“You guys know that someday, when I’m giving my press conference like Misty, and we’re all sitting on some pristine white couch with our shoes off in a spread in People magazine, you’re going to have to pretend you believed in me the whole time, right?” I smiled to pretend it was a joke.
“Baby, we do believe in you,” Mom said, looking a little hurt. “We don’t believe in them.”
“We just want you to be happy,” Dad jumped in, balling up his fists on the checkered tablecloth. “Not struggling every day to prove yourself and fit into a world that doesn’t want you!”
“It’s all right, Stuart,” Mom said, laying a hand on top of his arm. “We can save this for another time.” But I was already getting fired up. I’d inherited my father’s freight train temper; once you stoked the coals, we could run all night.
“But nothing would ever change if people never broke boundaries,” I said, struggling not to raise my voice. “You’re always saying
that. So how can it be different when it comes to me?”
“Well . . . it isn’t,” Mom said, “but—”
“Yes it is!” Dad was clearly going off-script. “Because you’re our daughter and we raised you to make change in the world, yes, but how about working for social justice? How about education reform, how about the wage gap, how about the White House?” He tossed his napkin across his empty dessert plate.
“I will change the world,” I heard myself say, my voice emotionless and steady. “And I’ll do it in pointe shoes, and they won’t see me coming.” They exchanged another look, but this one was more resigned.
“Why don’t we change topics to something less contentious,” Mom said. “Did you see the Times Style section today? Apparently ‘mom jeans’ are hot now.”
“Keep the faith,” I muttered, as I felt my phone buzz in the pocket of my coat hanging over my chair. I looked over at Dad, raising my eyebrows like a temporary white flag in order to ask permission to check it. Normally, in our family, devices at the table were met with as much hostility as wanting to pursue your performing arts dream instead of go to a four-year college. But that night, he nodded.
“Go ahead, it’s probably one of your friends, wishing you a happy birthday,” he said. But all of my friends had already texted me, with one unsurprising exception, who had probably dropped her phone into a gallon of Amaghetto that she was still sleeping off.
I slipped my phone out and saw an e-mail notification. It was a Save the Date from the Entskys, to a party in honor of Boroughed Trouble that would be held the weekend after Showcase at their house in Staten Island. Poor Ethan, I thought. I’d have to go, just to make up for all the other times I blew him off. Maybe I could even convince you to come with me, make a day of it. Sort of like a—well, not like a date, that would be so weird . . . but something. Something that gave me a tingle of anticipation that I tried to ignore.
Somewhere along the line, after weeks and weeks of lifts and turns, I’d lost my inhibitions about touching you. And I was thinking about you when I got home, something I never used to do. A pas de deux is a dialogue of love, I thought suddenly. Nureyev had said that, hadn’t he? Mr. Dyshlenko was only slightly less poetic. Just that week, he’d compared us to IKEA furniture: “If the pieces do not fit together, the whole thing is shit and needs to be returned!”
Luckily, we fit together perfectly. We always had.
“All right, what are you grinning about?” Mom asked.
“Nothing,” I groaned. But just as I was putting my phone back in my pocket it buzzed again.
did you make your wish yet?
I bit my lip to keep from smiling, glancing down at the extinguished candle lying on my plate.
I’d always made the same wish, year after year, since I was six. There was no point; I’d never wanted anything else.
But something told me that was starting to change.
Chapter Twenty
April 18 (second day of Spring Break)
25 days left
BECOMING A LEGAL ADULT didn’t mean much. OK, I could vote. I could buy cigarettes, if I smoked, which I didn’t. I could get married (ha). But I was still living at home, still annoyed by my parents, who clearly had no intention, despite their delusions, of letting me make my own decisions anytime soon.
Nope, it didn’t change anything in an immediate sense—except for one thing. If you were eighteen, you could make your own doctor’s appointments.
“I’ve never seen this grade of sprain in a professional track dancer,” the orthopedist murmured, pressing his thick fingers into the flesh of my ankle. He was short and bald and had a diamond ear stud. The photos on the wall were all of him posing with minor celebrities. But having the nickname “Dr. Dance” didn’t make him a miracle worker, like I’d hoped. “I’m giving you ninety-nine out of a hundred odds,” he grumbled, while I gritted my teeth and focused on an autographed photo of the Knicks City Dancers. They were all performing hip-hop moves in high-heeled sneaker boots, meanwhile I couldn’t stay up balancing on my own damn toes. Ninety-nine out of 100 seemed a lot better than 1 in 1,086, but it wasn’t, not when the odds were tearing a ligament completely in half.
“My performance is next month,” I said. “After that I can stay off it.”
“Joy,” Dr. Pashkin said sternly, “if you dance on this injury you might not dance, period. I’m amazed you can even walk, let alone go en pointe. Your ankle is grossly unstable.”
“But the swelling’s going down,” I said, trying to sound positive even though I wasn’t sure. “I’ve been icing it,” I added.
“A severe sprain doesn’t always swell that much, especially when it’s a high sprain like yours,” he said. “The syndesmosis ligaments”—he drew a short line with his thumb along the top outside of my ankle—“take a long time to heal, and with a tear like this, I’d want you off of it for at least eight weeks.” He looked at me and raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Minimum.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You don’t know—this is my only chance.”
Dr. Pashkin sighed. “Look, I know you kids don’t want to wait for anything,” he said impatiently, scribbling something on a notepad. “This recital probably feels like the most important thing in the world. But I promise you, someday you’ll look back and realize life wasn’t moving as fast as you thought.”
He was wrong. It was moving faster. We didn’t have eight weeks. We barely had three. But I didn’t know that then. I tuned out his blithe condescension, said a curt thank-you, let him fit me for an air cast and then tore it off in the elevator as I left that fancy high-rise office, running on pure, stubborn pride, thinking about how I was going to prove him and everybody else wrong. As the tears sprung to my eyes with each excruciating step, I just kept picturing you and Lolly, dancing our pas de deux while I sat with everyone else in the safe, anonymous dark. It seemed so wrong on so many levels.
I wasn’t going to let it happen.
• • •
You must have read it all on my face, because as soon as I stepped into the dance hallway, you pulled me into Studio 2, before Mr. Dyshlenko could see me from the main stage door.
“What’s wrong?” you asked, helping me onto the piano bench. Some sheet music was open on a stand a few feet away—the finale from Swan Lake. As if I needed another bad omen.
“He wouldn’t give me an out,” I said. You were the only person who knew I had gone to see a doctor. In fact, you’d come to school the week before with a list of the five top-rated specialists in Manhattan who took my insurance.
“What do you mean?”
I took a deep breath, trying to keep my face calm. Make it look easy, Joy. Make it look . . . joyful. “He said I shouldn’t dance on it, period. He wanted to put me in an air cast and order an MRI. He said, and I quote, that I’m ‘on borrowed time.’”
“That sounds like the title of Ethan’s next play,” you said, attempting a grim smile.
“Yup.” I looked down at my feet.
“So what are you going to do?” You shook your head. “That’s a stupid question, huh?”
“If I tape it tight and warm it up enough, it doesn’t hurt right away,” I said. “It’s worse when I’m not dancing. And I don’t want to be dramatic; I mean, there are people who have broken bones in the middle of a ballet and still finished. This is just a sprain.”
“Adrenaline is a crazy drug,” you said. “But you can’t tape it for the show. And if I let you fall I’d never forgive myself.”
“So what, you want me to pull out of the Showcase?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
I crossed my arms defiantly. “Well, what, then?”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I don’t want to get hurt, either. But if I stop now, they won’t even put me in the corps. I’ll be sitting in the audience, watching yo
u . . . and her.” This time my mental image was even clearer: Lolly and her smug smile and her stupid fan. Your hands on her little twig waist. I leapt up and shrugged off my coat. “I’m not about to throw away my shot. Not while I’m still standing, anyway.”
“Slow down, Hamilton,” you laughed. “You still have to be careful. They’re watching you. Well, Adair is. Dyshlenko would probably slow-clap you for snapping an Achilles in the name of passion.”
It’s my syndesmosis, I almost said, but then you put your hands on my hips and my breath caught in my throat.
I wondered if you could tell that I sometimes thought about kissing you. That was a new thing, just a week or two old. It had started during a rehearsal, the day we’d practiced the adagio. Specifically, this one part of the adagio that was sort of like a slightly more chaste version of the scene in Dirty Dancing when Johnny comes up behind Baby and runs his fingers down her arm. You had just spun me in a pirouette, and your right arm encircled my waist and pulled me into you, so close I could feel your breath hot on my neck. Then I leaned right and turned my face toward yours before breaking away, and in that split second when our eyes locked, something happened. I forgot we were in a fluorescent-lit studio with Ms. Adair and Mr. Stratechuck six feet away, because it felt like we were alone somewhere in the dark, about to do something we couldn’t take back. I forgot you were the gangly boy I met when I was fourteen, because I could feel the stubble on your chin grazing my upturned cheek, and the muscles in your arms flexing against me, and suddenly I was acutely aware of parts of you I’d never thought much about before, separated from me only by a few thin layers of fabric. I got so flustered I botched a simple chassé, and Ms. Adair told us to take five. I’d gone straight to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face and some sense into my head, and by the time I got back you had been you again, mostly. But I couldn’t shake that moment.
“Loosen up,” you said, shaking me gently, and I snapped back to reality.
