Spin the Sky

by MacKenzie, Jill;

  And we watched Olivia soar through her contemporary routine as easily and as flawlessly as if she had been doing those steps in that one single routine for her entire life.

  “So what if you don’t win?” I say.

  She gapes at me with huge eyes.

  “I mean, you’ll probably still have an amazing career in dance, even if you do go home tonight. Some choreographer will snatch you up as their assistant.” I turn back to the mirror and search my face for the cream’s results. “If I were you, I wouldn’t care if I went home tonight or not.”

  Olivia’s reflection in the mirror glares at me. “Are you serious? You actually think I’d be okay with that? You think that would be enough for me? For my—”

  “Your mom? Is that who you’re worried about? That your mom will be disappointed if you don’t win? Big deal. So she’s a tiger mom. She’ll get over it. That’s what moms do. But it’s different for me. You know my story.” I stare at myself in the mirror. Stupid cream. Doesn’t look like it’s doing a thing. “Everyone does, because of him.”

  Olivia sneers. “Get your head out of your ass, Magnolia.”

  “Am I wrong? You’ll go back to your perfect life. Things will be okay for you. But I still have to go back there. Everyone will still hate me.” I swallow. “Even if I win, it won’t change things.”

  “You’re just like him, you know that?”

  I hop off the desk. “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me. Jacks’s routine was awesome. He was perfect out there and everyone knows it. It says he’s going home. And what about me? It says I’m in danger of elimination too. You don’t get to have a monopoly on heartache.”

  “I never said I did.”

  “You’re pissed because he’s used this, used you, to get here. But you’re doing the exact same thing. You think you’re the only one who needs this?”

  I stare down at my hands. “I know I’m not. But where you’re from isn’t like where I am. Nobody treats you the way they treat me.”

  “Is that right? Who are you talking about, anyway? Who are these people that hate you so much?”

  “People.” My eyes avoid hers. “Just people from my town.”

  “From where, Summerville?”

  “Summerland.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “Who cares about some dinky people from some dinky town no one’s even heard of? Everyone who knows you loves you, Magnolia. That’s all that matters.”

  When I shut my eyes, the faces of my loved ones are there, like always. Rose. George. Mrs. Moutsous. None of them are here with me. Olivia’s mom might be tough, but none of my people even care that I’m here, doing this thing. If they really loved me, wouldn’t they be here to show me? And my mom. If she really loved me and Rose, would she have left us in the first place? “At least you have your mom.”

  “My mom who’s given me an ultimatum,” Olivia says. “Either I win this contest, or I’m out of the house, out of her life.” Her shoulders slump and her head dips. “My mom says I don’t have it in me, that I’m a loser. Always been a loser.” Olivia shuts her eyes, too. The tears break through and stream down her cheeks.

  My voice is quiet. “I had no idea. I knew she was difficult. But I didn’t know that she was awful.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You’ve been so wrapped up in what they think and what he did, you haven’t even seen what’s been all around you the whole time.” She slaps her chest. “We all need this. Don’t you see? We all have our reasons.”

  Olivia crumples the page in a ball and shoots it across the room. Then she ducks into the bathroom. I hear the door lock, water run, glass door of the shower close, hard.

  For a second I sit very still, listening to the other noises around me, other contestants getting ready in rooms nearby, echoing through the walls of this one. Maybe everyone does need this just as bad as I do. Maybe some of them even need it more.

  I slump down on the bed and untangle my braid, run my brush through my hair, making the up-down-pull motions of my hand over and over and over until it’s smooth.

  Olivia’s words run through me.

  Tonight. Tonight, I might be boarding my second-ever flight, heading home to Summerland. I reach across her bed to her cell phone still lying on her pillow. She won’t mind if I use it. I won’t be on it long.

  I flip it over, punch in the numbers. It rings twice. And then she answers. “Magnolia? Is that you?” The sound of her voice crushes me. I picture her in our house, our kitchen, sitting at the fold-up kitchen chairs. She sounds so alone. She sounds almost as alone as I feel right now. I hit the end button because I can’t talk to her here. Not from this hotel room that’s clean and smells so good and is everything that where she is isn’t.

  But a friendly voice would be good. I try to remember his number, though I haven’t called him in so long and never for something that wasn’t about rehearsal times or changes in one of our dances. It rings six times and I think it’s going to go to voice mail. Then he answers. His voice sounds like salve, running over my wounds.

  “Mark?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Magnolia.”

  There’s a huge pause on his end. At first I think he’s hung up or maybe we’ve been disconnected, but then I hear him breathing and he clears his throat and says, “I can’t believe you’re calling. I’ve been watching you.”

  “Oh.”

  He laughs and it sounds nervous. It sounds like him. “Not watching you, watching you. I mean like on the show. You’ve been incredible up there.”

  “I don’t know why I’m calling.” But as the words slip out, I do know why. I don’t want to go back there. Back to Summerland where things are cold, where things never change. Not now. Not yet. But hearing someone’s voice. Someone who’s known me for so long and maybe even loves me feels good, too. Like I want to be there. Not now but someday. Maybe even someday soon. “How are things on the home front?”

  “You know,” he says.

  I ask him for details and he gives me a rundown of Miller’s new sign and the new lifeguard tower at the south end of the beach. I know he’s trying his hardest to think of things to tell me. It’s Summerland. There isn’t much.

  “Mags?” he says when he’s done.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m cheering for you. You can do this. I know you can. You’re special. On that stage and on TV. Everyone knows it. Okay?”

  I don’t say anything else. Like that day with the ice creams, Mark and I have always had this thing where words are said, but aren’t really necessary. We aren’t good at small talk. I’ve never really noticed that we’re the same like that, but now I do. The silence between us is there, but comfortable. I can hear his breath. I know he can hear mine.

  From the bathroom, I hear Olivia shut the water off and slide the door across the tub. “I’ve got to go,” I say. He says thanks for calling and that he’ll still be watching, and I say thanks, too. I go to hang up but before I do, I say, “Hey. And thanks for being my friend.”

  And he says, “Always.”

  I toss the phone back on Olivia’s pillow and lie on my own bed, letting my truth seep through me. Summerland is inside of me. Its people are inside of me. But here is where I want to be. And I know the other contestants want it bad, but Olivia’s wrong. She knows where her mom is and that’s more than I’ve got. And Mark’s wrong, too. Even if he says I’m special out there, I don’t have my town’s love the way they do, no matter what happens here tonight.

  No. No way. It’s not the same for people like her, for people like him. It’s just not the same. Any way you slice it.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Olivia slaps my hand away from my mouth. “You know, if you’d stop fiddling with that hair of yours, it might actually be pretty.”

  I quickly hide both my hands behind my back. “I know. I can’t help it.” Really, I can’t. Ever since I lost—no—was robbed of my pillowcase piece, the end of my braid has taken a serious beating. I
keep my hands at my side until I’m sure Olivia’s regained focus on the shouting people, swooping cameras, and flashing lights all around us. Then my hands shove the two-inch tip of hair into the corner of my mouth.

  But the girl’s got some serious peripheral skills. She yanks my hand away from my hair. “You better help it. No one wants to see a hair sucker on national television. They’ll show it for the playback moments. They’ll use it to get more people over to Team George. You better knock it off. It’s now or never.”

  I watch as the cameras pivot between me and Olivia and the other ten of us, standing shoulder to shoulder on stage. I hope my hair is right and my makeup’s right and I hope they haven’t caught that hair-in-mouth thing but I bet they have. I wonder if, somewhere out there, my mom will see me doing it and I think of how I used to do it when I was little and she’d come home and find me sitting under the kitchen table, hair in mouth. Mom never minded because she said it reminded her of herself somehow and, back then, I thought that was a good thing. I think about Mrs. Perkins and how she’d caught me doing it once, inside her shop, and slapped my hand away just like Olivia did.

  I glance at Olivia. How is it that she seems totally put together, her long-legged body wickedly composed, while I feel like I’m going to melt into a pool of drizzle right here on center stage? Then again, like George, she always knows when the eyes are watching and the ears are listening. Except that I can’t decide if that’s who she is, or who her mom tells her she has to be.

  I think of the printout she showed me when we were in our room just two hours ago. The one that said I was going to come in second place in the finale show. The one that also said Olivia wouldn’t make it past Week Two, at best. Yet somehow, after she came out of the bathroom, Olivia pulled her shit together like it was her patriotic duty to do so. She painted her nails Bahama Mama pink and then she shaved her legs and then she said nothing while she applied four different products to her hair while I applied none and thought about how many cameras would focus on the fact that Olivia’s hair is like ribbons while mine’s like sandpaper.

  And while Olivia did these things, I stared out the window, into the LA abyss, my thoughts landing in Summerland. I know she thinks my town is nothing because no one’s ever heard of it—or hadn’t, until George and I made it on the show. But it doesn’t matter what she thinks. Not when my nothing is the only nothing I’ve ever known.

  Five minutes later, one of the producer’s lackeys called up to our room and told us we had “five minutes to get our skinny butts downstairs” to wardrobe and makeup, or we’d be off the show. As if they’d do that.

  Now the lights dim and the Live to Dance theme song blares.

  “Here we go,” I mutter under my breath.

  Olivia squeezes my hand. She hisses at me through clamped teeth. “Smile for God’s sake, will you?”

  I nod, but of course, my mouth can’t really do that on command.

  So instead, I scan the gazillion people that make up the live studio audience. But because we’re in the light and they’re in the dark, I can’t really make out any of the faces. They’re just sort of blurred together in these dull gray swirls that remind me of the mid-morning sky in Summerland. But then a pair of eyes stand out to me and hold my gaze. I blink and then turn my head to look at George and Rio but they’re way down the line, holding up the opposite end to me. When I look back into the crowd and try to find those eyes again, I can’t. They’re gone. Dissolved into the collective haze of eyes around them. My gaze focuses, instead, on a new face.

  This face is smiling with these glossy lips—shined and red like an eighties Corvette. Glimmering in the dark, like glow sticks. I know those lips. They’re exact replicas of the snot-bag-turned-sort-of-new-best-friend standing next to me. I peek at Olivia, who’s looking everywhere but at her mom. Maybe it’s because she’s not ready to go eye-to-eye with the woman that told her, point blank, that she’s a loser. I can’t believe her own mother said that to her. When I first saw her, I definitely thought she was the quintessential Martha Stewart mom—one who does needlepoint by day and drinks pretty pink cocktails with pretty names by night. I thought she was nice. Like Mrs. Moutsous. Like the kind of cookie-baking mom anyone in my shoes would kiss earth to share a last name with. I didn’t think she was the kind of mom to make her daughter feel bad just because she could.

  The overhead announcer shouts, “Welcome to Season Six, Live to Dance!” On cue, Camilla Sky saunters to the front of the stage in the shortest of minidresses and the highest of heels. She grabs her microphone. The cameras swarm her. “It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, ladies and gentlemen! Tonight we’re concluding Week One, which brings us one step closer to finding out which dancers will be in our finale in only five weeks’ time!” The crowd blows up. Camilla waves her hand in front of her. “Unfortunately, it also means we’re closer to sending home two unlucky contestants who will not be going on to compete next week.”

  Camilla pauses while the audience boos. Next to me, Olivia grabs my left hand again. On her other side, Hayden grabs her left one. And on down the line, the other dancers have joined hands too, all of us connected like one giant string of paper dolls. The audience oohs and aahs and claps their heads off, because this is what they want. For us to love each other. So it’ll be really good entertainment when they snip some of us off and send them home. Crumpled and disposed.

  Camilla takes an envelope from her assistant. “Okay, we’re going to get right to it. After we hear a few words from our judges.”

  The spotlight brightens on the wooden table where all three judges sit. They’ve pulled their faces into these tight smiles, too, which makes me think of Hayden. Even when the cameras aren’t around us, Hayden keeps her smile on and ready and I wish I had those kind of skills right about now.

  “Let’s start with the lovely Astrid Scott. Astrid, you’ve seen the blogs. You know what everyone’s saying about our dancers. Do you think the predictions are pretty accurate?”

  Astrid laughs, as if this question has never occurred to her. When, according to Olivia, she’s one of the biggest sources for most of the bloggers. “Loose Lips Scott”—that’s what Olivia called her.

  Astrid leans forward, making sure that her signature bazookas smile for the cameras that love them. “If we lived in a perfect world, we’d never listen to the things people say about us. But we don’t, so I think it’d be impossible to ignore the rumors about what’s going to happen in this show. However, I think it’s equally important to remember that it’s America that votes. Not just the bloggers.”

  Camilla raises one shaped eyebrow. “So what you’re trying to say is that anything can happen at this point?”

  “Exactly, Camilla. You might as well expect the unexpected.” She zeroes in on Jacks. The cameras swoop from Astrid to focus on Jacks’s face. She’s talking about him. We all know she’s talking about him because of those blogs and even though she says that the blogs don’t matter as much as we think they do, it’s obvious they do. Jacks isn’t looking at the cameras at all. Instead, he’s staring at his feet and biting his lip and if I didn’t know better, I’d say that Jacks is worried. Or sad. Or maybe even both. But then he lifts his head and winks for the cameras and smiles that crooked, broken smile of his and I know how wrong I’ve been.

  “Very sage words from someone who’s been in this business a long time.” Camilla thanks Astrid and then takes a few steps to the left of her. “And now to the legendary Gia Gianni. You haven’t seen the names that are in this envelope. Am I correct in assuming that?”

  Gia leans back in her chair, one hand to her chest, her face splattered with a horrified expression. “Camilla, are you asking if I peeked at the results?”

  “I know you’d never do that,” Camilla says. “But what I think America really wants to know is if you can predict who’s going home tonight by how well they competed on Tuesday?”

  Gia leans in closer to the microphone. “Camilla, darling, I didn�
��t get where I am in this business by chance. I know who the winners are. And that means I know who the losers are, too.”

  A chorus of oohs sweep through the crowd.

  Camilla runs her hands through her mane. She lets a piece fall in front of her eyes, which makes her look sultry and mysterious. Which, I guess, is the point.

  “A woman who doesn’t mince her words,” Camilla purrs. “I like that.” She takes three steps to her left, her eyes gleaming when they meet the piercing gaze of the third judge. “Last, but certainly not least, Sir Elliot Townsend. The king of Live to Dance. I’m sure our audience, as well as our viewers at home, would like to hear from you about what’s going to happen after two dancers are sent home tonight. Where will they go from here?”

  Elliot slowly scans the line.

  My heart thuds with the strength of a hundred clam guns. I want him to tell me. Tell me with his eyes that I’m not going home tonight. Not going home until I’ve done what I came here to do.

  Elliot passes over me without stopping. “Well, that depends.”

  Camilla taps her foot. “On?”

  “On the dancers. This competition isn’t a one-time shot. Yes, the dancer who wins will take the prize money and the title, but it’s so much more than that. This is a journey. A chance to grow. Even dancers who leave here tonight can leave with something. They can go armed with what they’ve learned here and use it to get better, or they can go home and live the life they had before any of this started.”

  Camilla nods and spins around to us. She waggles one finger at us. “Listen up, little lambs. This is good advice for you all.” She smoothes the bottom of her dress and laughs for her cameras. “Now, ladies and gentlemen. The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Without further ado, can we dim the lights, please!”

  I bow my head and close my eyes. I feel the cameras on me but I know they’re not on me, they’re on everyone. It doesn’t help. It’s all happening, right now.