“We will try,” said the spokesmouse, looking miserable. “Is it the only way?”
“It is the only way,” I confirmed. “If you get caught, we’re in trouble, and if you make noise where humans can hear you, you’re going to get caught.” Maybe I could convince Brenna to let the mice use her dressing room for any necessary rituals. She wouldn’t be shocked by their existence, and I was in a unique position to ask for favors, given the situation. I wouldn’t ask for anything that would give me an advantage in the competition—there was being smart about my resources, and then there was being a jerk—but helping the mice didn’t fall under that category.
“We Shall Obey,” said the mouse. All three had flat ears and drooping whiskers, and looked so miserable that I felt bad about silencing them. Sadly, I didn’t really have a choice.
“You can raid the craft table if no one sees you,” I said. That perked them up a bit: their ears lifted, and one of them gave a muted cheer. I pointed to my backpack. “Hop in, and don’t get tangled in my wig. I’m going to need to put that back on pretty soon.”
“Hail!” chorused the mice, and scurried into the backpack.
When I looked up, Dominic was watching me wistfully. “You’re going, then?”
“I’m going.” I picked up the backpack and stood, moving to kiss him briefly before I said, “But I’ll be back before you know it.”
“I know it whenever you’re away,” he said. “Be astonishing, Verity. Be the amazing, impossible, infuriating woman I married, and steal the show from all those other dancers.”
“Remember to vote for me,” I said, and stepped onto the edge of the roof, and off, and fell.
The Be-Well Motel was a rare thing for the area: a freestanding building with nothing directly connecting to the structure. Below me, the alley used for storage and employee parking beckoned like a dangerous asphalt river. If I fell that far, I’d never dance again, but I’d make an attractive smear on the pavement until the infrequent Southern California rains washed me away.
That wasn’t going to happen. When I’d fallen far enough to gather the momentum I needed, I grabbed the ledge of the building and braced my feet against the brick, pushing off as hard as I could. The muscles in my thighs bunched and released, launching me across the alley toward my target: the billboard we’d so carefully positioned ourselves behind. For a moment, I hung weightless and suspended in space, my mind stretching out that fraction of a second until it felt like a year. Then gravity remembered our unfinished business and yanked me down, pulling me in a hard arc toward the back of the billboard.
I put out my hands, bracing for impact just before my palms struck the metal trellis. The jolt echoed all the way up to my shoulders, but there wasn’t time to dwell on that: dwelling would lead to more plummeting, and plummeting was not in the plan. Instead, I gripped tight and swung myself up, hooking a foot on the higher part of the lattice. Then I pulled, and flipped myself up to grab the next row of pipes.
Hand over hand and foot over foot, I climbed to the top of the billboard and paused, looking back at the Be-Well. Dominic’s silhouette at the roof’s edge made me want to turn back, wrap my arms around him, and never let him go. I pushed the impulse down. We were here because we both knew what we had to do, and I’d learned my lessons well from watching my grandmother’s endless quest to find my grandfather and bring him home: love is great, but it can be a poison. Sometimes you have to step away, or you’ll never be able to break free.
I turned to the front of the billboard, looking out over the city. Then I jumped. It was a long trip back to the studio housing, and I was planning to enjoy every moment of it.
It took me a little over forty-five minutes to run along the rooftops, fire escapes, and other available supports and make my way back to the apartments. I checked my time before pulling my wig out of the bag and positioning it on my head. By the time the season was over or I got eliminated, whichever came first, I was going to be dealing with some stellar chafing. Anything for dance.
There was no one visible outside the building. I counted windows until I found ours, and then shinnied my way up the drainpipe to my bedroom. Lyra was long since asleep, her body a flawless curl beneath her blankets. Holding a finger to my mouth in a silent shush, I opened my backpack and let out the three Aeslin who would be secretly living with us.
They scampered to the pillow, waved their forepaws in the closest thing they were currently allowed to a “hail,” and vanished behind the bed. I ducked into the bathroom and wiped away the grime from my journey before coming back out and crawling into my own bed. The pillow was a psalm to sleep. The mattress was a benediction. I closed my eyes, and sank instantly down into sleep—
—only to be jerked out what felt like seconds later by the sound of someone blasting an air horn in the central courtyard. I sat bolt upright, one hand going for the gun that wasn’t under my pillow. Good thing, too: I might have had an unfortunate accident. My eyes were filled with grit. I wiped it away.
Lyra was also sitting up in her bed, looking groggy and displeased. “They’re going to be filming when we emerge,” she said. “Only reason they’d do the air horn. How’s my hair?”
“Sheepdog-like,” I said. “How’s my face?”
“You were drooling in your sleep,” she said. “Wonder Twin powers?”
“Activate,” I agreed, and shoved my blanket off my legs as Lyra jumped out of her bed. Twenty seconds later, we were crammed into the bathroom, doing the best we could in what we knew was an artificially limited amount of time. Lyra handed me a brush, and I stood behind her, smoothing her hair, while she washed her face and applied a quick layer of “neutral” makeup. Then we switched positions, her brushing and braiding my wig while I slapped on lip gloss and foundation. The camera’s eye was eternally unforgiving, and it would know if we came outside unprepared.
“Nice wig,” said Lyra.
“Thanks.” She was one of the few who knew that America had never seen my real hair. “It’s new.”
“I figured. You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I said.
The boys were waiting in the living room. They didn’t need as much time to get ready as we did, damn them, but they knew the rules of this game as well as we did, and they knew that we were already being judged.
“One,” said Anders.
“Two,” said Pax.
“Three,” said the four of us in unison. We burst out onto the balcony connecting the second-floor apartments. Doors were opening on every side: we’d timed our appearance perfectly. We hadn’t been paranoid about it, either—there were cameras in the courtyard, lenses positioned to get as many of the opening doors as possible. So we did what was expected of us. We came out screaming and waving our hands in the air, looking like there was nothing in the world that we appreciated more than being dragged out of our beds at some ungodly hour of the morning.
At least the sun was up, even if they’d probably only waited this long because they wanted better light levels. My legs were still pleasantly loose from my nocturnal running, which told me more than I wanted to know about how little sleep I’d gotten. But those were Verity problems, and this wasn’t Verity’s time. As Valerie, I put my hands in the air and screamed like this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened.
Adrian appeared out of the swarm of cameras, stepping up onto a low platform that hadn’t been there the night before and wouldn’t be there after he left. He was holding the air horn in one hand, and a megaphone in the other. “Good morning, all-stars!” he shouted, through the megaphone. We knew our cue: we roared approval and delight until our throats hurt. Adrian smirked, mugging for the cameras before raising the megaphone again. “Are you ready to get this party started?”
We were. We were so ready to get this party started.
“Well, then, come on!” Adrian beckoned, and we ran, barefoot and in our
nightclothes—or what we were pretending were our nightclothes—for the stairs. I realized we’d all been put in second-floor apartments on purpose: with only twenty contestants, sleeping four to an apartment, we could have been in doubles, each of us with a private room. But then he wouldn’t have been able to address us en masse like this, or get dramatic shots of shoeless dancers running down concrete stairs. Sometimes I really hated Hollywood.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, we ran straight into a wall of cameras, followed by some producer shouting, “Cut! Did we get the shot?”
“They came out slower than I like, but we can edit that,” said Adrian, pushing his way through the mob. “I think we had good energy, good sincerity, and besides, Lindy will kill me if I don’t get back to the theater before it’s time to assign choreography groups. Morning, all. Thanks for your quick response, car for the theater leaves in twenty. Please be presentable.” Then he was gone, turning on his heel and pushing back through the swarm of cameras.
Some of which were almost certainly still running, knowing Adrian. I kept my smile in place, feeling my face relax into the easy routine of being Valerie, who was virtually unflappable. “Let’s go get dressed!” I chirped, looping my arm through Lyra’s. She matched my smile with her own, and side by side, we walked back upstairs, the boys trailing behind us.
Jessica, who’d clearly done the same math I had, was waiting on the balcony. “There are seven empty apartments in this complex,” she said, without greeting or preamble. “What would it take for me to convince the two of you to move into one of them?”
I blinked. Lyra blinked. I recovered first.
“If there are seven empty apartments, why don’t you move into one of them?” I asked. “You could have the whole place to yourself. Way better than just a single bedroom.”
“Because then I’d look like I wasn’t a team player,” said Jessica. Her tone was disgusted, like she couldn’t believe I’d be so stupid. “Everybody knows you two were BFFs during your season, so if you wanted to go off and have some girl time, they’d find a way to spin it that didn’t make you look like total bitches.”
“Do we get a vote here?” asked Anders. “Because Val’s my BFF, too, and where she goes, I go.”
“I’m not going to be the only dude rooming solo with a woman,” said Pax. “I know where the camera takes that, and it takes me to a lecture from my mama as soon as I get home.”
“So basically, we could all move into one of the empty apartments, and leave you with the problem you already have,” I concluded. “Sorry, Jessica, no sale. Now if you’ll excuse us, I want to be wearing something more substantial when I go to find out what sort of torture we’re being put through this week.” I stepped past her, my arm still looped through Lyra’s, and Anders and Pax followed close behind.
I didn’t look back to see whether Jessica was seething. I was a smart girl. I could make an educated guess.
“Showtime,” giggled Lyra, hugging my arm.
I smiled at her, and opened our apartment door. Showtime, indeed.
So here’s the thing about dance rehearsal: it’s fascinating while you’re doing it, because you’re learning new choreography and forcing your body through its paces, even as your muscles protest and your lungs complain and your skeleton feels like it’s about to turn into sludge and come dripping out the soles of your feet. And when you’re done, you’ve learned something new, and you can make art with your body. That’s the true power of dance. Painters and sculptors and designers, they take raw materials and turn them into art. Dancers turn themselves into art. We are poetry in motion when we do our jobs right, and we can stop your heart with the point of a toe or the angle of a limb. But describing rehearsal?
If there was an annotated dictionary with more elaborate definitions, “a detailed description of a dance rehearsal” would probably go under “boring.” There’s a lot of repetition, and a lot of “I tried, I failed, I fell, I tried again.” Not the sort of gripping material that holds the attention, unless it’s edited down to a series of sound bites and clever clips. There were cameras on us the whole time we were dancing, capturing every scrap of material that could possibly be worked into a montage.
As I’d predicted, we were learning multiple routines, and expected to master them in the course of a week. The big group number that would launch the season was a combination of fast, pseudo-jazz and our own styles, designed to give us each a “stand out moment,” but really creating a confusing series of shifting angles, which we had to memorize without kicking each other in the heads. After that, we had two smaller group numbers, one for the girls and one for the guys. I didn’t know yet what the guys were learning, although I was sure Pax and Anders would have plenty to say about it once we were all back home, icing our ankles and whining. We were learning the sort of loose-limbed, lyrical contemporary piece that was my bane. Dance should tell a story, but I shouldn’t have to dislocate my shoulder to do it.
For the moment, however, I was learning my third routine for the week, and I was in my element. There were six ballroom dancers among the contestants, and four of us specialized in the Latin forms, so it had been decided that the big “ballroom style” number would be an Argentine tango. Sweaty, steamy, sticky, and best of all, familiar, using steps and postures I’d been doing in my sleep since I was thirteen years old. There were four women and two men, so we switched partners throughout the dance, forming duos and trios of swirling seduction. I was currently going through my steps with Lo, a beautiful Chinese-American dancer who’d taken the top prize in her season. We were almost the same height, and so we traded off who was leading constantly, spinning and caressing one another. Pretty intimate, considering we’d only met at the beginning of the rehearsal.
Our choreographer, Marisol Bustos, shouted instructions and we did our best to follow them. I’d worked with her before on my original season, and I knew she didn’t expect perfection right off the bat: she just wanted to know that we were trying. Well, I was trying, and when she finally called, “Enough! Enough! You are hopeless and should take fifteen minutes to dwell upon your failures!”, I was more than ready to collapse into a heap on the studio floor.
I wasn’t the only one. Only two dancers remained standing—Lo, who looked more amused than anything else, and Ivan, the other ballroom dancer from her season.
“I think you were built in a secret government lab for creating tireless ballroom dancers,” I accused without rancor, closing my eyes.
“Now that you know my secret, I’ll have to incinerate you with my laser eyes,” said Lo. Her toe daintily prodded my ribs. “Get up. There’s water. You could use some.”
“Everyone here is evil except for me,” I grumbled, and rolled over, climbing back to my feet before I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw when I did was Lo’s smiling face.
“Evil, perhaps, but in excellent shape,” she said. “I heard you hadn’t been working.”
Of course she’d heard that. The ballroom dance community is smaller than anyone likes to believe, despite the number of talented amateurs and studios scattered across North America. Everyone talks, and while it’s not like we all know each other personally, reputation is harder to run away from.
“There was some family stuff,” I said, wiping my cheeks on the top of my shirt. “I thought I’d been getting enough practice in. Apparently, I’m going to need to work harder.”
“Or risk elimination,” said Lo. Her smile faded, replaced by solemnity. “I want to know that everyone here is giving it their all. I want to know that whoever beats me will deserve it.”
“Maybe you’ll win again,” I said.
Lo snorted and started walking toward the table at the back of the room where the water service was set up. “America isn’t going to vote for the same winner twice in a row. They loved us enough to reward us, and I’m grateful, but all you have to do is look at the Internet to kn
ow that there are always people who think the wrong person won. Those are the voters we’re courting back this season. Everyone who feels like their favorite got robbed their first time around will be turning out, and the producers will reap the rewards.”
“Why are you here if you feel like you can’t win?” I asked, nabbing a small paper cup of water. The urge to dump it over my head was strong. I might have given in, if I hadn’t known my wig would block most of it from reaching me.
“It’s good exposure. I get to work with a wide variety of choreographers on someone else’s time, while that same someone pays for my food and lodging. I’ll be able to book more lessons after I show up on TV again. And it’s fun. Are you really going to tell me you’re only here because you might win this time?” Lo gave me an inquisitive look. Too inquisitive: for the first time since rehearsals started, I felt like my wig might be less convincing than it needed to be.
“No,” I admitted. “I missed my friends from the show, and I wasn’t doing anything big. This seemed like a good way to see them again. Like summer camp in high heels.”
Lo grinned. “I enjoyed you during your season. I voted for you, especially after your cha-cha in week two.”
“Thanks,” I said, returning her smile. I hadn’t been watching the show regularly by the time Lo was on: something about being on assignment in New York had put a major crimp in my viewing schedule. Still, I’d seen enough to be sincere when I said, “I really like your footwork. Your quickstep is amazing.”
“I think we’re going to be friends,” said Lo, just as Marisol banged her heel against the studio floor.
“Back to work! Back to work, and may some of you remember how to dance before the end of this day!”
Lo and I looked at each other, laughed, and dropped our paper cups in the trash before following the other dancers back toward rehearsal, and our future, which wasn’t going to wait around for us to catch up with it.
We danced for the rest of the day, until our feet hurt and our thighs sang hosannas to the god of muscular torsion. And then we went back to our temporary homes and rubbed Tiger Balm on our legs and shoulders before collapsing into bed, a whole company of exhausted dolls being put away at the end of a long day’s play. No one complained more than was absolutely necessary. We knew we were going to do it all again the next day.