“Sher.”
“Her name was not Sherrie Sher.”
“It really was.”
“Well all right, being Mrs. Sherrie Sher wouldn’t bring me back to who I was. I could date all the girls in the world and it’s still not going to change the fact that when you look at me you see a guy on top of me.”
It’s still about that to Rachel.
I know her.
She really cares about this shit.
“Etta . . .”
“So why are we even pretending like this redemption thing is possible? You guys dumped me. I’m dealing with it. Are you?”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was not for Rachel to be off the counter, to be on the floor with me, to have her hands in my hair and her forehead bent down to mine—what is with these girls with their hands on me today? Except this is so not Natasha. This is so, so different from Natasha.
She kisses me, for a long time. It’s not a deep kiss, not a sexy kiss. That would be a lot easier.
“Shut up,” she says. “Okay? Just shut up.”
I do, for a while, just listen to her breathing and feel her touching me.
Eventually I say, “I’m taking care of her. Bianca. And she’s getting better. She’s in group with me.”
Rachel nods. My face moves with hers. “That’s good. That’s really good.”
“She’s good.” I don’t know why I say this next part. “You’d really like her.”
The thing is, I think that she would.
The thing is that Rachel has good taste and her kissing me makes me feel beautiful again.
And it would be one of the last things she’d ever want to inspire, but feeling like that is enough to make me go home after school and dig my toe shoes out of the backyard.
15
I PUT MY SHOES ON and practice just standing up, flexing my ankles around, taking small steps around the room. I’m in my carpeted bedroom, so it’s pretty stupid, but at least this gives me an excuse to do a shitty job, which I kind of do.
I feel so stupid about doing this. The goal right now should be to ace this next audition, and there’s absolutely no way ballet is going to help me there. The dancing, if there even is any at this stage—Bianca says last time she got to second round, it was just singing—is just going to be another step combination. The next time I’d really use ballet would be if I got into the school—a school that, I’ve always known, has a pretty mediocre dance program—and if I can’t sing, I can’t get into the school. I should really be applying to dance schools.
Oh.
I should be applying to dance schools.
I’ve been putting it off because I really don’t think I could take being surrounded by ballerinas all the time. Even when I was pre-professional, I kind of hated it. I don’t think I can look at them and know how much prettier they are than me and how much an audience would rather watch them move around, these tall lean girls that form straight lines and swoop through the air, than watch all however-many-pounds-of-me jiggle her way through tours chaînés déboulés. You’re not supposed to look at a girl’s body when she dances, not in that way. She’s supposed to be unobtrusive. She’s supposed to just be part of the music, and here I come in all attention-grabbing and ETTAETTAETTA and you can make that sound as awesome and special-snowflakey as you want but at the end of the day that’s not what people want ballerinas to be. Rachel knew that, saw that pressure getting to me. That’s why I quit.
Except I keep dancing and then I go over to my computer and look up ballet schools in New York City (I haven’t done this in years, seriously, but it takes me right back to being that little twelve-year-old drinking her strawberry milk and staring at these same damn web pages, flexing her feet under the desk) and I think, okay, I’m going to table that. That’s a thing. Waiting until college to get out, after these past few weeks, is beginning to seem almost as nonviable as staying here indefinitely.
I turn on “At the Ballet” as I close the tabs about schools, a nice segue between fantasy (ballet) and reality (practicing for the audition—yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, how is that less fantasy, shut up). Mom and Kristina are home, so I stuff pillows under the door so they won’t hear me because I don’t want their comments right now about how I “sounded really nice today!” because I can never tell whether or not they’re telling the truth or if they just feel sorry for me, and I sing through Sheila’s part like always but then I’m too busy twirling around on the floor again to go back to the beginning of the song like I usually do, and for the first time I hear the entire thing.
I don’t remember the name of the girl who sings second. She doesn’t say it, and I think Bianca mentioned it at some point but I only hung on to Sheila because Bianca said she was the important one. “She’s the personality of the song,” Bianca said. “She has this whole monologue before it starts where she hits on the director and everything. She’s awesome and untouchable and damaged. You can totally act her.”
The second girl is nice, and then there’s someone else singing with her, harmonizing through a bit about everyone being beautiful at the ballet. Which is a nice sentiment and everything, except, you know, the ballet was where I wasn’t pretty at all.
But when I was a kid, spinning around in my room like I am now, ballet was my entire, beautiful world.
And then all of a sudden someone’s speaking. She’s talking about when she was a little kid, and she had this shitty broken home but she got through it by dancing around her living room with her arms held like she had someone to dance with, even when she didn’t. She’s got this New York accent and this small, honest little voice, and she doesn’t sound bitter or sarcastic about her fantastic fantasy life. She’s just this girl who’s feeling all this shit and who still gets this big kick out of holding her arms out and was never ashamed about doing it.
There’s some harmonies here, some doo doo doos, and I dance around like I’m waltzing instead of like I’m a ballerina because I’m ridiculous.
And then all of a sudden she’s singing, all by herself. Maggie, she says.
Everything was beautiful at the ballet
Raise your arms, and someone’s always there
She doesn’t slide up to a higher note at the end of the refrain like I was expecting, like the other two girls did.
At the ballet
That one hits harder, higher.
At the ballet!
Jesus. It’s a really, really, really high note, and she’s singing it strong and solid, like a yell, like she does not give a shit about being pretty, she just has to shoot this note out right now because she is singing about the ballet and it is wringing her out.
I try the high note, but I can’t do it, not unless I do it breathy and muted and not at all how it’s supposed to be. I can’t do it. Which is fine, because this singing part is shorter than Sheila’s and not nearly as easy to act through.
But it’s not Sheila’s part that I listen to over and over again as I lie flat on my bed, pointing and repointing my feet in my shoes, listening to Maggie through my headphones shouting about the ballet. Maggie. I love you, you imaginary little fantasy girl.
• • •
I call Bianca later to tell her about digging my shoes up and about how long it took me to listen to the whole song and is there any way she thinks I could maybe learn to hit that note before the audition next week and oh who am I kidding, I’ve already practiced Sheila a hundred times and this is the plan, but Bianca doesn’t pick up her cell phone. I call her house instead, and this scary-proper man tells me that Bianca isn’t available right now, but would I like to talk to James?
“Hey,” James says.
“Hey. Where’s Bee?”
“She’s here, Dad’s just not letting her use the phone because apparently she disrespected him or something, I don’t know.”
“Bianca did?”
“She went to church without us this morning because she’s the only one who isn’t okay with skipping ever, and she
came home crying or something about how she thinks God hates her because she isn’t Bianca-ish enough or something? And Dad took it as some kind of personal affront that Bianca would say that God hates her so of course the answer to that is to yell at her. Freudian parallels much, Dad?”
“Ouch. What happened at church?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I told my parents I was sick and went to Bellevue.”
There’s a lot of things I want to say to that but none that aren’t bitchy and so out of line or so completely not fair, because, like, how dare you have a boyfriend, James! How dare you care about something besides Bianca? I mean, come on. The last thing Bianca needs is us making her into the kind of delicate little heroine we need to drop our lives to protect. The problem is that I don’t like to think about what might happen to her if we don’t, and maybe that’s a lot more important than making sure she’s not too codependent. I’ll take codependent over starving herself until she’s locked in some institution, or worse, y’know?
I’m just saying that all of that: the moral of the story is that we can’t babysit Bianca! stuff would be nice and all, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my friend to it. If she needs this, I’ll be this.
I have a little sister. This isn’t new.
(This is a reason not to fall apart.)
And James should be okay with this too, and I’m sorry if that’s unfair, except that I’m kind of not.
So I just say, “How come Ian never comes here?”
“Because here is such an exciting place!”
“Like Bellevue is.”
“You have a point.”
“Seriously, though, Bee misses having you around and I do too. And I know Mason does. He calls me all like ‘let’s talk about Mrs. Hampdon being a bitch’ and I am like ‘Mason I do not go to your school.’ ”
He laughs. “She isn’t even a bitch, she’s very nice, actually. Mason just never shows up and then is all indignant when she fails him.”
“Damn educators.”
“Seriously.”
I say, “She’s not doing well, is she?”
“Yeah. I don’t . . . It’s not like she ever was, y’know? She’s not you.”
“I think for a while I thought everyone in my group was there to get better.”
“Yeah, most people are forced into it. She used to pout in the car the whole way home after.”
She doesn’t try.
Why did I think that I would be the thing to save her? All I can do is watch.
But it’s better than her going down alone, you know? If I can’t pull her up, and if I refuse to get pulled down with her, the least I can do is hold her hand.
“I want to meet Ian,” I say. “I only even know his name because I’ve been creepy and weird about it.”
“He wants to meet you too! I talk about you.”
“You do?”
“Hey, you’re my friend.”
“Bring him to a prep session sometime or something. Bianca and I have been practicing our asses off. She makes me sing until my throat’s sore.”
“Your throat wouldn’t be sore if your technique was better.”
“Ew, you sound just like her.”
“How about I bring him to a non-prep session? There’s an Irish pub by our school. You know it?”
Like there’s anywhere I don’t know in this town. “Yeah, I know it.” It’s pretty close to Cupcake. I should take everyone to Cupcake after. I am so not being serious, I do not want them to catch airborne STDs.
“There, tomorrow night? You want to tell Mason or should I?”
“Is this your way of asking about our relationship?”
“So there is a relationship.”
“I don’t know.” I pull off my shoes and find some nail polish. If we’re going to gossip about boys, I’m going to paint my toenails, thanks. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you want there to be?”
“Nope. I’m happy, he’s happy, we’re having fun. Why, has he been hinting around at something?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think so. He’s generally fine with casual.”
“See, I am too. Everyone wins.”
He pauses. “It seems like you should want more.”
“Do you have any idea how gay you sound right now? You meet the right guy and immediately want to get married. Are you sure you’re not a lesbian?”
“Hey, you’d know better than I would. Expert.”
“What does a lesbian bring on the second date?”
“Uh, what?”
“A moving van.”
He laughs. “I wouldn’t even need a moving van. Back of the pickup truck: mattress, piano, Bianca, good to go.”
“This is honestly the gayest conversation of my life.”
“Making you homesick?”
“A little bit!”
“Call Rachel.”
“Ughhh.”
“Aren’t you guys getting somewhere? Call her.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t push it.”
“Do you, um. Have a thing for her?”
I sigh. “It’s complicated.”
“That means yes.”
“No, it doesn’t, it means it’s complicated.” What am I even supposed to say? I don’t have a thing for her unless “having a thing for her” means “having a life that revolves around her” way more than it means anything sexual. If I picture a happy relationship with anyone, the thing is . . . the thing is, it’s Danielle, this girl-turned-memory who’s sitting in New York drinking espresso or reading her psychology textbook or whatever she’s doing up there. It was simple with her. Until it wasn’t. It’s different with Rachel. It always has been.
The irony of the entire situation is that I think if Danielle were still in Nebraska I wouldn’t be running quite as fast, at least. Or maybe we would have broken up even without the move. Seventeen-year-olds don’t tend to stay together until death do us part, no matter what our sweet baby James here seems to think.
“Maybe you should invite her out with us,” James says.
“I’m really incredibly not going to do that. Mason, remember?”
“I thought you weren’t a thing.”
I am not going to say that Rachel is only talking to me because she thinks I’m dating James’s sister. Nope.
So I just say, “Do your parents know about you and Ian?” even though I know the answer.
“Oh God no. Oh God no.”
“Be caaareful.”
“Yeah, I’m in my room, door locked, et cetera.”
“Bianca’s not going to tell them?”
“Of course not. Bianca’s Team Me Against the World. Always has been.”
“Always will be.”
“Yeah.”
The thing is that we have no idea what “always” is going to end up meaning for Bianca. Maybe I’m just now starting to get that this girl is really sick.
Like, physically, bone-deep sick.
“Tomorrow night,” I say.
“Yeah, you got it, kid.”
• • •
It’s becoming clearer and clearer at school that something’s going on with Kristina. I think maybe there’s some ramifications of whatever went down with that boy, and a lot of the stuff I’m seeing from her friends is pretty disgustingly similar to stuff that’s been happening with me this year. Do not taunt my sister when she’s getting her books, you assholes, I will end you.
Except before I get over to her, Rachel’s there, all of a sudden, putting all of her sixty-eight inches between Kristina and the freshmen, talking their shit down. And they finally back off and Rachel turns to Kristina and wraps her in this hug.
16
IAN, JAMES, AND BIANCA ARE already at the pub when I get there, and Mason shows up a while after. (I’m the one who told him, but I was coming from chorus so we didn’t come together. It doesn’t mean anything.) We pull an extra chair up to this little circular table and I have my fake ID ready but the waitress clearly
doesn’t care and brings a pitcher of beer to the table, whaaat why do I never come to this place? It helps that Mason looks pretty old. Mmm, he looks good tonight.
There’s a piano in the corner and after two glasses of beer James shows us why he needed to bring his piano in his fantasy moving van and damn, he is good. Bianca leans her head against my shoulder and we listen while he bangs out songs and sings and the other people in the pub are at least good-natured about it and I say to her, “How come you don’t play piano, huh?”
“I took violin for a little but I hated it. Mom let me stop.”
“Ugh, my mom never let me quit anything.”
“You quit ballet.”
“Yeah, when I was too old for her to stop me. And she never had to talk me into that in the first place. Plus, I dug my shoes up, so who knows. Potentially un-quitting.”
Bianca sits up. “You did?”
Ian says, “Wait, were they actually buried?”
“Yeah, in my backyard.”
“Aren’t they all full of worms or whatever?”
“No! My best friend and I buried them and we made a coffin and everything. Wrapped duct tape around a shoe box, buried it, made a little gravestone. ‘Here lies Etta’s subjugation to the masculine ideals of beauty.’ ”
Mason says, “You guys blame us for everything.”
Ian says, “That’s what ballet’s about?”
“I’m beginning to think maybe not,” I say.
James comes back to the table and kisses the top of my head, then Bianca’s, then Ian’s, then, after a shrug, Mason’s. Mason laughs and tackles him back into his seat. “Mason plays piano,” James says while Mason’s sitting on him to pin him down.
“You do?”
“Uh-huh, he’s really good. Play us a yarn, Mason.”
Mason rolls his eyes and heads over to the piano, and I don’t know what he’s singing (it’s not show-tuney, huh) but it’s nice, especially with all the beer. I rest my head on James’s shoulder.
“So you two,” Ian says, gesturing between James and me, “must be soul mates of some kind?”
“Whaaat?” I kiss James’s arm. “No such thing.”
“Etta is our fairy godmother,” James says.