How It Feels to Fly(2)

I consider staying to work out alone, with screeching violins and screams as my soundtrack, but the magic is gone. I used to be able to completely lose myself in dance, no matter where I was or what was happening around me. Ballet was my safest space. Then my body changed. I got curvy, and I got self-conscious. I couldn’t stop thinking about everyone looking at me—what they were seeing. When the comments started coming—both painfully kind and sweetly cruel—I heard them echo inside my head. Before long, my nasty inner voice had more to say about me, and worse, than anyone else ever could.

You’re fat. You’re weak. You’re worthless.

You might as well—

I can do my conditioning exercises upstairs, in the thin strip of space between my bed and Zoe’s. That’ll have to work, despite the storm in my stomach. The only way to kill the panic is to dance through it.

Even that barely helps these days.

But I’m coping. I am.

And Perform at Your Peak, a summer camp/treatment facility for elite teen artists and athletes with anxiety issues, is supposed to give me even more coping mechanisms. That’s what the website says. It’s what Dr. Debra Lancaster, the director here, talked about earlier this evening, at orientation. When she was telling the six of us campers about all the different types of activities we’ll be doing—one-on-one therapy sessions with her, group discussions, simulations of real-life situations we might face—she sounded so confident. She’s sure we’ll get something positive out of this experience.

I want to believe her. It’s just so hard to ignore the voice in my head.

Everything about you is wrong. Nothing can make it better. Nothing except—

I look at Zoe, who’s lounging on the sofa with her feet propped up on the wooden coffee table. She’s drumming on her thigh with the remote, eyes narrowed at the screen. When a guy jumps out from behind a shed and tackles the axe murderer to the ground, only to get immediately axe murdered, she throws her arms in the air and cheers. “Way to die, idiot!”

“So, um, see you upstairs?” My voice comes out more like a squawk than I want it to.

Zoe doesn’t even glance my way. “You’re still here?”

The other thing Dr. Lancaster kept mentioning at orientation earlier was group cohesion. She wants us to bond with one another, so we feel comfortable discussing our feelings. She made us do all these getting-to-know-you exercises. We had to toss a beanbag around the circle, shouting a random fact about ourselves each time we caught it. And we played a version of Simon Says where we took turns giving instructions, going faster and faster. It might’ve all been okay—if we were anywhere else. And clearly, the bonding didn’t take. Not with sarcastic Zoe, and not with frosty Jenna, and not with the other three campers—Katie, Dominic, and Omar—who vanished to their rooms the moment we were released.

Not that I blame them. The games felt so forced. Like a distraction from why we’re really here, or a trick to get us to let down our guard. A bait and switch. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to have someone to talk to for the next three weeks.

I walk out into the hallway. It’s empty. I’m alone.

I let my face relax. My cheeks are sore from smiling. I massage them with my fingers. I dance more than twenty hours a week, but lately it’s been the muscles in my face that hurt the most.

I pass the stairs to the second floor and head for the kitchen. I’m thirsty. I’ll need to stay hydrated if I’m going to keep exercising. Plus, filling my stomach with water will distract me from the hunger that’s creeping in. I don’t eat after eight p.m., as a rule, so water will have to do until morning.

When I enter the kitchen, the fridge door is open. I can see a guy’s legs sticking out underneath. At the sound of my footsteps on the tile, the door moves. A head pokes around it. It’s the guy counselor—I mean “peer adviser.” Andrew. He and our other peer adviser, Yasmin, are former campers at Perform at Your Peak. Success stories, according to Dr. Lancaster, who looked like a proud mom when she introduced them earlier.

“Hey there,” Andrew says.

Suck that gut in. Now!

“Hi,” I say, my smile snapping into place as I adjust my posture.

“You hungry?” Andrew steps away from the fridge, letting the door swing closed. He’s holding a loaf of bread, a pack of cold cuts, a hunk of cheese, a tomato, a jar of pickles, and mustard and mayo. All crooked in one arm.

“No, thanks. I just wanted a glass of water.” At the sight of all that food, my stomach rumbles. I can’t look at it, not for too long, so I look at him instead. He’s cute, in a wholesome way. Like he should be on a farm milking cows or something. He has warm brown eyes. A nice smile.

He dumps his bounty on the counter, grabbing the pickle jar before it rolls off the edge. “Well, the first thing you need to know about me is I’m always hungry. I think it’s a football-player thing.”

“I think it’s a guy thing,” I say, moving past him to get a glass from the cabinet. “My boyf—my ex,” I correct myself quickly. “He basically never stopped eating.” I keep my voice light. Like thinking about Marcus, what he said to me a few days ago, doesn’t hurt a bit.

Andrew laughs. “As a guy and a former football player, I eat twice as much as anyone else I know.”

I barely register that he said former football player—if that’s true, how can he be a Perform at Your Peak success story?—before my nasty inner voice kicks in: