How It Feels to Fly(21)

But then Dr. Lancaster finds me. “Sam,” she says. “We need to discuss why you’re avoiding meals.”

“I’m not—”

“Did you eat?”

I show her my empty plate, complete with bread crumbs.

“Then we’ll start your afternoon session a few minutes early. Come with me.”

We go to her office. She shuts the door and points at the couch. I drop into it, the feeling of peace I got from my private lunch evaporating.

“You need to eat, Sam—in the dining room, with everyone else.”

“But—”

“It’s not negotiable. Part of my job here is to keep all of you safe and healthy. For you, that means making sure you’re eating.”

“I eat! I promise, I do.”

Too much. And too often.

“I don’t have a problem with food.” Frustrated tears prick at my eyes, and feeling those tears makes me even more frustrated. “Why do I have to prove it? Why can’t you trust me?”

“Because—” For a second, I think Dr. Lancaster is going to pull a Because I said so, but instead she says, “I see your reluctance to eat. I see you counting what’s on your plate. Forcing yourself to eat more than you want—or less.”

The fight drains out of me. Shame settles in. “You see all that?” I whisper.

“I’m trained to see it,” Dr. Lancaster says patiently.

I curl up on the couch, the sandwich I wolfed down becoming a knife in my gut.

“Do you want to tell me about the eyes?” She pulls out the collage I left under my chair in the Dogwood Room. “What do they symbolize?”

“You’re the therapist. You tell me.”

“Can you tell me about a time when someone was looking at you and you didn’t like it?” She’s quoting my own words back at me.

“Want me to make a list?”

Dr. Lancaster looks thoughtful. “Actually, yes.”

I sit upright. “I was being sarcastic.”

She smiles. “I know. But you’re all going to get journals tomorrow anyway. Maybe I’ll give you a head start.”

“Great.” I wait a beat. “That was also sarcasm, by the way.”

Dr. Lancaster rummages around in a desk drawer and pulls out a selection of spiral-bound notebooks. “Blue, green, or purple?” she asks, fanning them out.

“Um. Green, I guess.”

“Excellent choice.” She hands it to me. “Before tomorrow’s session, I want you to write about at least three instances when you struggled with being looked at.”

“Three? By tomorrow?”

“You don’t have to write a novel about each one. A few paragraphs will do.” She crosses her legs, giving me a keen look. “Do you want to go ahead and get started, or would you rather keep talking to me?”

An easy choice. “I’ll take the extra writing time.”

“All right. But I need you to take this assignment seriously. And I think you need you to take it seriously too.” She motions to the door. “I’ll let you get to work.”

I SET UP camp in the gazebo Andrew and I explored yesterday. I lean back into a corner, legs extended out on the wooden bench, ankles crossed, with the notebook in my lap. There’s a breeze blowing. I feel it rustling my ponytail. And while the sun is blazing down, it’s cooler in the shade of the gazebo’s roof. I can see waves of heat radiating in the distance, but I’m not even sweating.

I doodle a flower in the margin of the paper. I add some swirly spirals around it and then shade in the petals.

I don’t know what to write.

Andrew and Dominic come out the back door. Dominic has a football in one hand. He laughs at something Andrew says and then gives Andrew a friendly shove. Andrew shoves him back. Then they go to opposite ends of the lawn and start passing the ball back and forth. I watch the way Dominic launches the ball into its smooth arc. I watch it spiral through the air. I watch Andrew jump to catch it, cradling it close. It’s like a choreographed dance: pas de trois for two men and a football.

You’re stalling.

“I know,” I tell my inner voice.

So get on with it. Write out each and every humiliation. Live it all over again.

I tap my pen on the page, thinking. Remembering.

Then I start to write about the day the cast list went up for our spring performance. At my studio, we do a mixed-rep show in the early fall, Nutcracker in December, and then alternate between a full-length story ballet and a mixed-rep show every other spring. This year we did the variations from Paquita, a Spanish-infused classical tutu ballet, along with two new ballets by guest choreographers.

I got a solo in Paquita. The variation that begins with all the leaps from the upstage left corner and has the arabesque and attitude pirouettes in the middle. My favorite, the one I’d always dreamed of performing.

I wasn’t so lucky with the other ballets. I was cast in the corps de ballet in one and was an understudy in the other.

This was mid-February—my body was already well on its way to being the disaster it is now—but I was still surprised. Still hurt. And then I went upstairs to the lobby, where I found my mom talking to Tabitha’s mom.

“Are you disappointed?” Mrs. Hoyt asked.