How It Feels to Fly(43)

It turns out: pretty hard. Especially with all the other activities going on. Yasmin and Andrew bring a folding table into the Dogwood Room for us. I’m given a new deck of cards and Omar’s given a sheet of instructions. I’m not allowed to look at his paper, and he’s not allowed to touch the cards.

“Lean a pair of cards against each other to create an apex,” Omar reads. “That’s an upside-down V. Like a tent.” He raises his voice to be heard over Zoe, who’s already barking at Katie about separating different-sized screws and finding the Allen wrench.

I follow his instructions. “Done.”

“Make five more like that, in a row, touching one another.”

I set up tents two and three and am carefully pulling my hands away from tent four when Dominic pops a balloon and curses loudly. I jump and my cards scatter.

Zoe curses back at him. “Can you not do that?”

“Sorry,” Dominic says, and blows up another balloon.

I start building my house of cards again. I focus on my hands. On not breathing too hard. I tune out Katie’s hammering and the teeth-grinding squeaks of Dominic’s balloon twisting.

This time, I’m on the second level when everything comes tumbling down.

“Um, it says that if you use glossy cards, they can slip against one another. Maybe these cards are too glossy?” Omar is tapping his hand against the table. When I start rebuilding, he moves the tapping to his thigh.

“Maybe,” I murmur, dropping a pair of cards into place.

“I don’t like watching you do this,” he confesses. “It’s making me anxious.”

I glance at him. “Can you try to breathe, like we practiced yesterday?”

He nods at me. “Yeah. Okay.”

“But don’t breathe at the cards.”

“Right.” He turns sideways.

I keep building. Card after card, each set gently against its neighbor. While Omar is taking in gulps of air, I’m holding my breath. When my hands start to tremble, I rub them together to make the trembling stop.

All of a sudden, it’s really important for me to finish this tower. Such a delicate thing. So hard to construct, and so easy to topple.

I lay a card flat across the top of two tents and sit back, taking in a ragged breath.

“Are you okay?” Omar asks.

I nod. “Mm-hmm.”

“You look upset.”

“I’m fine.” I look at his worried face. “Okay, yes, I’m upset. And it’s stupid. This—” I gesture at the half-finished tower. My hand moves the air, and the structure wavers. I gasp. But it stays up. “It’s a metaphor, right?”

Dr. Lancaster is walking over, looking interested.

“You did this on purpose,” I tell her.

“What’s that?”

“The house of cards—it’s a metaphor. It’s me.”

“How so?”

I glare at her, and then at the tower. “Isn’t it obvious? Everything about me is shaky. I’m barely holding together. Breathe too hard, and I fall apart.”

As if on cue, Dominic accidentally pops another balloon. Katie shrieks in surprise, and I jump and bump the table, and my tower collapses.

I put my head in my hands. “You couldn’t at least let us work somewhere quiet and calm?” I say to Dr. Lancaster, through gritted teeth.

“We don’t always get to choose where we build our towers,” she says.

More metaphors. Great.

“Sometimes there are distractions. There are setbacks. How do you proceed?”

“I can build it again,” I say. “Start from scratch. But . . . it’s just going to keep falling down. It’s the same tower. The same cards.”

“So how can you improve your chances of having it stand?”

I know we’re not really talking about the house of cards anymore, but I can’t resist saying, “I don’t know. Glue?”

She smiles. “Interesting. I’ll get some.” She leaves the room.

That’s when I realize no one else is doing anything. They’ve been watching. Listening. Having their attention on me brings back the skin-crawling feeling I hate. “Can you all not look at me right now?” I ask, mortified.

“Sure,” Dominic says. “Back to my balloons. My baby sister’s gonna flip when she finds out I can do this.”

“I don’t think that”—Jenna points at the squiggle in his hands—“counts as a balloon animal.”

He waves it at her. “This is totally a poodle. Use your imagination.”

“Okay, break’s over, back to work,” Zoe tells Katie. “You need to find eight screws that look like this.” She points at a tiny metal piece.

Omar and I sit, not looking at each other. But by the way he’s wiggling in his chair, I can tell he has something to say. “What is it?” I finally ask.

“How can you not like people looking at you?” His eyes are wide behind his round glasses. “You and me—we’re performers. We do what we do to be seen, right?”

“I guess.”

“Is it because you gained weight?” He says it without malice, just repeating what I told the group a few days ago. Still, I flinch. “I know a little bit about the dance world,” he goes on. “The musical-theater side of it, but still. It must suck.”