How It Feels to Fly(44)

“It does, yeah.”

“Type matters for me, too. People don’t want an actor with my skin color, or they want a brown kid, but it has to be a guy who’s more conventionally hot. And sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter whether I’m any good. You know?”

“I know.”

“Is that why you’re anxious? Because you feel like it doesn’t matter how good you are?”

It’s so simple. So true. “That’s part of it.”

“Do your parents support you?”

“My dad’s not around. My parents are divorced. But my mom . . . yeah, you could say she’s supportive.”

“My parents were supportive of me acting when I was little. But my dad’s a physicist and my mom’s an anesthesiologist, so you can imagine how well it went over when their only son told them he wanted to be on Broadway, like, as a career.”

“My mom used to dance, so she gets it.”

“Wow. Lucky.”

“Yeah. Lucky,” I echo.

A minute later, Dr. Lancaster returns with a bottle of Elmer’s. “What does the glue represent?” she asks, handing it to me.

I unscrew the cap. “Maybe . . . new coping mechanisms for anxiety? Like, what I was doing before wasn’t working, so let’s try something new?”

“That makes sense. Anything else?”

I think for a moment. “We talked on Thursday about my support system. That’s kind of like glue, holding me together when I can’t do it myself. Right?”

“Right.” Dr. Lancaster looks like she wants to be smiling even bigger than she’s letting herself smile. It’s embarrassing. I’m glad when she says, “Well, knock yourself out. We have fifteen minutes before we trade partners.”

I think about holding the cards in place while the glue dries. “I know Omar’s not supposed to help me,” I say, “but I’m going to need more hands.”

“Okay,” Dr. Lancaster says, nodding. “Omar can assist you. Yasmin too.” She beckons her over.

It doesn’t take long to find our rhythm. Yasmin holds a pair of cards while I run a seam of glue between them. Meanwhile, Omar preps the next apex, so that Yasmin doesn’t have to let go of her upside-down V until it’s dry enough to stand on its own. And then they switch.

“When we did this activity my year,” Yasmin tells us, “I had to teach my partner how to line-dance, and he had to teach me how to ride a unicycle.”

“A unicycle?” Omar asks. “What’s that a metaphor for?”

“Balance, I suppose.” Yasmin carefully lets go of the cards she’s holding. They stay up. “I wasn’t really thinking about it that way. I was more worried about looking like an idiot in front of my partner. He was this super-cute soccer player from Florida. I had the biggest crush on him.”

I run a line of glue along Omar’s cards. “Did you two keep in touch?”

“For a few months. I never said anything about the crush, though. Performing onstage wasn’t the only thing I was afraid of in high school.” She sets up the next pair of cards and waits for me to glue them into place.

When Dr. Lancaster calls for us to switch activities, Yasmin gets to her feet. “I’m on double-Dutch duty now,” she says. “It was nice to chat with you, Sam. Maybe we can talk more this week?”

“Sure,” I say, but I’m already distracted: Andrew’s walking over.

“That looks like a solid metaphor,” he says.

“Ha, ha.”

“Want me to take it upstairs for you?”

“Maybe later.” For now, I want to keep looking at it. I have to admit that I like seeing it standing there. Finished. Not falling.

“Just let me know when. In the meantime,” Andrew says, holding up the jump rope, “you get to witness something no one has ever seen before.”

“Speaking of things no one has ever seen before . . . ,” Zoe says. She and Katie are looking at the VCR from all angles. “How old is this thing, Dr. Lancaster?”

“It’s from 1989. Have fun with those instructions.”

I turn to Omar. He’s picked a piece of origami paper. It’s teal, and it makes me think about my conversation with Andrew over breakfast. The sky at sunset.

“Good choice,” I say. “That’s my favorite color.”

He smiles, but it’s more like a grimace. His nerves are back. “Let’s do this.”

“Fold the page in half horizontally,” I say.

He does.

Three folds in, I know we’re in trouble. “I—I need to start over,” Omar says. He crumples the sheet of paper and throws it aside. “I didn’t fold it right.”

“Okay.” I hand him another sheet of teal paper.

He pushes it away. “Not teal. Maybe red will work.”

“Okay.” We start again. This time, we do five folds before he’s backtracking.

“The creases have to be sharper,” he says, almost to himself, as he does it again.

“What you’re doing looks just like the picture on my instructions—” I start, trying to encourage him, but he makes a frustrated noise and wads the paper up.

“Green,” he says, sounding a little frantic. “We’ll try green.”