How It Feels to Fly(9)

“Yeah. It has a lot more to offer than that. Though it’s a great football school, for sure. You a football fan?”

The question is so absurd that I actually laugh out loud. “Um, no.”

“Your loss.” Andrew flashes his warm smile in my direction. But since he’s blindfolded, it looks like he’s smiling at the trees over my left shoulder. “Anyway, I still like watching football. I go to all the home games. I just didn’t want to play anymore.”

“How come?” I ask. “I heard what you said in there, but . . .”

“I spent way too long letting my dad run the show. With him, I never had a choice. He put me in peewee when I was nine—that was the earliest my mom would let me play—and we never looked back. Playing in high school and college was a given. But when I got to UGA, it was like a lightning bolt: I did have a choice. Dr. Lancaster said something similar to me when I was here, but I didn’t really get it until I wasn’t living at home anymore, you know?”

“So you were just . . . done? Just like that?”

“You make it sound so easy. But believe me, there was time between deciding and quitting. Took me all of fall semester to get up the nerve.”

As he’s been talking, I’ve been studying his features, framed by that sandy hair. The furrow in his brow above the blindfold. A small, white scar on his chin, just off center. Thin lips, which he presses together tightly before going on: “You said last night your mom was a dancer?”

“She was in the corps de ballet at a small company in Virginia. But not long after she met my dad, she broke her ankle.”

“It ended her career?”

“Yeah. It didn’t heal properly.”

“Too bad.”

“It’s scary, how one wrong move can screw everything up.” I shudder a little. “But then my parents got married and my mom got pregnant. As soon as I was old enough, she put me in ballet classes, and I turned out to love it as much as she did.”

“It’s good she’s supportive of your dancing.”

“She totally is.”

“As long as she supports you in whatever you want to do. When I quit football, my dad about had a heart attack. Threatened to stop paying my tuition. My mom changed his mind on that one real fast.”

I can’t imagine what my mom would do if I decided to quit ballet. Luckily, I plan to never find out. “So why did you decide to come back and be a peer adviser here?”

“Fall of sophomore year, I took Intro to Psychology as a gen-ed. It made me remember being here, working with Dr. Lancaster, so I thought, why not major in psych? And then this past spring, Dr. Lancaster emailed and mentioned that she was looking for a guy and a girl to work here this summer, so I signed up. I’m actually getting college credit. I have to write a paper about this place.” He turns his head in my direction. “Everything I talk about with y’all is confidential, obviously. My essay is more about Dr. Lancaster’s methods.”

We keep walking and chatting until we reach the gazebo. Then I get back to describing what he can’t see. The white paint, peeling, with the natural wood showing through. The three stairs leading up to the center platform. The rail around the platform that looks like a picket fence. The high ceiling with abandoned birds’ nests in the eaves.

He listens, and he walks, running his hand along the side of the structure. Just as I’m describing how there’s a path that goes back into the woods, he reaches up and pulls off the blindfold.

“Hey! No cheating.” I say it like a joke, but the truth is, the instant he can see me again, I’m nervous. It was so much easier to talk to him with his eyes covered.

“I’m not cheating. It’s your turn.” He waves the bandanna at me, grinning.

I grin back, even as my anxiety bubbles up. I take the bandanna from Andrew and lift it to my face. The world goes dark. I have trouble tying the knot at the back of my head. My fingers fumble with the fabric.

“Here. I got it.” Andrew’s hands brush mine as he takes the blindfold. I drop my arms and stand totally still as he ties the ends together. He’s right behind me. It’s a little unnerving, and a little . . . something else. I feel his breath at the back of my neck—or was it the wind?

I wonder what I look like to him right now. How he’s looking at me when I can’t look back. What he thinks when he sees my body up close.

Your enormous thighs. That muffin top you think you’re hiding. The way your bra pinches in, giving you back fat. Fat fat fat fat— I want to curl inward, to shrink. But I force myself to stand tall.

“Okay!” I say, and again my voice rings out like a sour note. “I’m ready!”

He’s staring at you. He’s disgusted by you.

I make fists, digging my nails into my palms.

“Turn around halfway,” Andrew says.

“Halfway? Like, a hundred and eighty degrees?”

“What is this—math class? Yeah, a hundred and eighty degrees. Give or take.”

I rotate my right leg out at the hip until my feet are in a perfect first position: heels together, toes pointed in opposite directions. Planting my right foot, I rotate to face it.

Andrew lets out a snort of laughter.

He’s laughing at you he’s laughing at you he’s laughing at you he’s laughing— “Why didn’t I think of that?” he says. “Note to self: ballet feet. Nice.” I hear him move away, the crunch of weight on twigs getting softer. “Okay, ten steps toward my voice, straight ahead. We’re going around the other side of the gazebo. It, uh, looks the same as the part you showed me earlier.”