You in Five Acts(6)

I glanced quickly to my left, where Lolly Andersen was admiring her form en pointe, her sleek auburn hair swept back in a chignon so tight it threatened to drag her eyebrows right off her face. Lolly had what most people considered the ideal ballet body, as pale and fat-free as a diet vanilla yogurt. She thought she was hot shit because she’d understudied a Marzipan in The Nutcracker when she was twelve. She was a self-described “bunhead,” which is why, I guess, she thought it was her place to tell me, in the locker room freshman year, that I had “more of a modern dancer’s body,” before trying to touch my hair without asking. I’d never forgiven her.

“If that happens, I really will look like this—permanently,” I said, baring my teeth in a psychotic fake smile. You had to press your lips together to keep from laughing.

“Good,” you said. “You and me, blowin’ up like spotlights, right?” I can’t remember when you’d started saying that, but it was an inside joke by then. You held up a closed fist and I bumped it, both of us sending our fingers splaying out backward like fireworks. It was never a question whether you’d get a lead in Showcase. I, on the other hand, was a long shot. I’d seen the performance every single year, so I knew the kinds of girls they picked to do dance solos: the willowy, flat-chested ones with the perfect form and delicate bones and all the stage presence of a feather. Not the ones with strong, curvy thighs or breasts that had to be squished into too-tight leotards so they wouldn’t “be a distraction.” Being a distraction meant that a part of your body was acting like a curve instead of a line—or that your skin didn’t match your tights, or that your short, natural hair refused to transform into a gleaming, flat-ironed Barbie bun. I heard it a lot, and every time it made my blood boil. Nobody had ever told me outright, You shouldn’t be here, but I’d gotten wise to their code words. I knew what they meant.

Still—“Just like spotlights,” I said, holding my breath.

? ? ?


At 4:30 P.M. sharp the teachers filed in and we all sat down along the periphery of the room. I ended up between Lolly and Eunice Lee, but both of them immediately turned away from me to whisper to the person on their other side. Not about me—at least, I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell who rejected who first, me or them. All I know is I came in on the first day, kept my head down, clung to Liv in between classes like an oxygen tank, and then showed up on the second day to find everyone had found their people already, and that there was no room for me. Except with you.

I caught your eye across the room and, when I was sure none of the instructors were looking, mimed a silent scream. You shook your head and then pointed at me, nodding. You got this.

“So,” Ms. Adair said, letting the word hang in the air for a while, suspended on the tension. “Welcome to the last audition of your Janus career.” There was some scattered murmuring and a few weak claps until you let out a jubilant howl that got the whole room laughing.

“Thank you, Diego,” Ms. Adair said with a slightly annoyed smile. “This is a cause for celebration. You’ve all come incredibly far in your training, and now is your chance to show it off.” She drew in a dramatic breath that seemed to pull an invisible string through her spine, raising her up a few inches. Her skin was almost translucent, the veins weaving like wires over the muscles in her arms and legs. When she wore all black, which was most of the time, it gave her the look of an extremely toned vampire.

Sofia Adair had been a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and had taken over the department hell-bent on making Janus competitive with her own alma mater, the company’s feeder school. (The reason she didn’t just teach there, according to gossip, was a stormy affair with a fellow principal dancer that had ended badly and led to a falling-out with ballet master Peter Martins.) She liked to constantly remind us that we were “dancing uphill” as far as professional recruitment was concerned.

“We’re going to be brutal today,” she said. “If we see something that needs work, we’ll tell you, because our goal for May is across-the-board flawlessness.” Ms. Adair glanced at me as she said that last word, drawing it out in a hiss like water on a hot pan, and I instinctively sucked in my stomach and drew back my shoulders. They were, I’d been repeatedly told, “problem areas” that I needed to “work on lengthening.” In ballet-speak, that meant thin out. But I was built like my mom, a high school track star, tall and strong, all muscle except for the places my grandma awkwardly called my “womanly parts.” Sometimes it felt like the only thing that could make me rise in my teachers’ esteem was to reduce myself. That didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem fair.

I looked over at Mr. Dyshlenko, crammed onto a folding chair by the piano, and caught him subtly but unmistakably rolling his eyes. He was a former member of the Bolshoi Ballet who looked like an angry, aging Ken doll and who liked to yell at people for being too perfect. “Dance is about expressing the passion of the human spirit!” he had told us one time when we got paired for a sophomore recital. “You’ve got to have blood in your veins to move, so feel it pulsing! You should look like tortured lovers, not robots! If I want to look at robots I can watch the E! channel.” But I hardly ever got to take class with him; he was mainly dedicated to training the boys or working on the Showcase pas de deux. Since Ms. Adair was my advisor and the teacher for Pointe as well as Ballet 7 and 8, the highest-level classes Janus offered, I mostly worked with her. I knew this was supposed to make me feel lucky, but I didn’t feel lucky. Ms. Adair demanded surgical precision. She liked her dancing bloodless.