The Turnout(79)

Dara heard the dull crack of feet pressed against seatbacks and turned, spotting the same spiky thicket of fellow Level IV girls—Pepper Weston, Gracie Hent, Iris Cartwright—their legs hanging over the seats, their heads dipping up and down from their phones to the stage. Pepper silently stitching elastic bands to her slippers and occasionally yawning.

They weren’t making any noise, but they were still asserting their presence and Bailey’s eyes kept flitting to their corner.

“Our Clara is relentless,” Madame Sylvie whispered over Dara’s shoulder.

“She’s sending a message,” Dara said.

The light board operator called for a pause and Bailey stopped a moment, hands on her hips, catching a breath, bending at the waist to steady herself.

From the thicket came the abrupt screech of a quickly suppressed laugh.

“Bailey,” Dara called out, “do you need five?”

Bailey paused, trying not to look at the Level IV girls, their low whispers, their prison-yard stares, Pepper’s slit-eyed gaze lifting to the stage.

“No,” Bailey insisted, lifting her body back in her arabesque, one impossibly long arm up, one out, holding the Nutcracker, her left leg in the air, her right leg planted still.

“Bailey,” Dara repeated, rising, moving down the aisle, thinking of the dazed, glassy look on the girl’s face after her time locked in the supply closet, after the pins in her shoes. “Let’s take a break.”

You have to leave them to it, their mother used to say about the plight of Claras every year. It’s jungle logic. You have to let them handle it amongst themselves.

“I don’t need it,” Bailey insisted, teeth gritted as Dara approached the lip of the stage. “I’m really fine.”

With that, her arms fell, the Nutcracker slipping from her hands, clattering to the stage floor just as Bailey leaned over at the waist and vomited.



* * *



*

You’ll be okay,” Dara said, both of them bent over the stagehand’s bucket, deep in the wings now. “Let’s take you to the restroom.”

Bailey didn’t say anything, her hands on her hips, taking long gulping breaths.

“Maybe it was something she ate,” someone said.

Dara turned and saw Gracie Hent lingering in the shadows, her face dark.

“Someone brought cookies from the deli at break,” Gracie added coolly, her eyes on Bailey. “The cookies had mold.”

There was such a boldness to the girl, a barbarism to her. This pink waif, her tidy bun.

“And how do you know that, Mademoiselle Hent?” Dara said sternly, moving toward her.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bailey blurted, reaching for Dara. “Forget it.” Clearing her throat, lifting her voice. “I’m fine now.”

Dara looked at the girl, her face wet and her eyes glittering, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

This was, Dara had to remind herself, the same girl who once burst into tears over a correction (Elbows ups! No chicken wings!), who had, for years, fretted openly over her body, the length of her neck, and burst into tears again when girls started calling her stub neck, nub neck. The girl who, just six weeks ago, had wondered over Clara, over her own talents—that girl was gone.

Good for her, Dara thought. Good.



* * *



*

Everyone was exhausted and they’d dismissed half the cast, Marie ordering a sheaf of pizzas for the rest, the smell of grease and cardboard and little-girl burps everywhere, because the six-and seven-year-old mice still needed to rehearse, which they should have done hours ago when they were still pitched and excited, stroking their acrylic mouse paws and dying to get onstage. Now they looked greasy, bloated, their bellies like pigeon breasts.

Dara slumped in fifth-row center as Marie and Madame Sylvie tried to rouse them, clapping and calling out the steps.

It was funny seeing Marie onstage, her fists sunk in the pockets of their father’s cardigan, her bleached hair the same whiteness as her face, her long, mottled neck. Mottled with brown bruises that lingered past the life of their maker, his thumbprints still on her somehow.

It was funny to see her up there, working, but it also felt natural, right.

Dara’s phone lit up and it was Charlie.

“I should be there,” he said. “I thought I’d feel better after I took the baclofen. I just . . .”

She started to tell him about the news article but somehow she couldn’t, his voice so fragile and eager.

“We’re nearly done,” Dara said, her eyes on the stage as “mice,” their wrists bent for flat paws, scurried under the lights more antically now, the recorded music booming. “Let’s try it with the heads now!” she shouted to the stage.

On the phone, Charlie was still talking.

“But I think I can still get a PT appointment,” Charlie was saying. “A late one. Nine o’clock.”

“Pay the extra,” Dara said. “Helga’s worth it.”

“Follow my voice,” Marie was saying onstage.

The mice were putting on their mouse heads, Marie standing over them, helping them with all the foam and fur. The heat underneath, which Dara still remembered from the years she was a mouse, blind and breathless.

“I miss you,” Charlie said, sounding so far away.