The Love That Split the World(72)

We let ourselves into the first studio we come to. The lights stutter on, illuminating gray vinyl floors, two mirrored walls, and a scraped-up wooden piano beside a rack of sound equipment. Beau walks across the room and sits down at the piano, tapping out “Happy Birthday” with one finger.

“Beautiful,” I say. “A true work of art.”

He smiles down at the keys and adds his other hand, picking up a slow, quivering song that deepens the chills along my neck. He drops his hands into his lap and looks up at me. “You gonna dance?”

I walk to the middle of the floor and sit down to stretch. “It’s cold,” I say.

“Want me to warm you up, Cleary?”

“Somehow I think that won’t end with me dancing.”

“No, probably not.”

I stand up and meet Beau’s gaze in the mirror. “This is incredibly awkward.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m dancing for an audience of one. Who does that?”

“Strippers?”

“Okay, I’ll just pretend I’m a stripper. That’ll make this so much easier.”

He nods. “Or you can picture me in my underwear.”

I cover my face and laugh-groan. “I think you’re going to have to close your eyes.”

“Shyest stripper I ever met,” he says.

“And how many strippers have you met, Beau Wilkes?”

“Not too many,” he says. “A few dozen.”

I groan again, walk over to stand behind him, and cover his face with my palms. I feel his mouth shift into a smile under my hands. “That better?” he asks, starting to play blind.

“I’m going to turn the light off too,” I say.

“Fine.”

“Fahn.”

“Fahn.”

“Please keep your eyes closed,” I beg.

He grips my wrists lightly and pulls them down in front of him, against his stomach. I lean around his shoulder to look into his face and see his eyes scrunched closed. “Thanks,” I say. He presses one of my palms to his mouth, and my whole body warms as I unwind myself from him and go to the light switch. “Keep them closed.”

“You’re the boss.”

When he starts to play, I close my eyes and listen, trying to let all my nerves and discomfort seep out. It’s easier than I would’ve expected—he plays so beautifully it’s like the song is a piece of him that’s reached outside his body to meet me, and it’s drawing me out of myself too, leaving no walls standing between us. The way he plays piano makes me wish I could see him play football too. I bet he’s graceful like Matt, but less subdued. I imagine he plays untamed, unfettered, un-self-conscious, the same way he plays the piano. With simultaneous tenderness and abandon, making mistakes that only serve to make those periods of perfection seem more beautiful and real, overflowing with life and possibility. He plays the piano like he’s falling and, at any second, his fingers could completely miss the keys. Seeing people do the things they love has always fascinated and inspired me. Seeing Beau doing the thing he loves now actually makes me want to dance, to live so big my life swallows the entire world.

I start to move. It’s nothing like doing jazz or pom routines with the Ryle dance team. It’s like that first ballet class I took. I’m a tree growing; I’m sun warming the earth. An avalanche and a wave glancing off rock, and oil sliding through the palms of ancient hands, and in all that time, I’m also me and nothing else. I’m not my mother’s straight-backed walk or my sister’s beating hummingbird wings, and it’s fine.

It is good. The people I love are in me, little flecks like mica in a creek bed. There are strangers in me too, with my face and hands and feet, a voice that spoke to me while I was nothing but a peanut-sized inkling in her belly; a hand that held mine as we walked down the street. This hurts, but it’s good to move and be all the things I am but can’t explain. It’s good to let my body bear the tension instead of my mind. I try to become the music, to absorb a piece of Beau into my limbs, and soon I’m lost in the darkness of the room, the swirl of the piano keys, the sweat wetting my hairline, my neck, my armpits, my legs as I leap and roll and hinge and turn. I am muscle and sinew, crunch and push, gather and swell. I am roundness, fullness. I am smallness, a tiny important thing tearing through the Earth.

My mind wanders. I fall deeper and deeper into the song, into the dance, into my own memory. The song fades away, and still I keep moving until the last burst of energy thrusts out of me and I feel myself fade and settle like once-disrupted sand falling back asleep on the ocean floor. When all of me has finally stilled, except my overworking lungs, I look up into the mirror and see Beau behind me, standing beside the bench. He’s leaning against the piano, eyes visibly soft even in the darkness. “Why’d you stop?” he says quietly.

I run a hand over my neck. It feels like it’s been hours since I last spoke, and my heart is still racing. “You stopped playing.”

“No, I mean, why’d you quit?”

I cross the room to the far wall, whose top half is composed of windows overlooking the campus, and lean against the barre. Beau follows, splays his hands out on the wooden post. He waits and watches. “It’s hard to explain,” I tell him.

He doesn’t push for more, and maybe that’s why, after a minute, I offer it to him. “My mom was a dancer. Not my biological mother—my mom,” I say. “And my little sister, Coco. She’s talented, wants to be in musical theater.” Beau looks at me patiently and waits for me to go on. “My dad was into sports, and my brother, Jack, is on the football team. They look like our parents too. I mean, the portrait on our mantel could be an ad for the nuclear family, and then there’s me standing off to the side, ten shades darker. Mom used to always tell me: It doesn’t matter how things look—we’re family. And we are. I know that. But I guess after Grandmother left, I admitted to myself that it wasn’t only the way we looked that was different.”