The Love That Split the World(73)
“So?” Beau says.
I sigh and try to regain traction on my thoughts, which all swam out of me while I was dancing. I feel emotionally stretched out, loose and relaxed, unable to track down my usual knots.
“So as a kid, I felt different from everyone, and the way I combatted that was to make sure no one else noticed, and that meant doing a lot of things I didn’t really want to do. But after Grandmother left, everything I’d done to fit in just made me feel sick. I didn’t want to be around anyone, other than Megan, because I was so self-conscious that I was pretending, and I didn’t know how to stop.
“And then one night, my whole family went to one of Coco’s recitals. She and this kid Michael Banks were doing a rendition of the duet from La Sylphide. It was beautiful. She was beautiful, completely in control and elegant. I’ve never danced like that in my life. Dad and Jack were practically asleep, but then I looked over at my mom and she was crying, and the way I felt right then, it was stupid, but I was jealous and hurt and I hated it. And then that night, I went home, and I started Googling Indian reservations in Alabama. I’d thought about doing it a million times before that, but I always felt guilty, like I was betraying my parents. That night I just didn’t care. There was a word, something my birth mother called herself the one time she visited me, ishki. So I started with that. It means mother, in Chickasaw and Choctaw, so I had a pretty good idea she came from one of those nations.”
“Did you find her?” Beau asks.
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I only really looked at one reservation before I kind of freaked out. There were pictures of people from the tribe, and I guess I didn’t expect that.”
“Because one of them might’ve been your birth mom?”
I nod. “But on their home page there was this interview with a girl from the tribe who’d just gotten a teaching job at Brown, after finishing a grad program there. I clicked on it mostly just to get away from the photos, but she was talking about how Brown was such a great place to learn and meet different kinds of people, and how before she went to college she didn’t really appreciate her home or her heritage, but that getting some space helped her see it differently, and now she knew she wanted to come back eventually but first she wanted to inspire young people to care about their histories and their traditions. And I want all that—to study something I love and meet people who are like me and not like me and graduate with a plan for how I’m going to make the world better. And I want to stop competing with my siblings and doing things just so people see me a certain way. And maybe someday I’ll like board games and window-shopping and movies about sports teams and dance team kick-lines, but right now I just want to start over, somewhere far away where no one expects anything from me and I can just be myself. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense,” he says, “but I think you’re wrong. Maybe not about all of it, but about dancing. Maybe you don’t dance like your sister or your mom, but anything with eyes could tell that it’s a part of you, Natalie. I’ve never seen you look more like yourself.”
“More like myself, huh?”
A small smile pulls at his mouth. “Don’t make fun of me. I’m tryin’ to be serious.” His lips settle into a straight line again. “You shouldn’t give dancing up just ’cause you think it belongs to someone else.”
I sigh. “What about you and football?”
His head tilts back in a silent laugh. “That’s different.”
“How?”
“Wasn’t my choice.”
“Beau, be honest with me. Were you scouted?”
He runs a hand down the back of his hair. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Natalie, I only graduated high school because teachers made up my grades so I could play. You think I’m gonna go off and get a college degree?”
“I think you could. I also think college athletic departments are every bit as corrupt as high schools’, and they’d probably make up your grades there too.”
“Maybe,” he says. “And in the meantime, Mason would be here, losing the house, and I’d be sitting through class, going crazy.”
“Couldn’t Mason work more or get a roommate or something? It’s four years, Beau, and it could change your life.”
“Maybe I don’t wanna change my life,” he snaps, and when I recoil from him, he settles against the barre again and runs a hand over his mouth then fixes his eyes on me. “I don’t want all that. That’s not what matters to me.”
“Okay,” I relent. “What do you want, Beau?” He stares at me for a long moment, and I start to feel shaky and full. “Beau, what is it you want?”
“A porch,” he says softly. He says it like it’s my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. “All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.”
24
On Thursday morning, after a particularly unsuccessful appointment with Alice, I head over to the school to get Jack. I pull around behind the field house as practice is winding down, roll down the windows, and close my eyes while I wait. Now that the Jeep is back in working order, I’m back to dropping off and picking up Jack, and now that I’m spending the middle of the night at the dance studio with Beau, the mornings are insufferable.