1
The street is dark, and the sidewalk is ice, and the headline of my obituary is going to read “Dancer’s Bright Future Cut Short by Frostbitten Butt, Embarrassment.”
But I keep slip-sliding along, hood up and shoulders hunched inside my raggedy parka, because I’m so close now. So close to warmth and friends, the two-story brick house glowing like an ember in front of me, the faint thump of bass already reaching my frozen ears.
And when the front door blows out of my iced-over fingers on the downbeat, music and warm light pouring into the cold and sweeping around me, it’s like coming alive. The bass is so much louder than all the half excuses in my head—too wiped from rehearsing, too tired to see Gavin, too worried about Monday and what it means for my entire future—
I let the anxiety rush out of me in a gust of breath. I’m already grinning as I step inside.
“Oh my gosh! Addie!” Katherine screams, appearing in the crowded entryway like magic to fling her arms around me, squeezing all the bulk of my coat, knocking my hood back and dragging me into the house in a flurry of love and long limbs, flushed-pink skin, blond ponytail. “You made it!”
“I didn’t die from frostbite!” I shout, delighted and maybe a little surprised, as always. I’ve still got the Florida-girl constitution, despite three and a half years of boarding school in the frozen wasteland of Michigan.
She grabs my hand and we plunge into the crowd, the house packed, voices and hip-hop music echoing off the high ceilings. “I told them you would make it!” she yells back over her shoulder.
Katherine is happiness and cotton candy spiked with righteous anger, hugs and warm sweaters, a finely tuned sense of justice, a piece of pure sunshine that’s sometimes blinding. She knows me, knows that as much as I like to spend every second I can snatch in the studio, even if it means skipping homework (maybe especially if it means skipping homework), I can’t resist the call of this dance floor when day-student Shannon and her older sister throw a party.
Katherine whirls down the hallway, towing me through the crowd of warm, half-naked bodies. I’m leaving wet footprints and I want to protest, but I am swept up and swept along, the energy in the house enough to blast out the walls. Lakeshore Academy is one of the toughest prep schools in the US. Our arts program is a feeder for Juilliard, RISD, Tisch—all the top arts colleges—and the academic-track kids end up at Ivies and similar. After an endless school week of classwork and homework and rehearsal and then more rehearsal and, hey, maybe more rehearsal, even those of us who can handle the pressure need places to explode.
We’re slipping around the flailing limbs of theater kids and gliding past the sudden smiles and shouts of glee when I’m spotted. Pausing to hug Halim, my partner in last semester’s pas de deux, I accept quick kisses on my icy-cold cheeks from the girls in ensemble and that cute girl Grace I bonded with in repertory (the only other full-scholarship arts kid at Lakeshore, as far as I know). My freshmen girls, the clever, quick, intense dancers I mentor, squeal my name as I pass, and I’m waving at them and blowing kisses as Katherine tugs me on, and we dance through the great room and the kitchen and into the den, where the hard-core dancing happens with the chairs pushed against the walls, and the music floods the room, crashes into your chest, and sinks under your skin until you can’t tell the difference between the beat and your body. The feeling is good in rehearsal, and the best onstage. But when it’s all yours and you can do anything you want with it, that’s when the adrenaline fizzes like champagne.
My hips are already moving, and the urge is building to strip off all my winter gear and just dance, no choreography, no counting time, just my body pounding with the boom of the bass and everything falling into place.
I go up on my toes, searching the den for Nevaeh and Taylor. The chandelier overhead is dimmed all the way down, the dark wood paneling on the walls gleaming and the crowd a great pulsing mass of joy. Everyone’s in dancewear or less, which always feels defiant—students aren’t allowed to show up at academic classes with bare shoulders or collarbones or scandalous leggings—too distracting, we’re told. Spaghetti straps once got me sent back to my room to change, feeling vaguely ashamed and angry, the way everyone turned to stare at me. Saturday detention because of my shoulders, as if girls’ bodies are against the rules and our skin is a sex crime, and cracking down on that is more important than our actual education. (And no one ever mentions that our performance costumes show way more than shoulders.)
But we’re free of that, all of us together here. The room is swaying, hopping, spinning, twirling, all of us hot and alive, and no one’s caring if our skin is distracting or if our behavior is appropriate. And is it possible to smile even harder than this? Because there are my sweethearts, Nevaeh and Taylor.
Nevaeh—she’s serenity, ribbon-curling grace, heartbreaking precision, Instagram eyebrows, volcano heart. She’s your nuclear safe house. She has tampons. And she’s vulnerable, sentimental. Tenderhearted, if she loves you, if she trusts you. Now she’s glowing, a sheen of sweat and sparkle on her dark shoulders and neck and cheekbones, glittering lips, a mass of tiny braids threaded with gold and blue wrapped up like a bow on her head. She’s spinning pale, freckled, blushing Zoe, my first-year mentee who has a crush on her, in swooping circles.
Taylor is close to the center of the floor, surrounded by his usual selection of swooners and admirers.
He’s take-no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners, leave-no-heart-unturned, rule-the-world. Popping out to crush your enemies and steal their significant others, no big. Weight lifting, red lipstick, outrageous flirting, and burning across the stage. First-generation Korean American, a dancer like his mom was. Making me laugh always and right now when he gleams at me.
And then I glance behind him, and my own smile teeters right on the edge of fizzling out.
Gavin.
Crap.
Dark curls, dimples, beautiful face against the long, slim neck of a tall, elegant girl, copper skin against her gold. His lips moving up to her jaw; his hand tracing down her spine. She spins away, her black hair flying out like a flag, then moves back against him. His fingers grip her hips tight. His eyes close, but she catches my gaze. She smiles that cat smile of hers. Ellory. Of course Ellory. Of course my audition competition. Of course they’re a couple now. I mean, they’ve both already dated everyone else in this tiny-ass school. Nevaeh and Ellory were even a thing sophomore year.
I wonder—for only a second, the tiniest wallow of self-pity—why did he date me first? She’s got that it-factor and the kind of body I keep hearing that dancers are supposed to have, slim and ethereal, while my body is considered exactly the opposite of that. I can move. I am graceful. I am a powerhouse. Fat and fierce. Delicate, I am not.
All that jumbled in the longest split second in the world, before I remember to wrench my eyes away.
I keep up my performer’s smile, the one I’ve got a lock on, my bulletproof shield that says I’ve got nothing to prove to you. I’m trying hard to be nonchalant, but I fumble with the zipper of my coat, old and always sticking.
Katherine leans into my shoulder, because she can always tell when I’m faking it. “Right?” she says, rolling her eyes. “Nevaeh was like Oh my gosh, just get a room already.”
I snerk at that and then murmur in Katherine’s ear. “Is ‘man slut’ a thing? Because if it isn’t, that’s sexist.”
She laughs, the big braying cackle that carries, and that is maybe the only not-dignified thing about her. Taylor’s and Nevaeh’s heads both whip around, and when they see us, their faces are the best thing in the world, knocking Gavin and Ellory and that tiny bit of self-doubt out, out, out of my head.
I wave at them and then give up on my coat with a huff of disgust to kick off my clunky, stiff boots and yank off my itchy, woolly socks. I stuff it all into a pile near the couch and sigh, flexing toes that are red and aching. My focus is contemporary dance, but classical ballet is my first love, and it’s the foundation of my ensemble piece this term. I’ve been en pointe since after dinner, because the winter showcase is less than a month away. But there’s no taking a break, because Taylor is skidding up to me, taking me by the shoulders.
“Oh my god, it’s you!” he shouts, ridiculous, so good at making a scene. “It’s really you! You made it!” I love the drama of his face, impossible to ignore. The broad cheekbones and the thick, swept-back black hair, his shoulders wide in his white tank. He likes boys more than girls, and he’s got a superhot Damien back home in Queens, but he knows that smile tempts everyone.
Copyright © 2021 by Working Partners Limited
