Rules for 50/50 Chances

by Kate McGovern

  Twelve

  Backstage before the Saturday matinee, I’m more nervous about a Nutcracker performance than I’ve been since my first year dancing a solo. What has become so routine, almost mundane, is suddenly an actual thing that I have to mentally prepare for. A series of neurotic thoughts are rushing through my head on a loop but I seem to be powerless to stop them. Caleb is going to see me dance. This is the first time he is going to see me dance. I have to dance my best, or he will think I am a jackass.

  So I put on a Nutcracker like I’ve never done it before. Every time I step onstage, I picture all my energy going directly out to the audience. I’m extra careful with all the little details that are easy enough to let slide during a regular matinee. Somehow, having him there, looking for just me in the crowd, reminds me of how much I love being onstage. It’s easy to forget that during Nutcracker season. But I really do love the rush that comes with the lights fading up and the music bounding in, and seeing the other dancers sweat and push and work so hard to make it all look effortless for the audience. The truth is, I never feel quite as at home, quite as secure and content, as I do when I’m dancing.

  At intermission, I peek out through the wings, the heavy black velvet curtains that sweep the sides of the stage and keep us hidden from the audience while we’re running around like chickens (in tutus) with our heads cut off. From stage left, where I’m situated, I should be able to see the seats where I think Caleb and the girls are sitting, just right of house center. But they’re not where I expect them to be, and I can’t crane my neck far enough to see if they’re farther over to the right. They’re probably waiting in line for the bathroom. Little girls always have to go to the bathroom at intermission.

  * * *

  After the show, I take a few extra minutes to make sure I don’t look like a sweaty mess when I leave the dressing room. Eloise notices me putting on lip gloss. She crosses her arms and stares me down.

  “Going somewhere?” Normally on a Saturday, with another performance at eight o’clock, we mostly just hang out in our sweats and listen to music for the couple hours in between.

  “Just running out to see a friend.”

  She eyes me suspiciously. “The same male friend you were spotted with at the BPC performance, perchance?”

  And I thought I was being so careful, taking Caleb to the performance that Eloise wasn’t going to. I should’ve known the other girls at the studio were too gossipy to let my unidentified male guest go unnoticed.

  “Who are you, Harriet the Spy?”

  She smiles. “Just keeping tabs. Be careful, you know.”

  “Of?”

  “Distractions.” She leans over and lifts one leg to crack her back. I cringe at the sound. “As soon as Nutcracker’s over, we’ve got to think about the spring showcase. And there’s next year. Have you even figured out what companies you’re auditioning for?”

  “You sound like Georgia.”

  Eloise looks hurt. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  “Sorry. I know. Thank you for your sage wisdom,” I say, zipping up my fleece and grabbing my bag. “I have to run, though.”

  Before she can say anything in response, I push past her and head toward the stage door.

  But Caleb and the girls aren’t outside. I head back inside and up to the lobby, but it’s mostly emptied out by now, just a few ushers cleaning up programs and candy wrappers, and a handful of lingering audience members. One quick 360 tells me that the Franklins are not in attendance.

  I check my phone—nothing. No messages, no text saying they loved it but had to run, nothing.

  “Who you lookin’ for, Rose?” asks Marlie, the box office manager.

  “Oh, no one,” I say, turning away from her so she won’t see the tears starting to work their way out from wherever tears are made.

  “You had some tickets here for someone, right?” She flips through the ticket box. “Yeah, Franklin, right? Here they are. Guess they couldn’t make it.” She hands the envelope to me, but I don’t take it. Instead, I thank her and hustle out into the cold. I can’t go back down to the dressing room and face Eloise again, not right now.

  Outside, tears almost freezing against my cheeks, I type and delete several messages to Caleb, ranging from “Are you okay?” to “What the hell?” to “Thanks for the no-show.” But I can’t settle on the right approach, so I don’t send anything. Finally, after twenty minutes of walking around the block, avoiding the girls and checking and rechecking my phone to see if he’s called, I wipe my face, pretend I’m fine, and go back downstairs to get ready for another show.

  * * *

  “How were your shows?” Dad asks, as I tear through the front hall and up the stairs after the evening performance.

  “Fine,” I call out, forcing my voice to be even, normal.

  “That good, huh?”

  I shut the bedroom door behind me. Something must’ve happened to him. Or to one of his sisters, or his mom, I’m sure. I sit on the edge of my bed, my coat still on, staring at the wall, then look back to my (not ringing) phone, then back to the wall. Something has to be wrong—or else he’s just a huge jerk. That, or I did something wrong. I page back through our recent text exchanges, trying to figure out what it could’ve been, but I can’t tell.

  I turn on my laptop. There’s no possible way that Caleb is going to be reachable. In my mind, he’s already disappeared into the abyss. Maybe he never existed in the first place. My stomach is tied in about a million tiny, tight knots, and even though I’m exhausted, my heart is racing. I can’t tell if it’s more worry, hurt, or humiliation that’s making me feel so sick. I just didn’t expect to care this much. I thought I had this under control.

  And yet, there he is, online just like it’s a normal night. Probably moseying along, doing his homework, surfing the Internet, minding his own business. At least I know he’s alive.

  Something like fury roils up inside me while I wait for an instant message that doesn’t come for the better part of an hour. Then finally, just when I’m gearing up to force myself to shut down—so he won’t be able to message me even if he wants to—my computer quacks.

  Caleb Franklin: How are you, HD?

  How am I? Seriously?

  Me: Um, fine?

  Caleb Franklin: Why the question mark?

  The playing dumb thing pushes me over the edge. Now I’m really mad.

  Me: You seriously don’t know?

  He doesn’t respond for a minute, and the back of my throat is starting to ache the way it does when you’re about to cry but really don’t want to, when my phone vibrates against the desk.

  I pick up, but don’t say anything.

  “Rose? Are you there?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say after a moment.

  “Hey, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

  I can feel myself snap and know my voice will come out sharp, maybe too sharp, but I don’t care. “Um, you were supposed to be at The Nutcracker this afternoon. With your sisters. I left you tickets. Remember?”

  There’s a pause, and then I hear him exhale long and hard. “Crap. Crap, crap, crap. I’m so, so sorry, Rose—I just…” He trails off.

  “We did say you guys were going to come to the Saturday matinee, right? I told you I’d leave your tickets at the theater,” I say. I’m pretty sure that’s what we agreed to, but now I’m starting to question my own sanity.

  “Yeah, but…” he stammers. “I didn’t even know what theater. Or what time, or anything.”

  All the racing in my mind stops for a minute. He didn’t know? Does he seriously think that’s a legit excuse? “But you didn’t ask.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess I…” He trails off. “We said I’d see it over the weekend. But then the whole thing happened with your parents, at dinner, and then—”

  And then we kissed. So that is what this is about. We kissed, and then he didn’t want to see me again. I thought I was supposed to be the freaker-outer, but it turns out he is.

>   “Did you … Is it because of what happened? The thing with my mom? And then the—” The thing after that, but I can’t bring myself to say it. My voice catches in my throat.

  “No, no,” he says. “It absolutely wasn’t because of what happened. I just—honestly? We never talked about it again—and I didn’t—I just thought it wasn’t happening. Or I didn’t really—I didn’t really think about it, to be honest. I’m so sorry.”

  I don’t respond.

  “Rose? I’m sorry. Seriously. Can I make it up to you? Can I come see the show next weekend?”

  I let out a long breath. People forget things, I know. But it hurts that he wasn’t thinking as much about me as I was thinking about him. If he had been, he would have remembered.

  “Let’s just call it a day with The Nutcracker, okay?”

  “Can I make it up to you with ice cream? It’s never too cold for ice cream, right?”

  I want to say no, I really do—I know I should take this as a sign that I should let this go. It would just be safer, easier, not to care. But the fact that he remembers my dad’s rule—the one I told him about the first time we hung out—tugs at my resolve.

  “I don’t really have a lot of free time until after The Nutcracker.”

  “When is that?”

  “Next year.”

  He laughs hard at that, and it loosens me up. I wish I could hold on to my anger at him, but already I can feel it dissipating.

  “The very beginning of next year?” he asks hopefully.

  “Yeah. Like January second.” I sigh. I guess there’s not really anything wrong with having some ice cream.

  Thirteen

  Chanukah and Christmas—Chrismukah, we used to call them when I was little, which we celebrate in equally half-assed ways in my house—pass by in their usual blur, marred as always by my Nutcracker schedule and this year by something more insidious, too. Mom is in a festive mood one minute and pissed off the next. Even the train set doesn’t make her happy like it used to. I almost wish Dad had left it in its box in the basement this year, gathering dust.

  When Caleb pulls up in front of my house to pick me up for ice cream on January second, I put on my best slightly skeptical, slightly mad face as I walk out to the car.

  “Forgive me yet?”

  I shrug. “Undecided. I’ll let you know. You’re just lucky I’ve shown up for this event. I almost forgot.” I slip into the front seat next to him and finally let myself smile at him like I really want to.

  “Phew,” he says. “I thought you were going to give me your serious face all day. So, long time no see. Happy New Year. What’s new?”

  It’s been more than a month since the fateful dinner with my parents. It seems like a lot has happened between the moment Caleb and I kissed and now, even though we’ve barely spoken.

  “Well, I survived another Nutcracker season without sustaining any injuries,” I say. “And I rang in the new year watching a Hitchcock marathon with my parents, so that was super cool of me.” The truth is, Lena tried to drag me to a party at Anders’s house, but I prefer Hitchcock movies to high school parties.

  “It’s good to see you, HD.”

  “You too, Sickle Cell.” And it is.

  * * *

  Caleb and I get our ice cream to go in Harvard Square, but even though I really do believe my father that it’s never too cold for ice cream, as soon as we step outside into the tundra that is January in Boston, I realize we’ve made a mistake. I jump up and down a few times, while the cold of my frappe seeps through my mittens.

  “Did you know that they do not have frappes in the rest of the country?” I say, trying to distract myself from the impending frostbite.

  “Of course they do.”

  I shake my head. “Nope. In the rest of the country milk shakes have ice cream in them. They have no need for frappes.”

  “Milk shakes have ice cream in them here too,” he says. “Milk shakes and frappes are the same thing.”

  “Incorrect. Proper New England milk shakes are just milk and syrup.”

  “Milk and syrup … shaken?” He grins at me.

  “Precisely.”

  “Well,” he says, snaking an arm behind my waist and drawing me in closer to him, “I’ve learned something new today. Thanks for that.”

  It’s warmer tucked in against Caleb’s chest. “Can we go inside now?”

  He nods. “I know a good spot.”

  * * *

  I know I’ve been to the Gunn before, maybe when I was five or six, dragged around the museum on a Sunday afternoon with my parents, or maybe when Gram was in town for a visit; I can’t remember exactly. It’s on a quiet side street right behind Harvard Yard, a few blocks from my school—I’ve walked past it probably a thousand times and not given it a second glance in years. I’m not a big museum person, but I don’t mention this to Caleb as he leads me quickly across the Yard—the grass is frozen solid, dotted with patches of gray snow—and up the marble steps of the old red brick building.

  “You can’t bring that in here, guys,” the security guard tells us as soon as we push through the heavy door and into the warmth of the museum. The ice cream, of course.

  “We’ll finish it here,” Caleb tells the guard with a smile. I get the feeling Caleb always gets what he wants when he deploys that grin.

  Ice cream quickly consumed, we show the guard our school IDs to confirm that we can get in for free, and head inside. It doesn’t bring back any particular memories—I think it’s been renovated since I was here the last time—but Caleb seems to know it well.

  “Come on,” he says, leading me down a hallway. “I want to show you something.”

  We climb up two flights to a gallery called Modern American Art, 1950 to the Present. As we step into the first room, Caleb nods at the security guard standing watch. “Hey, Randall.” The guard greets him back with a nod and smile.

  “You know him?” I ask as we pass into the next room.

  “I come here semiregularly.”

  The gallery is a bright, high-ceilinged room with crisp white walls and glossy hardwood floors. The rooms have the kind of solemn, silent feeling that always makes me a little uncomfortable in museums: I’m more used to the bustle of theaters, the backstage white noise of pianos being tuned and pointe shoes clacking on concrete floors. In the gallery, I trail Caleb through rooms only sparsely populated with artwork and museumgoers. Huge abstract paintings take up whole walls.

  “See, I don’t get that,” I whisper to Caleb, nodding toward one of them. “It’s just a big black canvas. I could do that.”

  “But have you?” he whispers back. Point taken. Nonetheless, it doesn’t look like much to the untrained eye. “It’s about texture, HD. And tone, and the way the paint interacts with the canvas, and the light, and—”

  “So what you’re saying is,” I interrupt, “it’s not just a big black canvas. It’s a fancy big black canvas.”

  “Here,” he says as we step into a room with, finally, some paintings that look recognizable as actual art. Along one wall is a series of three long, wide panels, hung side by side and running almost from floor to ceiling. They’re painted in rich colors: at first glance, all I see is a blur of bright reds, deep browns, and shimmering golds, swirling together in a busy, vibrant mix. Looking more closely, I register that the first panel captures a scene from the famous slave uprising on the Amistad. Black men and white men are entangled on the deck of a ship while blue-green water sparkles around them. The painting feels familiar, and I’ve stared at it for a full minute or two before I read the name plate next to it—“Giles Henry Franklin, Still Rising, 1989.”

  “Wait, I know this painting,” I say, it suddenly dawning on me that Mr. Sullivan, my tenth-grade U.S. History teacher, showed us a slide of it during the unit on slavery and the Civil War. It’s sort of famous.

  “You do?” Caleb asks, sounding surprised.

  “From U.S. History. Are you related to Giles Franklin?”

 
“He’s my grandfather. My dad’s dad. He gave me my first sketchbook. Cool, right?”

  “That’s not cool—that’s kind of amazing.”

  “He was commissioned to do this series for the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Amistad uprising.”

  I haven’t seen the other two paintings before. One depicts a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter; the other shows a series of scenes, each one blending into the next and clearly crossing different time periods. In one scene, there’s a black man and a white man in suits, conferring behind a table in a courtroom. In another, a cluster of African-American students are walking into a school, and in a third, a white man and a black woman are exchanging wedding vows.

  Caleb notices me surveying the third painting. “Oh, that one’s major Supreme Court decisions.” He points to each scene in turn, naming them as he goes. “Um, Powell versus Alabama, Brown versus the Board of Education, Loving versus Virginia.” He falters on that one. “That’s, uh, legalizing interracial marriage. Can’t remember the year.”

  I swallow, hard. “Wow. This is—I mean, I didn’t know your grandfather was a famous painter. These are awesome. It’s awesome that they’re here. You can just come see them whenever you want.”

  “He’s got some other stuff in the collection here, but these are my favorites. When I was like ten, this museum bought them, and Granddad brought me here. Even then, he explained them to me, not like I was a kid, you know? I still remember what he said. ‘Grandson, these are my paintings. They’re about freedom. Don’t let anyone tell you the struggle is over.’”

  I take a step back to get a wider view of all three canvases. “We’ve come a long way since the Amistad, though.”

  He chuckles toward the floor. “Sure. But not all the way.”

  It’s so quiet in the gallery that I can hear him breathing next to me. “I didn’t mean … I know there are a lot of problems, still,” I say. “Never mind. Thanks for showing these to me. They’re awesome.”