Bright Burning Stars

by A. K. Small

  I ate another spoonful. I made Mireille repeat herself twice—that I wasn’t pregnant—to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. She must have felt my relief because she got up, pulled a blanket from beneath her desk, and draped it over me. The heavy wool enveloped me.

  “One final suggestion,” she said. “The effects of an abortion can be grave and long-lasting. Promise to get help—see a therapist—if you need it?”

  “Okay,” I said, but then added, “Will you tell on us? On me?”

  Mireille did not answer.

  Us. I thought of Cyrille, how after he’d escorted me here he’d asked to stay, but Mireille had shaken her head, said she could manage from here on out, and then, gently, she’d pulled me inside and closed the door.

  “Better rest up,” she now explained. “So you can get back to your passion.”

  As she drew her curtains and told me I could rest in her office for as long as I needed, my eyelids grew heavy and I wondered if she meant passion as in dance and apiculture or passion as in falling in love.

  In the days following my return—after I’d slept eighteen hours straight in the beekeeper’s office—the bad weather disappeared. December brought blue skies and colder temperatures. I was so relieved not to be pregnant anymore that I smiled at everyone, including The Witch, and hooked an arm through Marine’s elbow constantly. Only at night deep in my dreams did I sometimes reach for the baby, a tiny face dangling midair, its mouth open as if in a scream, but when I woke the images ceased to exist. M and I didn’t speak about what happened. She asked me once how I was feeling and if I wanted to talk about it. She said that she worried about me, my mental state, that going through something like an abortion could make someone already fragile shut down, but I shrugged her off. Opening up was not an option. Plus, I didn’t want to explain. Moon-sisters had a wordless understanding, didn’t they?

  One afternoon, as we walked past the downstairs mural on our way to rehearsal, I noticed a brand-new drawing of Marine and me standing next to each other, the paint strokes thick and colors naïve. In our ivory leotards, Marine showed off a dark bun and I, a sun-yellow one. We held hands and smirked as if winning The Prize was a done deal, inseparable engraved beneath our feet. I pointed to it, said that the artist wasn’t half bad, and laughed.

  “She captured us pretty well, don’t you think?”

  But M didn’t answer. She kept on moving. I barely noticed her coolness—the way she wiggled her arm free from mine—or Luc’s sudden proximity, how he stretched next to us in the circular studio or how the two of them constantly ran off to the costume room, Little Alice trailing them. I only focused on my own weight decreasing, my belly finally sucking back in, and my breasts returning to A-cups. I stood energized at the barre. When I lowered myself into grand port de bras, I almost felt balanced again.

  Part two

  Winter Term

  seventeen

  Marine

  A few days before Christmas, I stood inside the Palais Garnier, anxiously adjusting the straps of my bright red Kitri costume and licking the strawberry-colored lipstick off my lips. Everyone had finished center in the Grand Foyer. It was a few hours before curtain call and Division One crackled with nervous energy. The boys practiced triple tours en l’air, while the girls struck the ground with their demi pointes, then kicked their legs back and forth for maximum flexibility.

  Earlier, during warm-up, Luc and I had stood beside each other at the circular barre, me on the outside, him on the inside. Once in a while, he’d brushed my knuckles and whispered, “Ça va aller,” that everything would be all right, that nothing bad could happen in all this sumptuousness. I’d chosen to believe him, and while I kept on doing tendus, I’d also stolen a couple of glances at his hands, remembering the complex sound they’d made on the piano keys the other night. In the circular studio, beneath the skylight, Luc had played “Bolivar Blues” by Thelonious Monk, a piece full of trills, syncopations, and arpeggios, and had sounded absurdly good. Now, he was in the zone, running his variation—as usual, cool under pressure—and I did not want to disturb him.

  I tried not to think about food, or about the famous horseshoe stage, the judges only meters away. God, everyone knew that these demonstrations dictated the rest of the year, that they made some of the rats go crazy. They were weekly générales blown up on steroids, looming imminent, obligatory, yet somehow they’d snuck up on all of us.

  When Kate sidled up to me and gushed that this place was like out of a museum—there were even guardrails protecting the golden walls and busts—or a movie—would Leonardo DiCaprio please walk out in a fur cape and crown?—I didn’t crack a smile. Last year I’d have grinned, thankful for my best friend’s lightheartedness in such a terrifying setting. We’d have linked fingers and practiced glissades to feel out the slippery spots on the marble floor. We would have massaged each other’s shoulders and meditated side by side, a pre-winter demonstration practice that Kate had come to rely on every year. She swore that kneading each other’s knots loosened our upper bodies, offering the judges a more relaxed demeanor, thus a chance to score higher. Kate also believed that meditation enticed The Muse to visit, lessened injuries, and killed stage fright.

  But that was last year.

  The truth was that we’d barely spoken since Kate had gone to the beekeeper. She wasn’t even the one who’d told me about her visit to Mireille. The news, like everything else here, had leaked. Furthermore, Kate’s return to the studio had been strangely normal, as if pregnancy inside the walls of Nanterre was as trivial as the common cold. Aside from the mention of a magic spoonful of honey and a complete removal of bedsheets—not sent to be laundered but secretly disposed of in the weekly trash pickup—Kate had resumed smoking and practiced grand battements once more with fierce intensity, her belly weight gone. As for Cyrille, he went on about his business, dancing and shining as brightly as usual. Only at night did shadows come out, Kate sometimes screaming a high-pitched wail, as if someone were hurting her, waking me out of dead sleep. But in the morning, she milled around, chatting away as if nothing had ever happened. So I didn’t say a thing.

  I walked over to the far corner of the Grand Foyer. Kate followed. I pulled out pairs of pointe shoes from my bag and tried them on. Kate did the same, and maybe because she sat beneath one of the chandeliers, she sparkled too—not à la Demigod, all crackling heat and passion, but galaxylike, in her cool feminine way. Her costume glimmered, too, pale blue with strings of Swarovski rhinestones cascading down the bodice, and her hair was up in a flawless bun. Her eyes were electric blue with eyelashes like Isabelle’s, the size of butterfly wings. Yet tonight, Kate’s incandescent beauty, something I used to admire and envy, made me unexplainably sad.

  Kate said, “This is nearly the biggest night of our lives. Why are you so quiet?”

  I yearned for the dressing rooms, for the orange slices wrapped in a napkin hidden in my makeup desk. I stared at the harps carved in the walls, at the cherubs with fat bellies, at the paintings of the odalisques that long ago had brought Kate and me together, everything gilded in twenty-four-karat gold. I thought about mentioning our pact, about telling her how we hadn’t Beyoncé’d in forever.

  But instead I said, “How could you not tell me about the baby?”

  Kate reached for my hand. “I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  We touched for a second but then I let go of her fingers. Cold air wrapped around us. I stood up and pushed my right foot into the ground, hard. The shoe’s sole cracked and the blood blister on my unprotected big toe split open.

  When Kate asked me to meditate, I turned away. It hurt to look at her. At once, Oli appeared behind my eyelids. He was hiding beneath his covers in the attic, face peeking from his sheets. “I kissed Clémence Aubert on the mouth, Marinette,” he whispered. At the keenness of the memory and his openness, I thought I might drown from missing him right here in this extravagant palace.


  I said, “I thought that the Moon Pact was about telling each other everything.” My voice caught. I drew a breath, then added, “With Oli—”

  But Kate didn’t wait for the rest. “Is Oli the only person that will ever matter to you?”

  It was as if everyone in the foyer, including the odalisques and the cherubs, waited for an answer.

  When I didn’t reply, Kate said, her accent thickening, “I thought so,” but she stayed seated beside me and fussed with the skirt of her tutu.

  Of course Oli was the only person who would ever matter to me. What good were moon-sisters if we didn’t share everything the way real siblings did? What good was our relationship if we didn’t discuss tough aspects of our lives? If I wasn’t mad at her, I’d have hoped for some of her starlight to rub off, even just a few rays. If I could, I’d have turned off every chandelier in the palace until the Grand Foyer was pitch black. But instead, I finished breaking the sole of my shoe. I rammed the dangling string inside the toe box, superglued it, then hooked a rubber band at the ankle. When Cyrille looped an arm around my waist, I started and almost pushed him away, sickened at the sight of him. But then I remembered he was my anchor partner and so I made myself smile, resigned at having to dance with him, because those were the rules.

  “Want to rehearse a final time?” he said.

  “Why not?” I answered.

  Cyrille slipped his hand in mine and pulled me away from Kate.

  eighteen

  Kate

  I hid in the stairwell, leaning against the wall, the tendonitis in my right ankle abruptly flaring and a wave of hollowness as giant as the San Andreas Fault burrowing inside me. Please, not now, I thought. I massaged the painful area in my foot with my thumb, then slipped on thick leg warmers, my overalls, and a sweater. I hadn’t told M about the pregnancy because I wanted everything to go away, not because I didn’t love her.

  When Isabelle and Short-Claire cornered me, I was so out of sorts that I wished I’d bumped into The Witch instead.

  “Rumors are flying,” Short-Claire said.

  Blocking my path, she added, “Someone reported that they saw you a few weeks ago coming back from the beekeeper.”

  I knelt, pretending to fix a ribbon on my pointe shoe.

  “Anyway,” Isabelle continued, “winter demonstrations usually confirm Numbers One and Two. We think it would be highly unfair for you to win if you made that kind of humongous error.”

  “A visit to the beekeeper is breaking The Cardinal Rules to the hundredth power,” Short-Claire said.

  As I kept on playing with my ribbons, she added, “Also, a foreigner has never won the demonstrations. Not once in the history of the Paris Opera. So, don’t hold your breath.”

  I slowly stood back up and tried to sneak past them, but the girls kept on barricading me until Jean-Paul came through the doors, making them jog up the stairs.

  “Wait,” I called after him.

  He slowed.

  An acute burn shot up my ankle again. Like Alice in Wonderland, I felt like I’d fallen headfirst into the rabbit hole. My usual pre-performance nerves of steel were more like nerves of cooked spaghetti. Something in my brain seemed off. Like I’d forgotten to turn on my self-confidence switch. Or, like the switch had died. Not to mention the emptiness, expanding in my chest. What was going on? I wasn’t sure how to ask Jean-Paul for drugs that would reduce the unbearable pains in my body, yet sharpen my brain.

  “Is your bag still full of miracles?” I said.

  “I was waiting to see how long it would take you.” Jean-Paul stopped at a door marked Private one floor below the dressing rooms, and yanked it open. “After you, ma dragée,” he said. “I don’t talk business out in the open.”

  The room was a wide storage space for ladders, ropes, and machines. One lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. Drafts from open floorboards swirled at our feet.

  “What do you have in mind?” Jean-Paul said, clicking the door shut. “A little vodka to loosen you up?” He crossed his arms and looked down at me. “Pissed off at your best friend for stealing Prince Charming?”

  “I need to be able to perform.” I paused. “Without the jitters.”

  Jean-Paul unzipped his backpack and slid out a bag full of white pills. “You got the jitters?”

  I had the urge to hit him. “I’m human,” I said.

  “You could try one or two of these.” He reached for a pill, popped it into his mouth. “They’re magic. You’ll dance even better than usual.”

  I knew. That’s why I’d stopped Jean-Paul to begin with. I remembered that day in my room—how I’d spun endlessly, the taste of sour apple in my mouth, the pain of a possible pregnancy concealed. I reached my hand out.

  “It’ll cost you,” Jean-Paul said.

  “How much?”

  He dropped his backpack to the floor, then glanced at his watch. “Not that kind of currency. I know this isn’t a tight space but it will have to do.” He dangled the bag, then walked around the storage room, inspecting the ladders and ropes. “I’m tired of Cyrille getting all the hot chicks.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  At once, Jean-Paul’s posture straightened, a new self-assurance oozing from him. His eyes widened and his pupils dilated.

  “Be creative, boule de miel, and you might win the demonstrations.”

  I fiddled with the blue tulle sticking out of my warm-ups. I saw Short-Claire and Isabelle closing in on me in the stairwell, foreigner ringing in my ear, then M slipping her fingers easily through Cyrille’s. I thought of how he sometimes looked at her as if she belonged to him. If their chumminess continued, or worse, intensified, they would rise up to the heavens, leaving everyone behind. But what about me? What were my options?

  “Tick, tick, tick,” Jean-Paul said.

  The room was pretty dark. Maybe I could show him skin, make him think he was getting something from this transaction. I slid off my sweater, let it fall to the floor, revealing the top of my costume.

  “Come on,” Jean-Paul said. “You know what to show me.”

  I swallowed hard. “You’ll give me a pill, if you see me naked?”

  “You bared it all for Cyrille. What’s once more?”

  Footsteps in the stairwell startled me. Someone yelled for Madame Brunelle. The demonstrations were nearly here. I tugged on my spaghetti straps, yanked off my overalls, then my leg warmers. But then in only my blue tutu and tights, I froze.

  Jean-Paul tapped his wrist. “Better hurry, ma pâte de fruit, or you’ll be out onstage perfectly sober with a bad case of the jitters. And a limp.”

  The pills shone like precious jewels through the bag.

  “You think some of the company members take that stuff too?”

  “Man, you’re naïve,” Jean-Paul replied. “Of course they do.”

  A siren blared in the distance.

  I wriggled free from my costume and tights. “Happy now?” I stood, naked, ankles crossed, fists balled up at my sides, the blue tutu a puddle at my feet. Jean-Paul breathed hard. The crackling of the plastic bag in his fingers made me jumpy.

  “Move under the light,” he said.

  I hesitated.

  “No pill then.”

  After I stood beneath the dangling lightbulb and turned in a circle as if I were getting an invisible costume fitted to my body, Jean-Paul finally handed me one. I wolfed it down. “You saw. Now get out,” I said.

  But Jean-Paul stood, his eyes drinking me in. “Give it a minute. You’ll want a second pill in no time.”

  I shook my head but as I began to move, the room lightened. The hollowness faded. The burning in my foot melted away and the nerves I’d felt cutting into me like razor blades dulled. My embarrassment changed to ease. I inhaled more deeply, as if sunlight had just poured into the windowless room.

  “Magi
c,” Jean-Paul repeated.

  In the semidarkness, I tingled. Jean-Paul’s eyes gave it away. How much he wanted to touch me.

  “Marine and I used to be so close,” I said, a new sense of power settling over me. “I lived at her mother’s bakery in the summers. I slept in her bed in Fifth and Sixth and I used to dream of being her triplet. I thought we’d always have each other’s backs.”

  “Cyrille will get what he wants, then he’ll drop her. She’ll plunge.”

  I touched my shoulder. The more my fingers ran on my skin, the more Jean-Paul leaned forward. I thought he might tip over.

  I said, “She wrote my dad a postcard once, explaining that she would always take good care of me.” Nostalgia rose up in my chest.

  Jean-Paul took a giant step and stood inches away from me, devouring my body. “Want that other pill?”

  I nodded. Everything seemed sharper, the way the ropes were threaded tight, how the ladders had scratches on the sides and a few loose screws. I had the feeling that if I were to pirouette, I’d balance the ending forever. My earlier fright disappeared, replaced by the crystalline taste of victory and by that silken warmth spreading in my belly.

  I got into fourth position and spun with my right leg up, high. I balanced, pain-free.

  “Jesus Christ. Naked pirouettes.” Jean-Paul opened the bag and took out another pill.

  I reached for it.

  But Jean-Paul lifted his hands above his head. “I get to touch for the second pill.”

  I smoothed my bangs, floating above my body. Why not?

  “You got thirty seconds,” I said. “You can’t put one finger below the belt or I’ll scream.”

  Jean-Paul ran his hand first on my throat then down my rib cage between my breasts, his fingernails scratching my skin. When he crossed the threshold, the place below my belly button, he gasped. The plastic bag fell to the floor.

  I jumped back. “Done,” I said.

  Jean-Paul didn’t move, so I knelt down, plunged my hand into the bag, and stole a handful of pills. I grabbed my costume, tights, and warm-ups from the floor and quickly dressed.