You & Me at the End of the World

by Brianna Bourne

  Normally my dreams are a reel of unrelated scenes that wheel around drunkenly in my head, but every now and then something comes into sharp focus. A bleed-through from the real world. Most of the time it’s pain, like if my arm goes numb in bed, in the dream I’ll be dipping it in a shimmering fairy pool of acid. This time, it’s the soft, slow stroke of a finger from the middle of my forehead down to the tip of my nose. Over and over.

  Right now, I’m convinced that someone’s stroking my nose outside of the dream.

  Could it be my mom? She used to do that. The first time I was aware of it was after I fell during an Academy performance of Giselle. I landed wrong coming down from a grand jeté. It was a showstopper—the stage manager had to scramble her crew and fly in the grand drape and everything. She made an announcement on the god mic to the audience that we’d be resuming in ten minutes due to “unforeseen circumstances.” As if two thousand people hadn’t seen me crumple into a heap on the floor.

  Someone else’s mom might have had to wait in the audience, wringing their hands, but Eliza Ashton tore through the pass door and into the darkness of backstage. Through the fog of pain, I heard her shoes clattering toward me, and then she was settling my head on her lap. The company manager and the stage manager were huddled over me, and the physio guy was down by my feet, cutting the ribbons off my pointe shoe and carefully testing my ankle.

  The pain was awful, and I was so scared. Ballet was all I knew how to do. I would have fallen apart if my mom hadn’t been there, asking the questions that needed asking, barking for more ice.

  They moved me to a dressing room, and Gabriella changed into her copy of the Giselle costume and finished the show. While we waited for my dad to get the car and take us to the hospital for X-rays, Mom never let go. As my sniffles morphed into hiccups, she started running her finger down my nose, over and over. I closed my eyes at last and fought for breath.

  “I used to do this when you were a baby,” she whispered. “It was the only way I could get you to sleep in your crib.” I saw a photo once, of her long fingers curved around my tiny ear, her thumb on the tip of my nose.

  “You’re going to be just fine,” she said.

  She must have been terrified. Her own career ended when she went down in the middle of a run of Madame Butterfly. She ripped her Achilles like a sheet of paper, and she never recovered. But she just kept on stroking my nose.

  My ankle turned out to be fine, and I was dancing again two weeks later. My fall wasn’t a career ender like hers.

  No one else has ever stroked my nose like this. My mom must be here. I’m sure of it. I just need to wake up. I climb out from under the rubble of the dream, but when I open my eyes, my room is blue with moonlight. It’s silent. Even the air-conditioning has clicked off.

  “Mama?” I whisper.

  My room is empty, and my clock reads 4:53 a.m. I rub my nose. There’s no one here, but there’s an ache in my chest that has me worrying my lungs are collapsing.

  Could it have been Leo? I ease out of bed and sneak out into the hallway. I need to make sure he’s still here, that the whole afternoon wasn’t a dream.

  The guest room door is ajar. I start to push it open, but then I notice that I can’t feel the handle. My skin isn’t registering the handle’s smoothness, or its metallic coldness. Maybe I haven’t fully woken up yet.

  I nudge the door open anyway. Leo is facing away, twisted up in the sheets. He’s not wearing a shirt, and his back is smooth and pale in the moonlight. He’s breathing evenly, shoulders rising and falling. There’s a single dark mole on his shoulder blade. It’s almost unbearably intimate, seeing that, seeing him like this. A mix of embarrassment and fascination buzzes through me, flooding into my cheeks.

  His tattoo is a spidery blur in the shadows. It’s about the size of my palm. If I took a couple of steps forward—if I let the glow from the night-light in the hall spill in—I might finally find out exactly what it is.

  Instead, I take a quiet step back. I close the door quickly, embarrassed that I’ve seen him in that private, sleep-warm state.

  I need to focus. Leo’s still here, so at least I know yesterday wasn’t a dream.

  But that means it wasn’t my mom stroking my nose. She and my dad are still gone.

  I retreat, zombie-walking back to my room. I close my door and start to shake.

  This isn’t normal.

  Being the only two people in the city isn’t normal.

  After yesterday, I can’t pretend the emptiness is just going to magically end. Finding Leo almost eclipsed the weirdness of being in a world with no people, but I can’t ignore an actual eclipse. We saw the sky go black in the middle of the day, and the sun went down long before it was supposed to, and we almost got killed by a freak windstorm.

  My thoughts swarm on me, and I almost crumple to the floor.

  No. Get up, Hannah.

  I fling my bedroom door open. I make a break for it and run through the dark house, into the kitchen and down the flight of stairs to the ballet studio in my basement.

  I need to shut my brain up. I need to dance.

  My heart thuds and my legs scream, but I force myself to do another set of sautés. I have to keep jumping. The effort of holding my arms in first position makes my teeth grind together, but I keep my fingers curved low by my hips. Entrechat, entrechat, entrechat. With each landing, I change the front foot: right, left, right, left. Every time my feet hit the floor, another thought shakes down out of my head. If I keep going, if I can just do a few more jumps, I’ll shake the last of the thoughts out and my mind will be completely empty. I won’t have to think about the dream, or the wind, or the eclipse, or the dark. I’ll be too focused on the physical to think about the emptiness outside my front door.

  I’ve been in my basement studio for four hours now. I knew Leo and I should have come back here yesterday instead of gallivanting across the city. It doesn’t get dark at the wrong times when I’m here. The sun rose right on schedule this morning. There’s a reason people do the things they’re “supposed” to do. If you go around only doing things you want, you’ll end up living in a cardboard box. Or get killed by high-speed winds while riding on an unsupervised swing carousel.

  I push myself to do another set. Jump, jump, jump.

  I wasted a whole day yesterday. I missed my afternoon barre routine, my evening yoga session, and my workout on the stationary bike.

  My calves spasm and turn into spaghetti as I hit my physical limit. I double over and stumble to the barre for support. I think I’m going to throw up. The edges of my vision go dark.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  I did more jumps than I normally do, but I shouldn’t be on the verge of collapse. Missing those sessions must have thrown me off more than I realized.

  The speakers keep pounding out a brisk, peppy beat. I drag myself over to the other side of the room and slide the fader down on the basement’s built-in sound system until there’s silence. I slide down against the mirrored wall. As the cold from the glass seeps into my spine, I let my shoulders slump and catch my breath.

  I look around the converted basement that is now my professional-grade ballet studio. My mom had it installed after I got accepted into South Texas City Ballet’s Upper School, when dance went from taking up about twelve hours a week to thirty. The room is stage-bright, flooded with a dozen inset spotlights. The floor is sprung, which means there’s a layer of curved wooden strips underneath. When I land a jump, the whole floor moves with me to save my bones some shock. On one side of the studio, there’s the requisite expanse of mirrors; on the other there’s a smooth wooden barre bolted to the wall.

  I thump my head against the mirror. Having a studio like this means there’s even more riding on my corps de ballet audition tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. The thought sends a sizzle of anxiety through me.

  I need to push on. If by some miracle I get out of this mess in time for the audition, I have to nail it. When I come out of
that studio sweating and nerve-wrung, I want to be able to tell my mom that I blew the competition out of the water. I want to see her beaming elation when I get a phone call from the artistic director and see her giddy scramble for a camera when the papers come in the mail and I sign the contract to join the corps de ballet.

  If I’m not ready, if I’m out of shape—if all I get is an email with words like regret and next year’s audition and thank you for your interest in South Texas City Ballet … I don’t even want to imagine how she’ll react to that.

  I lurch up from the floor and flick through the songs on my phone to find the one for my audition piece. I’ll cool down for a few minutes and then work through it. I also need to change my shoes—I did this session in flats. I peel off the floppy canvas shoes and wiggle my toes.

  I freeze when I hear the faint, ghostly sound of someone calling my name.

  For a moment, it’s the music store all over again, but then I remember that Leo’s upstairs.

  “Hannah?” His voice is muffled by the walls, but it’s definitely Leo.

  I go over to the base of the stairs and shout, “Down here!”

  I steel myself. I head back to the stereo as he comes down. He stops in the doorway, shaking his hair out of his eyes. He gives me a lopsided smile. Attraction slices through me. He’s wearing the same black jeans from yesterday, but now they’re paired with a black Aerosmith T-shirt. He must have had it in his car. Like everything else he owns, the cloth is worn and soft and makes me want to snuggle him.

  The fizzy, on-edge feeling I had all day yesterday comes rushing back. Suddenly I feel like I could do a million more pirouettes, like food and sleep are things I’ll never need again. When he’s around, I’m a live wire, a constant pulsing drip of adrenaline in human form.

  I reinforce my shields. I don’t need a repeat of Don’t get attached to me.

  “I got a little freaked out when I couldn’t find you,” Leo says, scrubbing his hand through his hair. I’m a little annoyed at how good it looks after a night of sleeping on it. Leo with bedhead is the kind of look pop stars pay their hairdressers ridiculous money for.

  He comes into the room and spins in a circle. “Wow. I was not expecting this. I think most people have dingy horror basements full of cinder blocks and spiders.”

  His eyes are puffy from sleep, but his smile is already full-power.

  “How long have you been up?” he asks.

  “A while. I had a bad dream, so I came down here. I’m almost done, I just want to run through my audition piece.”

  “Neat. Do you mind if I watch?”

  I hide my bare feet. “I guess not. I just need to put on some shoes first.”

  Leo heads for the five pairs of pointe shoes hanging from hooks on the far wall, spaced wide like a gallery installation.

  “Cool, cool,” he says. “Which ones do you want?”

  “I don’t dance in those. They’re my mom’s.”

  “Oh. Your mom’s a ballerina too?”

  “Ha. Much more of one than I am.”

  In the corner, I dig around in my duffel bag for my current favorite pair of pointe shoes. I have about five pairs in the rotation. I don’t want Leo to see my feet, but he’s not paying attention to me. He’s enchanted by the shoes on the wall. I hastily wedge my toe spacers in and bind my two smallest toes together with medical tape.

  “Am I allowed to ask why your mom’s shoes are on the wall? Is that a thing dancers do?” he asks.

  “No, it’s not a thing. She doesn’t dance anymore, so I guess they’re like a shrine to her old life.” I recite the significance of each pair for him. “The smallest ones were her first pair. She was five when she started, ten when she went on pointe. Then there’s the pair from her first standing ovation, the first time onstage at the Kennedy Center, the first time she guested in Europe, and the night my dad proposed.” They met after he got promoted at work and joined South Texas City Ballet’s board of directors.

  “So she’s a big deal, huh? Have I heard of her?” Leo asks.

  “Probably not, unless you’re into ballet. Her name is Eliza Ashton.”

  “Nope.”

  “Who have you heard of? Baryshnikov?”

  “Yeah, and um, Olga someone? Or Natalya? No, that’s a Bond girl. Yeah, never mind.”

  I finish winding the silk ribbon around my ankle, tying a serious double knot and tucking it into the hollow near my anklebone. I smack my other shoe on the floor, whacking the toe end on the wood.

  “What are you doing?” Leo asks over the ruckus.

  “Tenderizing,” I call back. Brand-new pointe shoes are shiny and beautiful, but they’re undanceable. This pair has gone through hell—I used a heavy-duty wire cutter to split the shank, poured hard-drying shellac in them when they were too soft, hammered them when they were too stiff, and used a Zippo lighter to burn anything that frayed. Hours in the studio have rubbed all the shiny pink satin off the end of the shoe, so when I’m on the box, I’m dancing on dingy gray canvas.

  Finally my shoes are on and ready, fitting like high-end bionic limbs. I rise up and shake each foot out in turn, making sure there aren’t any gaps that my foot can slide around in. Leo can’t take his eyes off my feet. I’m used to being watched now, but I can still remember being the one watching. My mom would take me to rehearsals to meet her friends. When they weren’t dancing, the women would randomly rise up onto pointe. They stilted around like egrets in a marsh, poking the floor in a lazy rhythm as they hovered in front of my mom and me. They peered down at us with horribly slouched shoulders, their chicken-bone arms akimbo. But once they were dancing, their backs were straight and their form was perfect.

  Up on my toes, my eyes are level with Leo’s. At the barre, I do a quick series of tendus, dégagés, and rond de jambes. The muscle memory is so deep I can do them in my sleep. With a hush, the worn tip of my slipper slides in an arc across the polished wood floor. After that, I do a quick pirouette in the middle of the studio to test my center of gravity.

  Leo leans against the mirror and crosses his arms. Dancing for him here feels way more intimate than that cardigan moment in the kitchen last night. There’s something tight and humming in the room, all his attention focused so intensely on me. We’re yards apart, but I feel like we’re touching.

  “So what will you be gracing your audience with today?” he asks.

  “It’s a variation from this thing called the grand pas classique.”

  “Sounds kind of … classic.”

  “Yeah. It’s a standard audition piece. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world.”

  “What’s the most exciting thing?” he asks.

  I think for a moment. “There’s this random solo from STCB’s production of Madame Butterfly that I really like.”

  Ironically it’s the same dance my mom was doing right before she fell. We learned it at the Academy last year, and whenever I rehearsed with my mom, she cringed every time the song reached its crescendo.

  “Can you show me that instead?” Leo asks.

  I should really rehearse my audition piece. But the Madame Butterfly solo is more interesting. I scan through the music on my phone to find P for Puccini.

  Leo comes over to check out the six-channel mixer that my phone’s connected to. This time I preempt him. “Yes, I know, I’m spoiled.”

  But he surprises me. “It’s only spoiled if it’s more than you need. You’ve obviously worked up to needing this kind of stuff.”

  I hand the remote to Leo and take up position kneeling downstage right. All I see is the image of my mother’s face in the YouTube video of her final performance. She stared out longingly over the audience, not knowing her career would end two minutes later. I nod at Leo, and he presses play.

  There’s a lead-in and then the boom of a sound-effect cannon. I’m not going to lay on all of the acting, but ballet isn’t just about body movement and a good dancer never ignores the emotions behind the choreography. It suddenly strikes m
e that maybe I like this piece more because there’s a story to tell. The grand pas classique, on the other hand, is just technical artistry.

  I rise onto my toes, closing my mind to everything but the dance. The work. The noise. I love the sound of ballet up close. The clop of shoe meeting wood when my toes tap the floor, the shushing slap of a cabriole as the calf of my left leg brushes the shin of my right. The hard puffs of breath and the fast, sucking inhales right before the harder moves. I’m a better dancer because of my mom. Without her guidance, I’d be breathing at all the wrong times, leaving my muscles weak with lack of oxygen.

  The music builds, strings layered on strings as the violins swell. At the end of the piece, I bourrée en pointe in a zigzag. It’s my favorite part, even though it’s hard to do. Your feet have to move so quickly, microscopic shifts that give the illusion of hovering. I waver to the far end of the room, then toward the door, back and forth, like a leaf floating to the ground.

  It never fails to give me chills.

  The dance finishes, and I drop down to my heels. Before I can ask, Leo fades the music down slowly. I wonder if pressing pause is a pet peeve of his as well. I’ve never liked shifting too abruptly back into the real world.

  Sometimes he’s so much like Astrid, but in this he isn’t. She’s seen me rehearse in this basement hundreds of times, and when she presses pause, the music cuts dead before the last note can ring through. Then she’s up and cheering like I’m on a TV talent show.

  I glance at the corner where she usually likes to spread out, and my chest goes tight. I miss her. I’m so used to seeing her there with a pile of chopped-up magazines and bright kid scissors and glue sticks, or homework strewn everywhere and her fire-engine-red hair pinned in perfect victory rolls.

  Other than the heavy sound of my breathing, Leo and I are silent for a long time.

  “Holy shit. You’re really good,” he says finally.

  I shrug. I’m used to non-dancers being impressed with what I can do, but it feels different this time. The awe written all over Leo’s face … does he only like me because I’m a ballerina? The thought makes me irritated and prickly.