Rose Sees Red

by Cecil Castellucci

  “Really?” This was interesting. I’d never been in a secret club.

  “We’d be the only members because we have flower first names.”

  “What would we do in this club?” I asked.

  “Oh, club things,” Daisy replied.

  “Like a password and a song?”

  “Sure. And we could be best friends.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d never had a best friend.

  “But you have to say you’re sorry for making me bleed.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, a bit confused by her offer. I didn’t know it could be settled so easily. The idea of having a best friend was bigger than anything.

  “I might have a scar forever,” she said solemnly. “And it would be your fault.”

  I hadn’t thought about that.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, and this time I actually meant it with all of my heart.

  “And because you’re sorry, that’s why you’ll have to do what I say,” Daisy said. “And then we’ll be best friends.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Having a best friend was fun, even if I didn’t like many of the things that Daisy liked. It was more important to just be her friend. I did whatever she said. I liked whatever she liked.

  We had sleepovers all the time and we wore matching outfits to school. I got so good at thinking the same things were cool that people joked that they couldn’t tell us apart. That we were like twins.

  Our mothers signed us up for everything together, but our favorite thing was ballet. We were obsessed with going to the ballet, making up ballets, and having everything we owned be pink.

  It was the only thing that we ever did together that I actually liked for real.

  Everything was fine until sixth grade, when I was asked to go into the pre-pointe class and she wasn’t.

  “Ballet is stupid—we’re quitting,” Daisy announced. “We’re in sixth grade now, so we’re too old for it. Ballet is like dolls—it’s something you grow out of.”

  And just like that, it was supposed to be over. But I hadn’t grown out of it. I’d grown into it. It was my morning and evening. It was my breathing in and my breathing out. It was my food and my water.

  I didn’t want to quit. I couldn’t. So I kept taking ballet.

  At first I didn’t tell her. I thought that she wouldn’t notice. I should have known right then that Daisy wasn’t a real best friend. You don’t lie to a best friend. You feel safe with her.

  “Where were you?” she asked me one afternoon, a month into my attempted deception.

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “You’re still going, aren’t you?” she asked. “I can smell the tutu on you.”

  “I like ballet,” I said.

  “I’ll never be your friend if you choose ballet over me.”

  I thought about it. I had to. Daisy was my best friend and I was betraying her. But quitting ballet? That seemed even more awful than losing Daisy.

  I chose ballet.

  That year, Daisy got the whole school to give me the silent treatment.

  Almost every day after school, I took a bus downtown and took ballet. But in the end I wasn’t convinced that it was worth the suffering that I endured at school every day. The silent treatment wore me down.

  I hadn’t made any other friends at ballet class over the years because Daisy and I had always been so inseparable, impenetrable. Nor was I the best in my pre-pointe class. I was close to the worst. The teacher kept telling me that my turn-out was bad, my extension was awful, and my arms were wobbly. And that I was lazy.

  In sixth grade, I cried every night.

  By the end of the year, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit.

  Daisy immediately sniffed it out on me. It was easy to tell because one day after school, instead of leaving early with my big dance bag, I was just there, ready to hang out.

  “I knew you’d see the light,” she said. “Ballet is stupid. Friendship is much more important.”

  I stepped right back into being her number-one best friend, going along with whatever she said.

  On the surface, everything was good. I was the perfect teenager. But underneath, I started having these moments where I would panic a little. Like maybe I was missing out on something bigger, more important, more beautiful.

  Walking down the halls with my books in my hand, I would chassé. Sometimes outside while we all hung out, I would do a double pirouette. Occasionally when we had to run in gym class, I would throw in a leap or two. It seemed that no matter how much I tried to squash it, dancing always tried to gurgle up.

  “What are you doing?” Daisy would ask.

  It was only when Daisy spoke—and she spoke a lot—that the impulse to dance would stop.

  “Nothing,” I would tell her.

  “It looked like dancing,” she said.

  “I was just goofing off.”

  “Well, you looked silly. Don’t do it.”

  I swallowed it. Because I liked being the girl who got invited to parties and who could go to Johnson Avenue after school, go to Seton Park, and be available to do stuff. Outside, I was popular. Inside, I was aching.

  This truce lasted until it was time to think about high school.

  “What are we going to do about next year?” I asked as eighth grade advanced.

  “Well, if I don’t get into Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, then I’m going to private school,” Daisy said.

  No one wanted to go to a bad high school. Everyone knew you needed to get into one of the top high schools in the city or else you’d never go to one of the top colleges in the country.

  “My parents aren’t rich,” I said. “They already told me that I’d just have to go to public school. We have to study really hard.”

  But Daisy didn’t want to study too hard. Not when there were boys to chase, trends to set, and girls lower on the totem pole to make fun of.

  I wasn’t convinced that I could get into those brainy schools. I was smart, but I wasn’t smart like Todd. I had a different kind of smarts, and that kind of smarts didn’t do very well on tests.

  The night before I took the high school placement test, I woke up at two in the morning and had a full-blown panic attack. What if I got all the math problems wrong? What if amplifier:ear was not the same as telescope:eye?

  That’s when it dawned on me, like thunder:storm or wind:tornado.

  The thing I had going for me was dance.

  School Sucks

  The Van Cortlandt Park–242nd Street subway station was a terminus, so there was always a train waiting on the tracks. That day—the day I was destined to meet Yrena—I picked the car with the best-looking graffiti on it. It was a car covered in intricate letters that colorfully spelled out the words Faith and Trust.

  I had my choice of any seat, but it felt weird to be the only person sitting in an empty car and be right in the middle of it, so I chose to sit in the corner.

  As other kids from school boarded the train, I didn’t bother nodding at them. They never sat with me even if they noticed me. Even if there was an empty seat next to me. Even if I tried smiling at them.

  I was not friends with them. I was not friends with anyone. That’s the trouble when you took everything black. You couldn’t let any color in, either.

  Maurice Tibbets got on at 86th Street. There was always a crowd around Maurice Tibbets. He had a lot of personality, and I knew from observation that he seemed to be fun to be around. And it couldn’t have hurt that his mother was a superstar—Oscar-winning, Grammy-winning, Tony-winning Khadira. No last name necessary. Maurice was showbiz gold, and everyone at Performing Arts wanted to be near the glow.

  I watched him on the sly as he hung on to the pole. Sometimes he’d let go and balance himself with his feet. He knew how to handle his body. Even on the moving train, he always knew where his center was. That’s what made him the most talented dancer in freshman year.

  I wished I was as talented as he was. Holding my back strong, I
stood up and tried to find the center in my body. For a second I felt it, like a tiny golden ball inside of me that I could roll around gently. Then it disappeared, making me slouch again. But for a moment—a brief, certain moment—I had known what it felt like. For the rest of the trip I tried to get that feeling back.

  At Times Square, we all got off in one big mass of pushing bodies. We were all going in the same direction, but still I trailed behind the others and their little cliques. There were the drama kids. There were the dancers. There were the musicians. There was the mixed group. I wanted to enter one of the little galaxies of friends, be one of the suns, even one that lived on the outermost arm, but I was too far-flung to be drawn in.

  How did they find each other? I wondered. How did they know that they could be friends?

  I had vowed that after what had happened with Daisy, I would take my time finding friends. I would go slowly. Now, two months into school, I still hadn’t made a move, and everyone seemed to be all cliqued up.

  I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on the galaxies of friends while they laughed and talked about homework and the opposite sex and what was on TV last night. I walked through Times Square—eyes down, ears open—holding my breath because Times Square stank. I hated that I had to do this walk alone, past the marquees for Dirty Sluts, Hot Cherry Girls, Madam o’ Glam. It was all porno theaters and dirty bums panhandling and prostitutes hanging around on the corners, even this early in the morning.

  Every day, though, somehow I made it through. I had run the gauntlet by myself one more time. And despite how low I might have felt about my lot in life, whenever I saw everyone hanging out in front of the brown school building on 46th Street, I let out the breath that I had been holding in.

  I made my way over to an empty spot off to the side of the building, away from everyone else, and began my morning of standing around, people watching. Some dancers on the corner had laid down a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk and were taking turns break dancing. I watched as they threaded the needle, went around the world, and practiced their freezes. Other kids surrounded the dancers, moving and clapping to the music coming out of a windowsill ghetto blaster. Early-rising tourists with cameras took pictures of the building and everyone who happened to be standing outside. I think they expected that we would start to dance on the taxicabs, just like in the movie Fame. The real cool kids gave the tourists the finger. I just tried to melt into the wall. I didn’t want to be someone’s souvenir.

  “Rose!”

  I heard my name and wondered if there was another girl at Performing Arts named Rose.

  “Rose!”

  I looked over and noticed Callisto and Caitlin, two triplets from my homeroom. They were waving someone over—waving me over.

  “Rose!” Callisto called my name a third time and then patted the wall next to where she was leaning.

  I pointed at my chest.

  “Me?” I asked.

  Callisto’s head nodded up and down. I could have done a million things then. I could have shrugged. Or ignored them. Or gone into the building and up to the locker room to hide. But instead, that day, I picked up my bag from the ground, weaved my way through the break-dancers and the huddles of other kids, and went over to join them.

  Callisto immediately offered me a clove cigarette from her fresh pack.

  “Want one?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. My lungs were already filled with a dark smoldering discontent. I had enough smoke inside of me.

  She shrugged and put one in her mouth and lit it up.

  I liked the smell of clove cigarettes and found I didn’t mind at all when Callisto blew the smoke right in my direction. It was a sweet smell, and its effect was calming, like incense. I leaned back against the wall and thought about Yrena’s smile and my mother’s warm hand and how nice it was to have someone to stand with that morning.

  Today is going to be a good day, I thought.

  “Are you staring at my earrings?” Callisto asked.

  Callisto was very New Wave. She had her hair cut to look a lot like Ziggy Stardust. I knew this because she wore a denim jacket with a picture of Ziggy on the back that she got some guy down in the Village to paint for her. She wore three silver earrings in her left ear but none in her right one.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, blushing. Because I had been staring—not in a disapproving way, just in a fixing-my-gaze-on-something-while-thinking-deeply way.

  “I always wanted to get a second hole, but my mom won’t let me,” I said.

  “Our mom cried when Callisto came home with those extra earrings,” Caitlin said. “She couldn’t believe the lady at the mall would shoot extra holes in someone’s ears without parental permission.”

  “She was worried that I looked too tough and would never be taken seriously as a concert violinist,” Callisto said.

  Caitlin, Callisto, and their triplet brother, Caleb, were all musicians, although Caleb was going to Performing Arts for drama, not music. He never stood with his sisters in the morning—in fact, I rarely saw him in front of the school. He had his own friends and they usually went to the parking lot across the street where the kids smoked who-knows-what.

  Caitlin had shoulder-length wavy hair and wore liquid eyeliner, Cleopatra-style. Callisto looked nothing like her. You’d never know that they were sisters, or even triplets, except I had noticed that sometimes all three of them moved their hands the same way.

  “Rose,” Callisto said. “Important question. Did you study for the geometry test?”

  “Not really,” I said. I’d actually forgotten all about math class.

  “Darn, me neither. I was hoping I could cheat off of you.”

  “Sorry.”

  I didn’t know if I was supposed to move away from them after they were done talking to me or if I was supposed to stay. They didn’t seem to mind me staying, so I stayed.

  “Any plans for Halloween, Rose?” Caitlin asked.

  “No plans,” I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Maurice and a bunch of other dance students stubbing out their cigarettes. They were all heading up to the locker room to change into their dance clothes because dance class was first period and they wanted to get there early to warm up.

  I knew I should be doing the same, but I never did. Mostly it was because I hated being in the locker room while all the other dancers were talking and having fun. I wore my dance clothes underneath my street clothes and always ran in to change at the last minute.

  That day, however, I didn’t go up early because I was hanging out with Callisto and Caitlin and they were talking to me and there was no way that I was going to leave that spot, not even if the Soviet Union sent a nuclear missile to destroy New York City.

  “Why are there no cute sophomore boys?” Callisto asked.

  “I wish Elliot Waldman would come over and talk to me,” Caitlin said. “He is such a dream.”

  I joined them in staring at Elliot Waldman and his friends, who were seniors, as they walked back toward the school from the parking lot across the street. Caleb and some other underclassmen were with them.

  “Elliot Waldman is the only person at this school worth drooling over,” Caitlin pronounced.

  At exactly the same time, Caitlin and Callisto each put one hand on her forehead and one hand on her heart, as though they were fainting.

  “What do you think, Rose? I bet you’re the kind of girl who thinks David Freddy is hot.”

  It was a fact that most girls who went to the High School of Performing Arts were either in the Elliot Waldman camp or the David Freddy camp. Some girls thought that David Freddy was the hottest thing since sliced bread. Personally, neither Elliot’s leather jacket nor David’s long hair did it for me.

  My idea of hot was a perfect extension. My idea of hot was a guy looking good in tights. My idea of hot was the way that Maurice Tibbets balanced without the pole on the subway, even though I didn’t like Maurice Tibbets like that.

  The fir
st bell rang, so I didn’t have to answer Caitlin and Callisto. I just grabbed my bag and waved good-bye as I dashed into the building ahead of them.

  “See you in homeroom!” Caitlin called after me as she joined the other music kids rushing inside to tune their instruments.

  I raced upstairs to the dance department, peeled off my street clothes, and did a quick five-minute warm-up before Ms. Zina walked in with her limp and her cane and made us work up a sweat.

  In dance class no one spoke. Everyone was completely concentrated. There was only the music, the instructions from Ms. Zina, and the shapes our movements made.

  With the piano player tinkling away at the piano, and all of our feet making thumps and squeaks on the floor as we moved through the class, and the early morning sun streaming in through the windows, I felt as though I were in another world. Even though I always hung back a little, dance class was the only place that I felt good.

  All of my feelings went right into my body.

  I felt more like the real me when I danced—and that included the million little mistakes I made, which frustrated me. My arms felt floppy. My legs seemed weak. My extension was not high enough. My turn-out was terrible.

  Why do I have to suck so much? I thought.

  There were things that I could do to be better. I could show up early and warm up. I could ask questions about how I was supposed to make my body move like that. I could ask for help.

  But I didn’t.

  By the time homeroom came around, which was right before third period, I was exhausted. Telling myself I wasn’t good enough exhausted me.

  I threw my street clothes on quickly and headed for homeroom. There, I could have a moment to lay my head down on the desk and shut my eyes while the homeroom teacher, Ms. Lana, took attendance.

  “Here,” I mumbled when she called my name.

  “Hey, Rose,” Caitlin said, poking me back into the world. “You wanna come over to our house this Sunday for Halloween? Our parents are out of town.”

  “We could go egg a house or do shaving-cream bombs,” Callisto said.

  I am a girl who loses friends, I thought. I am a girl who can’t keep friends.