by Laurence Yep
It was funny to think of Jade imitating Tutu. “Is that why you spend so much time with her?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Jade said with a smile. “So try it now. Imagine that you’re Tutu—like this.” Shutting her eyes, Jade danced a few steps effortlessly, and then opened her eyes again. “And while your mind’s busy with that, your body goes through the steps on its own.”
Balling up the tissue, I sighed and stepped into the middle of the hallway. As a precaution, I temporarily unwound the sash from my waist and handed it to Jade. Then I tried to picture our kitten, but unfortunately, my Tutu had started to take a nap. “It’s not working,” I said in frustration.
Jade chewed her lip for a moment. “Well, then, try remembering a really special time when you felt good,” she suggested.
A special time? That would have to be that Saturday last summer, watching lilies in the pond in Kenilworth Park. I pictured myself floating on the pond like a water lily. Floating, circling, drifting. And I began the first steps of our dance routine.
“That’s it,” Jade said approvingly. “What did you imagine?”
“I was floating in a pond like a water lily,” I said. And the look on Jade’s face told me that I had pulled it off. Maybe there was something to this visualization thing. And that planted a small seed of hope in me. Maybe I could do this flower routine after all.
“Thanks, Jade,” I said, managing a genuine smile. I couldn’t be mad at her anymore—not when she was the one person who could always make me feel better. “Thanks for helping me.”
“What are sisters for?” she asked, pulling me into a quick hug. Then she handed my sash back to me. “Now do something for me,” she said with a smile. “Put a new hem on this.”
I made a face at Jade, and she laughed as she linked arms with me. “Let’s get going,” she said. “Mr. Omi will be wondering what happened to those books he sent me for.”
And my ballet class will be wondering what happened to me, I thought to myself, squaring my shoulders for the moment when I would have to walk back into that classroom.
When I got back to ballet, the class was in the middle of another run-through. The other students looked at me curiously but kept dancing. Only Renata smirked.
The music finished about the same time that the school bell rang, ending the class. Before she dismissed us, Ms. Hawken reminded us that tomorrow was a big day: we would be combining our tech and dress rehearsals.
I changed back into my regular clothes, and as I was leaving for my next class, Ms. Hawken motioned for me to wait.
“Are you okay, Isabelle?” she asked kindly.
I shrugged, trying to find the words to explain what had happened. “I thought the sash on my costume would help give me confidence—like yours does,” I said. “But it only made things worse.”
“That’s just because it was too long,” she said sympathetically. “It could still work. Or you’ll find your own lucky charm. It doesn’t have to be anything you wear, you know. It could also be something you do.”
Red-faced, I glanced toward the hallway, remembering the advice my sister had just given me. “Jade does visualization before she dances,” I said, and then more softly, I added, “If it can help me dance anything like her, I’ll give it a try.”
Ms. Hawken smiled. “Your sister has made her share of mistakes, too, Isabelle. Anyway, you shouldn’t compare yourself to her or anyone else. You have to measure Isabelle against what Isabelle can do.”
But do I use inches or miles? I wondered as I left the studio.
Jade and I didn’t talk on the bus ride home. Maybe she knew I was thinking about my flower routine, wondering how I could use visualization to make it better. But she stood hip to hip with me, swaying side to side in the crowded bus aisle. That was her way of letting me know she was there if I needed more advice.
As we trudged home, I saw reminders that the Autumn Festival was coming soon. The sidewalk was hidden under a blanket of leaves. And the crisp autumn air nipped at my nose and ears. Our neighbor had raked up his leaves and put them into orange trash bags with jack-o’-lantern faces printed on them. They squatted now on his lawn like huge pumpkins. Time was rushing by too fast.
Jade unlocked the front door, and we both hurried inside. I needed to finish practicing my dance visualization, and I needed to fix my sash. But first things first. I rushed through my language arts homework at my desk.
When that was done, I took the sash from my backpack. Eagerly Tutu leaped toward it, claws reaching for the pretty dangling prey. I barely jerked it out of her way in time. “Tutu, no!” I hollered.
“I’ll take her downstairs,” Jade said, coming up quickly behind me. “Tutu,” she called in a high, sweet voice. From her backpack, she drew out her costume shawl and held it out like a matador’s cape.
Our kitten’s head twitched from side to side as the fringe of little tassels at the bottom of the shawl swung back and forth. Then, tensing, she leaped with paws outstretched to catch a tassel.
Jade jerked the shawl away at the last moment, so Tutu landed instead on the rug. Whirling around, she got ready to pounce again.
Jade jumped easily over her into the hallway and spun around, dangling the shawl once more. Tutu charged after it. The long rug in the hallway bunched up beneath her feet as she chased after Jade and disappeared from view.
I went to Mom’s sewing room and started to alter the sash. Part of me thought I should wait for Mom to get home, to be sure I did the alteration right. The other part of me thought I needed to try to fix the sash myself. That part won out.
I trimmed the sash, and then I trimmed it even more, until it looked like a delicate bouquet of flowers fastened at the waist of my costume. Once I’d finished that, I stepped into my costume and tried a spin or two. Without the weight of worry over the long sash, I felt as light as a feather.
Afterward, I went to make up with Tutu. I’d just reached the foot of the stairs when I heard banging and clanking in the kitchen.
“Mom?” I called.
“Hey, Isabelle,” Dad answered. “Mom phoned me. She has to work a little late, so she told me to get dinner started.” He poked his head out of the kitchen. “Meatloaf okay?”
I nodded. Then I glanced down the hallway and saw Jade in the living room. She wore her shawl wrapped around her lower back and draped over her forearms. She tried a few steps as she shimmied the shawl back and forth. She was making it into a real part of her dance now. I wished I could be that creative.
When I started to feel jealous, I remembered Jade’s words: “You’ll be your own kind of dancer.” I sighed and headed into the kitchen. I almost giggled when I saw the large oven mitts hiding Dad’s hands. He looked a lot more at home behind a drum set than he did in the kitchen.
“Need any help?” I asked.
He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Peel some potatoes?” he asked hopefully. He almost tripped over Tutu, who was circling around his legs, rubbing herself against the man with the pan of meatloaf.
I got a peeler from the drawer. “Sure,” I said, “since you asked so nicely.”
Dad put the meatloaf into the oven. Then, as he rooted around in the drawer for another peeler, he began humming the melody of “Pond Dreams.”
I shoved aside the onion that Dad hadn’t used in the meatloaf. And as I started to scrape away at a potato, I hummed along in a higher pitch.
We’d peeled about three potatoes before I asked, “Dad?”
He stopped humming. “What?”
I tried to keep my voice casual as a ribbon of potato peel dropped onto the counter. “Did you ever want to become a full-time musician?” I asked.
Dad stared at the peeled potato in his hand as if it had dropped out of the sky. Then he nodded slowly. “When I was younger, I did,” he said. “I had friends who became full-timers.” He began to work on another potato. “But to be honest, I just wasn’t as good as they were.”
I thought about everything I had bee
n feeling at Anna Hart. It was strange to find out that Dad had once felt like that, too. “Did that bother you?” I asked.
Dad swept the potato peelings into a neat pile. “For a while, it did,” he admitted. “But then I realized it was useless for me to measure my talent against someone else’s. And I liked the drums too much to quit. Now I just try to keep improving and to play better than I did the last time.”
I patted his arm. “I think ‘Pond Dreams’ is your best song yet,” I said, and it was true.
Dad dipped his head. “Thank you kindly,” he said with a smile.
And just in case I’d never said it before, I added, “I think you’re a great drummer, Dad.”
“Well, maybe I’ve played the drums so much, I’ve improved a little,” Dad said. “Anyway, I like to think I leave people better off after they’ve heard me.” He wagged his peeler at me. “Now tell me why you’re suddenly curious about my career decision.”
Too late, I realized I shouldn’t have asked so many questions—not if I wasn’t prepared for Dad to start asking them, too. I picked up a carrot and began peeling it. “It’s just that…” I began, “well, I don’t think I’ll ever be as good a dancer as Jade.”
Dad put his peeler down and then, picking up another carrot, twirled it between his fingers. “You’re going to tell this poor little carrot that it’s not as good a vegetable”—he said, reaching for a potato with his other hand—“as this tater?”
Despite everything, I started to laugh. “You’re not supposed to play with your food, Dad,” I scolded him.
“You’re getting to sound like your mother more and more every day,” said Dad. He made an elaborate show of setting both carrot and potato down side by side. “But if you’re going to be fussy, you and Jade can be rubies and diamonds.” Then Dad turned to face me and said, “Either way, Isabelle, stop comparing yourself to your sister.” He picked up the spare onion. “That’s the fastest road to onion-dom, otherwise known as the kingdom of misery and tears. Instead, just try to dance a little better than you did the day before.”
At the moment, I would have settled for getting through the Autumn Festival without a mistake.
The next day in the dressing room before rehearsal, I was already nervous. Renata didn’t help any when she asked, “So, how are you going to mess up today, Dizzy Izzy?”
I cringed at the nickname. When several people grinned, I wondered if I was going to be called Dizzy Izzy for the next four years. It probably all depended on the festival.
Once we were all dressed, we walked through the school corridors to the auditorium. The other classes had already started rehearsing. In the music room, about two dozen violinists played a simple tune, more or less together, as a teacher called out a tempo. Through the door of the visual arts room, I saw a teacher and four students lifting papier-mâché trees onto a wide, flat cart.
The auditorium usually doubled as our cafeteria, but the lunch tables had been folded up and shoved against the rear wall like giant slices of bread. The smell of the day’s lunch mixed with the odor of wet paint and freshly sawn wood. Even though the door to the kitchen was shut, I could hear the clatter and clank as the staff washed dishes, big trays, and pots.
The drama students were rehearsing a scene from The Merry Wives of Windsor on the auditorium floor while they waited their turn onstage. Over in a corner, an a cappella group was practicing the song “Tomorrow.” It felt like recess in here, with all the different groups playing their own games.
While our ballet class waited to go onstage, we warmed up briefly and then walked through our routine. Ms. Hawken kept time for us with claps of her hands.
After the other groups had gone on, it was finally our turn. So I filed with the other flowers past props stacked behind the stage.
Against the wall was a set that looked like a snow-covered valley. A theater arts teacher and his students were gathered there, reviewing a batch of props. Gabriel waved at me from the group.
Last night I’d worked hard on visualizing my routine. As I stepped onstage, I had just begun to run through the routine again in my mind when suddenly everything became super bright—as if I’d just been dumped onto the Sahara Desert. It was such a shock that, for a moment, I lost the dance images in my mind. Squinting, I saw Mr. Raley, the English teacher, acting as the stage manager. He began speaking into the microphone of his headset.
The light dimmed and I looked up. Overhead were banks of lights of different sizes and colors. Most of them had been turned off now.
I glanced at some of the other dancers. They looked just as distracted as I felt. It took us a moment to find our proper places.
Ms. Hawken must have noticed. “Concentrate, class,” she said from stage left.
So I tried to imagine myself back at that peaceful pond. I was tired, because I had spent most of last night running through the imagery for my dance routine. But I also was anxious to see how the shortened sash would work. I reached for it now and made a silent wish that I would finally dance well.
“Ready?” Ms. Hawken called. “Begin.”
I started to move as soon as I heard the familiar music. When the notes dipped, I bent at the waist like a lily pad curling up. And when the notes rose with the harp music, I thought of the water lily opening its petals. I didn’t hesitate. I knew what to do. It felt right to move my head and arms this way. All that practice was finally paying off. The good feeling made me want to move, to jump, to—!
The world suddenly went white as a spotlight swept across my eyes and moved on. Mr. Raley immediately told the student operating the spotlight to slow down.
Between the spotlight and Mr. Raley, the next image popped out of my head. When I hesitated, Ms. Hawken made a circular gesture with her hand for me to keep going, so I did.
The spotlight, though, distracted me so much that it was hard to hold on to the images I had put together last night. The light began to follow us in time to the music, but it was moving counterclockwise while we were wheeling in the opposite direction. I heard more barked orders, and the light started trailing us clockwise.
After about half a minute, Ms. Hawken called, “Stop, stop. Mr. Raley, it’s too murky. Can you speed up making it brighter?”
“I thought you wanted twilight and then dawn,” Mr. Raley said.
“My day is shorter than yours,” Ms. Hawken replied. “The sun needs to come up sooner.”
The music stopped, and we stood waiting while Mr. Raley and Ms. Hawken experimented with different lights until they got the combination they wanted.
Somehow we made it through our routine, but I wouldn’t have called it “dancing.” In fact, with all the interruptions for tech and sound adjustments, it didn’t even qualify as exercise. It was more like a game of freeze tag. Our stage time ended without a complete run-through, and I didn’t really get to test my modified sash.
More classes had come to the auditorium to use the stage, so we shuffled off and Ms. Hawken assembled us in a clear area of the room. “Despite all the distractions, you did well,” she said, looking at me first before her eyes moved on to the rest of the class. “But you’ll have a big audience tomorrow. So you’ll really need to focus. Be in the studio at six.”
As I left with the others to change, I wished we’d had more time onstage. I wondered if my whole class was heading toward disaster.
Late Saturday afternoon, I tried to control my growing excitement as I mounted the school steps with Jade. Inside the school, the visual arts classes had decorated the walls with pumpkins and other autumn images. Flying overhead were ghostly girls in white dresses and soldiers in blue uniforms. The old building was rumored to be haunted from the days when it had been a girls’ school and later a hospital during the Civil War. I felt the ghosts’ flashing red eyes watching me from the ceiling.
I could tell that some of the other students were just as keyed up as I was. They were practically skipping along the corridor, chattering away excitedly. But others were quiet,
like Jade. I knew enough not to bother her while she did her visualization. As I walked with her and ran through my own set of images in my mind, I worked off some energy with arm gestures and half turns.
I glimpsed Gabriel near his locker. He was muttering to himself as he practiced a trick with his cards. Several of them slipped from between his fingers and fluttered to the floor. He scowled as he squatted and gathered up the wandering cards. His tricks might not look like magic right now, but I knew that after enough practice, they would look amazing in front of an actual audience. I hoped it would be the same with my dancing.
When we hurried by a corridor, I saw Luisa and the other pirates practicing a few steps outside the modern dance studio. They looked just as nervous as Gabriel.
We passed a woman tinkering with a video camera and tripod. Was she the videographer? I knew the school was hiring someone to record the show so that we could buy the DVD later.
Suddenly, I heard Luisa cry out in dismay. Jade and I turned at the same time to see her looking down at her costume. Even at this distance, I could see that she had torn a big hole in the side of her bodice.
“What are you going to do?” one of the pirates asked. “You can’t go onstage like that.”
“But I’ve got to,” Luisa said desperately. She suddenly burst into tears.
Luisa was usually so tough. It shocked the other pirates to see her cry. I was surprised, too.
“Luisa!” I called. I motioned for her to come down to us. “It’s okay. I’ve got a little sewing kit in my bag.”
“But you have to get into your own costume,” Luisa protested. “There’s no time to fix mine.”
I looked at Jade, who waved Luisa over. “There’s always time to help a friend,” she said. “But hurry.”
As Luisa walked toward us, she started to raise an arm to wipe her face on her sleeve.
“Don’t touch your face,” Jade said quickly. “Your makeup will smear.” We all wore makeup for performances so that our faces didn’t disappear in the bright spotlight onstage.