“Head down, shut up. Stay in the back row and dance well. Be nice but don’t try to be one of them. Don’t show off and don’t show them up if you can help it.”
“Exactly what I thought.”
“And listen.” In what had become a familiar gesture, Will put his palm flat on the crown of Daisy’s head. “Marie might be testing you. See what you’re made of. Know what I mean?”
Daisy nodded.
“I won’t shadow you like a bodyguard but I got your back. Don’t let them see you cry. Come cry to me afterward.”
Daisy took the pen attached to the bulletin board and initialed the four places where her name appeared. She hitched the strap of her dance bag further on her shoulder and prepared to embark on a campaign of humble invisibility.
“Let me go in first,” she said. They exchanged three quick kisses: left cheek, right, left again.
“Fuck ‘em,” he said.
Walking into the studio, Daisy told herself she was only imagining the break in the buzzing conversation. The eyes turned in her direction were mere coincidence. Head down, shut up, she thought, her own eyes scanning the ranks for one familiar and friendly face.
From one of the back row barres, Taylor Revell, a fellow freshman, put down her knitting and raised her palm. Her foot nudged aside the dance bag she’d set on the floor, holding a place for Daisy. Suffused with relief, Daisy walked over, smiling and saying hello to anyone who looked at her.
Taylor had corn-colored hair with bangs, and a smattering of freckles across her long nose. Her teeth were long as well, making her slightly horse-faced. She was convinced her chin was too weak for ballet, an insecurity which gave her the mannerism of sticking her bottom jaw out. Marie lovingly called her Il Duce.
“You’ve got about five red laser dots on your back,” Taylor said out the side of her mouth. “You’re in the crosshairs.”
A quick glance confirmed Jessica Barnes was staring and whispering behind a hand to Meghan Lamb.
“Where Barnes goes, little Lamb follows,” Taylor said.
“You might not want to stand too close,” Daisy said, pulling on her canvas slippers. “Dancers have notoriously bad aim.”
“I REMEMBER SAYING IT,” Daisy said. “’Dancers have notoriously bad aim.’ How’s that for irony?” Her chuckle fell flat and Rita’s mouth barely twitched in a smile.
“Anyway,” Daisy said, tucking a foot under one knee. “It was tough adjusting that first month of school. I felt a little lonely.”
“Did you have a roommate?”
“I did. Sarah. But she… Looking back now I wonder if she was depressed. She left school by the beginning of October and I barely got a chance to know her. I’m not the type to leap into friendships anyway. I remember seeing girls in my dorm who were pricking their fingers and exchanging blood two days after they’d met. A month later they were barely on speaking terms or rooming with someone else. I’m more cautious socially. Sometimes I wonder if it came across as cold.”
She picked at a loose thread in the brown chenille pillow that was becoming her best friend during therapy.
“A lot of times high school felt like a shipwreck. A social shipwreck with everyone in desperate survival mode and only one lifeboat. Everyone fighting for a seat, clinging to the sides and beating each other with oars to keep their spot. I can’t stand that kind of chaos, when people create drama for the sake of it. Dance was always my haven in that regard: a solid pontoon boat that never tipped over. Then I got to college and everything reversed—socially it was more chill, but dance became a complete shipwreck.”
“Was it more competitive?”
“Competitive to the point of toxic,” Daisy said. “And catty. These ridiculous, unwritten rules in class about who stands where at the barre. All this idiotic posturing within a dumb pecking order. The boys weren’t so bad, but the junior and senior girls were a pack of bitches.”
She was pulling the loose thread in the pillow too tight and making the stitches pucker. She smoothed it out, taking a deep breath. “The company I danced with in Gladwyne had a hierarchy but it served a purpose. You were mentored by older students. They’d help if you were struggling or applaud your accomplishments. At Lancaster your accomplishments got a shrug and an eye roll, like it was beneath upperclassmen to recognize talent. And if you were struggling, Jesus, they were almost gleeful about it. What’s that word when you take delight in someone’s misfortune? Schaden…”
“Schadenfreude,” Rita said.
“They adored someone’s bad day. I swear. I spent the first month of school thinking I’d made a mistake. I was really unhappy.” She took a sip of her coffee. “It got worse after I was cast in The Bach Variations. I felt targeted, disliked and for no good reason.”
“Did you talk to Marie about it?”
“No, that’s not how it works in ballet.”
Rita raised her eyebrows.
Daisy tried to explain. Dance trained her to be fearless of physical pain and struggle, and to recognize the gulf between difficult and impossible. Ballet favors not only the brave, but the smart.
“No stupid girls are in ballet.” It was the motto of Daisy’s Russian teachers at Gladwyne Ballet. Usually shouted as a hand slapped your butt after a careless mistake. Sometimes muttered under the breath as trembling limbs were shoved into alignment. Even spoken affectionately with a pinch on your inner thigh that pushed your extension into something you didn’t even know possible.
Marie Del’Amici didn’t subscribe to such corporal teaching methods, but she was no less demanding. And not averse to an occasional, shouted harangue when her students got lazy. Fortunately, her language restrictions took some of the sting out. She ignored the pecking order unless it became an unacceptable distraction. Her job was to teach and the students could sort themselves out.
“Will said Marie might have been testing me,” Daisy said. “Another thing about ballet. If a teacher is hard on you, it means they care. Marie cast me in the Prelude for a reason. I didn’t want to let her down so I dug in and went to work. Maybe that’s why I said yes to David when he asked me out.”
“This was before you met Erik?”
“A month, maybe six weeks before,” Daisy said. “During the time I was so tired, lonely and distracted. Maybe I didn’t handle David as well as I could.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe I said yes because I didn’t have the energy to tactfully say no. Or because I wanted some validating attention.”
Rita’s smile was soft as she shook her head. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Will suggested we double-date, go out as a foursome. But David objected for some reason.”
“I GOT NO OBJECTION TO WILL,” David said. “Shit, the guy gets more pussy than the ASPCA. He probably goes with men just to get a break.”
Daisy didn’t quite know how to answer.
“You sleep with him yet?”
Silverware frozen in hand, she looked at him. “This is charm, right? Clarify for me because I think it’s charm but your accent is hard to understand.” Actually it wasn’t. Will’s Canadian accent and slang were sometimes sludgy in her ears, while David, who was born in Belgium, spoke perfectly decent continental French.
“It’s curiosity,” he said.
“But if you know I’m a virgin, and you do, then why ask if I’ve slept with Will? If you’re curious, ask why I haven’t slept with anyone. Or if you’re ballsy, ask if I’ll sleep with you.”
“Will you sleep with me?”
“No.”
His smile didn’t waver yet his face changed. As if a mask dropped. Or a single-celled layer of skin melted away, revealing beneath it a gentler, more thoughtful David.
“Will said you didn’t bullshit easily,” he said.
She smiled and returned her attention to the plate, twirling a careful portion of linguini against her spoon. It was hard enough eating pasta neatly. Even harder with a boy staring at you like you were his dessert.
“You make it sound like I’m an albino or some other genetic rarity.”
“Well, you must have had boyfriends.”
“Why?” she said behind her fork, chewing.
“Because you’re fucking gorgeous.”
“But I could be a total bitch.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“The pretty girls always have sex?”
“Speaking from my observational experience? Yes.”
She finished chewing, looking across the table at him. Compared to sparring verbally with Will, which felt like a tango, this was fencing. Moving blindly backward as she kept up a parry to his thrusts.
She tried a soft riposte. “I’ve had plenty of boyfriends. And since you’re curious, and buying me dinner, I’ll tell you I’m not all that blank of a slate.”
He smiled. “I’d love to fill it in.”
His words filled her face with a swift heat. His manner was bold but she couldn’t deny a small part of her was flattered by it. Attention was attention.
So she smiled back. “Listen, you want to take me out to get laid, then I’m not your girl.”
“I never said that.”
“But you’re not saying much else.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything but sex.” She looked at her watch. “Three minutes about you. Go.”
He rearranged the salt and pepper shakers, thinking. “I love music,” he said, running his fingertips around the rim of his water glass. “Both my parents were classical musicians.”
Daisy went still. She knew David was an orphan but not the circumstances of his parents’ death. She looked up to meet his eyes but he was looking down now, playing with his spoon. Fiddling with the latch at the gate of his most private self.
“Music talks to me,” he said. “It makes me tell stories in my head. It was how I dealt with a lot of things when I was young. Know what I mean?”
She nodded, wishing he would stop fidgeting. “Go on,” she said quietly.
“The first time I saw you dance… I was watching a class and Marie was having you do something to the music from Nutcracker. The second act pas de deux.”
He hummed the descending notes of the grand adagio, in a voice that was soft, but right on tune. “I love that theme. My mother told me a story about it. Someone bet Tchaikovsky he couldn’t compose a piece using the notes of a scale in order. They assumed ascending order. But Tchaikovsky, being a genius, chose descending and the result was the Nutcracker adagio. The rest of the score gives me cavities but that piece always makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
“My ballet teachers told me a different story.” Daisy said. “Tchaikovsky’s sister died while he was writing the score. And the adagio’s sadness is in tribute to her. The descending scale is her death haunting him.”
David pointed the spoon at her, mouth slightly open. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew you knew that story. The way you were dancing. Everyone else was bringing the sweetness but you tapped into the sadness. I knew you knew.”
“It has a righteous anger to it, too. Toward the end, when he brings in all the brass and lets rip. He’s pissed. Shaking his fist at the sky and cursing God.”
“Yes.” His eyes held hers, filled with a pleased wonder. The moment flickered warm between them. A small, complicit campfire. Then it was as if David became aware of the taste of vulnerability in his mouth and he gave the spoon in his hand a tiny toss. It plonked onto the table and bounced onto the rim of Daisy’s plate. It was a defiant gesture, and his cocky expression was back as he glanced up at her.
“I have a bad habit of falling in love with dancers,” he said, grinning.
“What do you like about us?”
“The flexibility.”
She touched her tongue to the inside of her cheek and raised her eyebrows.
“What I don’t like would be a shorter list,” David said.
“Do you dance?”
He laughed. “No.”
“What do you do?”
Over the rim of his water glass his eyebrows wrinkled. “Is this curiosity or your cocktail hour conversation?”
She put her chin on the heel of her hand. “What do you love?”
He tapped the base of the glass on the table, shaking the ice cubes. “I love the five-minute call,” he said after a moment. “All the action before the show finally starts. I like the little pause when my hands are on the rope of the curtain and I hold the whole thing captive. It doesn’t start until I pull. I love that last moment. I love being in line for something and it’s not yet my turn, but I’m next.”
“Why?”
“Because everyone wants to be me right then. Lucky bastard, he’s next.”
“What else?”
“I love the moment before you kiss someone new. The almost-kiss. You know it’s going to happen but hanging tight with your faces together and not kissing? It’s my definition of magic.”
He likes to get there, Daisy realized. Not be there.
“Did I make it?” he asked, taking her wrist and looking at her watch.
“Close enough.”
“Can I kiss you?”
She hated when boys asked beforehand and what exactly was he planning to do if she said yes? Plant his hands between the plates and lean over the table to her? She smiled into her pasta. “Maybe.”
He took his time letting go of her arm and she noticed he wore rings on both his index fingers. One was dull silver and textured, the other plain gold. When she asked, he took the silver one off and handed it to her with a little shake which seemed to make it fall apart. She saw it was a puzzle: five separate bands that fit together in one. She attempted to put it back together as he lit a cigarette and watched her.
“It was my father’s.”
“Oh?”
“And this,” he said, pointing to the gold ring, “was his wedding band.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Car accident. He and my mother together.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged.
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
She couldn’t solve the puzzle. He took it back. Elbows on the table, eyes squinted against the cigarette clamped in his mouth, he put the rings together in ten seconds. “Took me about a month to crack it,” he said, shaking it apart again and putting it in her hand.
“When did you come to the States?”
“Right afterward.”
“Was there no family in Belgium who could take care of you?”
“My mom was an orphan. She only had one sister, Helen, who lived in New York. My dad was the youngest of eight children. He was an afterthought. You know, seven kids, then ten years go by and oops.”
“Surprise.”
“So when he and my mom died, my father’s parents were alive but they were old. And all his siblings were older, too. Older and scattered. Only one of his sisters was still in Belgium and she wasn’t even in Brussels. I was going to be uprooted no matter what and my parents must have had the foresight to realize it. In their will they made Aunt Helen my legal guardian. It was never contested.” A bitterness in David’s tone made Daisy wonder if he resented nobody fighting to keep him in Europe.
With an exasperated sigh she gave the ring back. “I can’t do it.”
David’s expression was thoughtful as he reassembled the ring and slid it onto his finger. He was cute. And when he calmed down, held still and showed himself, he was actually interesting.
“Want to go somewhere else?” he asked.
“No, thank you. I had a good time but I’m kind of tired. And I have class tomorrow.”
Little was said on the drive back to campus. He held her hand as he drove and it felt phony. His attraction to her sat in her lap. So did the certainty he’d want to ki
ss her goodnight.
“So quiet,” he said, squeezing her fingers. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing, really,” she said, wondering if going with the slightly-stretched truth—I don’t kiss on the first date—was the best tactic. She considered a fake coughing fit or cooking up a scratchy throat.
“The quiet ones are always wild in the dark.”
“Is that also your observational experience?”
“Personal experience.”
A cold sore would be ideal right now.
“Is your roommate around?” David asked as he walked her to her dorm.
“I don’t have one,” Daisy said absently.
“Oh?” David was a master at putting seven kinds of innuendo into one syllable. “How’d you pull that ideal situation off?”
Inwardly Daisy kicked herself for the slip. “I had one. But she left school.”
“And now you have the swingle.”
“Well, I’m not getting too used to it. I’m sure housing will transfer someone in. If I don’t find a new roommate myself first.”
“Well, don’t hurry.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence. It was a weird, humid night, with a drizzle that couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to be rain or mist. With David’s arm around her shoulders, Daisy was painfully aware of how the rules had been ratcheted up a notch. She was on her own. No curfew or school night excuse as a safety net. No “my father will kill me.” And no roommate to blame. Not even a fake one, thanks to her idiocy.
“I had a good time,” she said, glancing up at the skies as the rain starting coming down heavier. “I’ll see you around Mallory tomorrow?”
He nodded. “Can I kiss you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Can you?”
A long staring moment and then his hands slid around her face and tilted it up to his. His eyebrows and eyelashes were wet. His face came closer and he rolled his lips in, then out. A hesitant, almost shy gesture and for an instant it made her toes curl in her shoes. She understood how he loved the almost-kiss. The moment before his lips touched hers was magic. Then his mouth opened and his tongue slid against hers and it was all wrong. He felt wrong. He tasted wrong. He kissed wrong.
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