by Laurence Yep
Mom stared at all the skin exposed on my sister’s forearms. “Jade, you really must be growing,” she said. “Look at those sleeves!”
Jade hid her arms under the table as she sat back down. “Actually,” she mumbled, “I think this sweater just shrank in the dryer. I guess I didn’t read the label before I threw it in. Sorry.”
Mom frowned. “I appreciate that you’re helping with the laundry during the holidays, Jade,” she said, “but we talked about being careful. That sweater was expensive.”
“I said I was sorry,” Jade said as she began to eat sullenly.
“No harm done,” Dad said, trying to smooth things over in his usual way—with a joke. “Wash it a couple more times and Tutu can wear it instead.”
“Why are you both picking on me?” Jade asked sharply. I thought I saw tears at the corners of her eyes. “First Mom. Now you, Dad. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Take it easy, Jade,” said Dad, puzzled. “What’s gotten into you?”
Jade’s chair scraped the kitchen linoleum as she stood up. “You wouldn’t understand,” she snapped. Sliding her still-full plate onto the counter, she left the kitchen.
Mom sighed. “So much for a nice family dinner together,” she said.
We all listened to Jade stomp angrily up the steps. The next moment I heard our bedroom door slam.
Dad scratched his head, puzzled. “Did some aliens steal our Jade and leave an angry clone behind?” he asked.
“She’s just worried about the show,” I said. “After all, she’s got a big part.”
Dad glanced at Mom. “Should we go upstairs and talk to her about it?” he asked.
Just then, we heard the dance music begin to play from Act One of The Nutcracker. Mom listened for a moment and then shook her head. “Let’s give her some time,” she said. “You know what a perfectionist Jade is. She’s got a lot riding on her shoulders. She’ll be okay once the show starts.”
But this was my sister’s favorite music. She couldn’t just sit and listen to it. We should be hearing the thump of her feet as she danced.
Something was really bothering her, and I was going to find out what.
I carried our dance bags up to the room that I shared with Jade, but when I opened the door, everything was dark. I flipped on the light switch. My sister was sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up and her chin resting on top of them.
“Go away,” she mumbled.
“It’s my room, too,” I said. I unslung the bags from my shoulders and dumped them on the floor. Tutu had followed me into our room, and she circled our bags, sniffing for traces of pepperoni, as I started to change into my pajamas.
Jade hid her face against her knees. “Are Mom and Dad mad at me?” she asked in a muffled voice.
I shook my head. “Mom and Dad know how much pressure you’re under,” I said.
Jade lifted her head and said angrily, “I can do Clara, you know.”
I’d never seen Jade like this. My sister was an amazing dancer. There was nothing she couldn’t do, and she had always acted like she knew it. So what was upsetting her now?
“I know you can,” I assured Jade. “Has Mr. Kosloff been giving you a hard time?”
Jade shook her head and buried her face again.
It wasn’t easy trying to find the right next question. I felt as if I was tiptoeing around.
“What are the other dancers like?” I asked. I wondered if any of them were bugging Jade the way Renata bugged me.
“Why are you asking so many questions?” she snapped.
As the music began to replay on her laptop, the notes swirled around us, filling the awkward silence.
“If you want to practice, I’ll go back downstairs,” I finally offered.
“No, do what you want,” Jade mumbled.
Up until now, Jade had practiced every chance she got. Something was really wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. Maybe the best I could do was to take her mind off her problems for a little while. It seemed strange, though, to be the one trying to help her. She was the one who was always coming to my rescue.
“Want to see your outfit then?” I asked. Unzipping my bag, I took out the big brown envelope with the sketches. Tutu immediately dove inside the bag, and the sides of the bag twitched as she poked about.
Jade hesitated. “You told Luisa that you were the only one who could look at them,” she said.
“Well, Luisa might be my best friend, but she’s lousy at keeping secrets,” I said. “But, hey, if you really don’t want to look…”
Jade smiled weakly. “You know I do,” she said.
I stuck my hands into my bag and retrieved Tutu. A towel had gotten snagged on her claws, and I eased it off. Then I opened the envelope of sketches.
Looking at these designs, I felt as if it were already Christmas. Besides a few people at HDC, we were the first ones to see the party costumes. Jade sat up straight as I excitedly flipped through the sketches.
When I saw the costumes for the mice and the soldiers, I realized that Margie must have misunderstood Mr. Kosloff and given me all the kids’ costumes for Act One instead of just the party outfits. I slid the battle costumes back into the envelope and began to go through the party designs. Mr. Kosloff had made a lot of notes and cross-outs on each page. When I saw Clara’s outfit, I held it up dramatically. “Ta-da!” I announced.
Jade stood up so that she could look at the outfit more closely. It had a fitted lavender top with long sleeves and a skirt with a sheer layer over a full flaring underlayer. We studied the design. “It’s pretty,” I said, “but…it could be better.”
Mr. Kosloff had scribbled notes in the margin beside Jade’s party dress. Jade jabbed her finger at one of the notes. “Lavender isn’t my color,” she said. “I should be wearing light blue. And look at how long those sleeves are. They make this look like an old lady’s dress.”
“Light blue is fine up close,” I said. “But on the stage in a big theater, you have to have a color that will make you stand out.” I studied her complexion. “It should be red.”
“I want light blue,” she said.
I shook my head firmly. “Red.”
“You asked for my opinion,” Jade argued.
“No, I asked you if you wanted to look at the designs,” I countered. “It was just to satisfy your curiosity.”
“I know what color’s best for me,” she snapped as she flopped back down on her bed.
Mr. Kosloff wanted my opinion, not yours, is what I thought to myself, but I just said, “You’re right about the sleeves.” I thought about shortening them, but that didn’t seem to be enough. So I drew the dress without sleeves. “How’s this?” I asked, showing her my revisions.
Jade picked up her earbuds and fiddled with the cord. “Better,” was all she said.
I thought that after making such a fuss about the dress, Jade might be more excited about the new sketch. So I looked at it again. Something still seemed off. “Do you think the dress is too plain?” I asked. “After all, you’re the star of the party.”
“Just do what you want,” she said. “You’re not going to listen to me anyway.”
I tried to control my temper. “Jade,” I said, “what’s bugging you?”
She shook her head and looked away. “Don’t worry about it, Isabelle,” she said. “Mr. Kosloff made some changes to my routine that I’ve got to remember.” She plugged her earbuds into her laptop and then fitted them snugly into her ears. Closing her eyes, she began to listen to the music again. She must have been visualizing her routine, because every now and then she’d move her arm or her wrist.
Jade couldn’t fool me. Whatever was bothering my sister was more than just a few changes to her routine. I had to find out what it was—and try to help her fix it.
I carried the envelope of costume designs downstairs, planning to look at them in the living room. But I bumped into Mom as she was coming out of her sewing room.
“Just the
girl I wanted to see,” she said. Pulling me inside, she led me over to a tall white armoire against the far wall of the room. When she opened the doors of the armoire, I stared in amazement. Usually the shelves of the armoire were crammed with fabric and piles of stuff from Mom’s work, like photos and X-rays of old dresses from the Smithsonian. But today the shelves were clean and bare, except for a white wicker sewing basket, a tidy pile of colorful fabric swatches, and the small purple sewing machine that Mom sometimes let me use. She lifted the sewing basket off the shelf and showed me what was inside: spools of thread, a tape measure, a pair of scissors, and a pincushion.
“For you,” Mom announced, waving her hand toward the armoire with a flourish. “I thought you could make this your own and work on your designs in here.”
I knew that space was precious in a room filled with stuff from floor to ceiling. “Mom, really?” I said.
She gave me a little hug. “I know you want to be a dancer, Isabelle,” she said, “but I think you’ve got a talent for design, too. I’d like you to keep developing that when you can.” She pointed me toward the oak desk that had belonged to my grandfather. “I cleared off some space at my desk for you, too,” she added.
As I sat down in the chair in front of the desk, I felt like a queen in her castle.
“You’ll find colored pencils and erasers in the drawer,” Mom said. “Is there anything else you need?”
I shook my head, almost too happy to speak. When I set the envelope on the desk, Mom started to reach for it but pulled her hand back.
“Do you want to see the designs?” I asked.
Mom looked tempted, but then she shook her head. “If I look at them, I’ll wind up making comments,” she said. “And Mr. Kosloff wanted your ideas, not mine.” She bit her lip, as if holding back something else.
“Spill,” I said. “I can see you want to tell me something.”
Mom nodded and smiled. “Just remember one thing,” she said. “An outfit not only has to look good on paper, but it also has to look good and move well when a real person wears it.”
I thought about some of the clothes I had drawn when I was small. “Like a dress that looks slim and neat on paper but would be so tight, you could hardly walk in it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” Mom said. “Don’t stay up too late, Isabelle, okay?” She kissed my forehead and left to get ready for bed.
I kept Mom’s advice in mind as I began to go through the party outfits. Though all of the costumes looked danceable, I had suggestions for how to improve most of them—I couldn’t help it! Sometimes all I did was suggest a new color or pattern. Other times I widened a collar or lengthened a cuff or suggested a thinner belt. The ideas just kept coming.
After I had written my notes and drawn my sketches by the designs for the party outfits, I should have stopped there. But I couldn’t help sneaking a peek at the other designs from the battle scene. The soldiers’ uniforms were colorful enough, but the mice looked like weasels to me.
Since I wasn’t supposed to have seen those designs, I should have just slipped them back into the envelope with the other stuff. But they bothered me. Why would weasels invade a house? I know the mice were supposed to be the villains, but these designs seemed too scary. Mice should look like mice, so I wrote a suggestion that the muzzles be shorter and rounder. I wasn’t sure Mr. Kosloff would understand my note, so I made a sketch, too.
Then I almost erased it, afraid that Mr. Kosloff would get mad at me for doing more than I was supposed to. And had I gone too far in the other direction and made the mice too cute? I got as far as touching the eraser to the paper, but I didn’t use it. When something felt not quite right, I had to do something about it. So I slid the mouse sketch into the envelope with everything else.
Jade was already asleep when I crept upstairs and into our room. Tutu was curled up next to her. As I crawled into my own bed, I glanced at my sister. Helping Mr. Kosloff had been easy. Helping Jade was going to be a lot harder. But I wasn’t going to give up.
I was trapped inside a huge clear plastic ball. Giant weasels were chasing me. As I ran, my ball rolled forward. But the weasels were gaining on me. One of them reached out a paw.
When I felt the touch on my shoulder, I sat up with a shout.
Jade jumped back from my bed. “Yikes!” she squealed. “You scared me.”
“Ditto,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I was having a nightmare.”
“Then it’s a good thing that I woke you up,” Jade said. “Come on. We have to get to the theater. We’re all rehearsing together today.”
As far as I was concerned, I’d just swapped one nightmare for another. Mr. Kosloff was going to go through all the children’s scenes today because he wanted to see how we were doing. So this would be his first chance to see Isabelle the Human Bowling Ball in action.
Ms. Ferri had been nice yesterday, but how long would Mr. Kosloff put up with my pirouettes before he’d ask Renata to take my place? I was sure she expected that. Wherever she was right now, she was probably grinning ear to ear.
I put on a sequined purple leotard and purple jazz pants and went downstairs with Jade. My sister had made a point of wearing a light blue top and skirt over pale green leggings and light blue leg warmers.
Mom had already left for another craft fair in Virginia, but Dad’s wedding gig wasn’t until later that afternoon. Normally Dad liked to sleep late on weekends, so I was surprised to see him already up. “How are my two favorite daughters?” he asked, trying to sound cheerful. “I thought I’d make breakfast for you.”
I think the meal was his way of trying to make up with Jade after last night’s fight.
“That’d be real nice,” I said.
“Ta-da!” Dad announced, proudly holding up two packets of instant oatmeal. Ripping them open, he dumped the contents into bowls and added water from a steaming kettle. “This’ll stick to your ribs.”
“It smells good,” I said, using a spoon to stir one of the bowls.
Dad held up his hand. “Wait, wait, this is a high-class joint, you know,” he said. He peeled a banana, sliced it up, and heaped so many pieces into each bowl that the oatmeal disappeared.
As we ate, Dad tried to chat with us, and though I answered him, Jade merely grunted. When we were finished, she finally spoke one word: “Thanks.”
I put our bowls in the sink and stood on tiptoe to kiss Dad. “Yeah, thanks, Dad,” I told him.
It was a little chilly as Jade and I walked to the bus stop, so I slid my hands into the pockets of my heavy jacket. Though Jade was right next to me, she was lost in her own little world. Her earbuds were snug in her ears. Was she visualizing her routine again? I probably should have been doing the same thing, but I was too busy checking the buses. Somebody had to make sure we got on the right one and wound up at the HDC rather than in Maryland.
We took the bus as far as Dupont Circle, where we got off and walked toward the tall steel-and-concrete HDC theater and offices.
A small girl turned to watch as we entered the stage door on the side. When I was little and my parents had taken me to a ballet program, I’d been just as curious about the dancers I saw going backstage. I felt a tiny thrill. Did this little girl wish she were me?
Just inside the door, a guard sat on a folding chair near a giant photo of Anna Hart, the founder of the HDC—as well as the performing arts school I attended. Fingerprints smudged the glass because dancers liked to touch it for good luck. Jade touched the framed photo gently, and so did I.
The guard buzzed us through a second door, and we entered the part of the theater that the public never saw. The walls here were plain cinder blocks painted white, and pipes and conduits ran along the ceiling. We could have been inside a factory instead of a theater. It was such a contrast from the lobby, like the difference between stagehands in sweatshirts backstage and ballerinas in pretty costumes beneath the spotlight.
When we got to the second floor, the doors to Studio A hadn’t o
pened yet, so the corridors were filled with kids. Luisa waved her hand, and we squeezed through the crowd toward her.
“It’s like a rush-hour traffic jam,” she said to us.
“What’s the holdup?” I asked.
“They say Mr. Kosloff’s working out some changes in the choreography,” Luisa said.
When kids began to swivel around and point, I turned and saw the company members making their way toward us. Until now, it had just been young dancers like us practicing their routines on weekends while the professional dancers rehearsed during the week. Today, though, Jade and the partygoers would dance with the professionals for the first time.
Since I’d seen these dancers only in costumes onstage, it was strange to see them in regular clothes. It was even stranger to see them with paper cups of coffee or tea in their hands. The dancers were standing just a few feet away from us now, but it might as well have been a mile. I felt tongue-tied, and I saw that my friends and castmates were staring at the professional dancers with wide eyes, too.
I felt Jade reach for my hand. The Nutcracker sounded faint and tinny from her dangling earbuds. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said softly. “I’m really glad you’re here with me.”
I thought about my bowling-ball routine to come and said, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”
About ten minutes later, Bettina, the blonde artistic associate I had seen teaching the little mice yesterday, let us inside Studio A. It was the HDC’s largest studio. As we stepped through the doorway, Luisa gasped. “Oh, wow,” she said, and I followed her gaze inside. Mr. Kosloff was standing in the center of the floor, and just beside him was our idol, Jackie Sanchez. I felt a flutter of excitement in my chest.
Jackie had studied at Anna Hart and become a principal dancer at New York City Ballet. I’d seen her from about forty feet away when she’d come to our Autumn Festival. Now she was only ten feet away and was wearing capris and a sweater instead of the costume she wore on festival night.