The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World

by Amy Reed

  “Sorry. Go.”

  “You know that dance school Fog Harbor Dance Academy?”

  Of course I know that school. It’s the best dance school in all of coastal Washington, and it’s where I took lessons until I was nine. “Yes, Billy. I know the school.”

  “They had a big half-page ad in there about how they’re holding auditions to give a new student a full scholarship for a year. All the classes they want.”

  I feel a weird kind of weightlessness in my ribs, like a tiny person leaping inside of me. “Do you still have the newspaper?” I say calmly, with as little emotion as possible, like I don’t care, like this news barely interests me at all.

  “Um, no,” Billy says. “I threw it away.”

  “Why’d you do that?!” I accidentally yell.

  “Shut up, Lydia Chlamydia,” hisses a girl on the Carthage side of the lunchroom, without ever taking her eyes off her phone. I went to a sleepover at her house in second grade, when I was still marginally normal.

  “Don’t worry,” Billy says. “I have the phone number. And I already called them to find out about it, and they said you should call to set up the audition.”

  I’m trying really hard not to smile, to not let that leaping thing inside my chest get too full of itself. I’m trying to rein everything in so it won’t get out of control, because hope can do that; it can get dangerous if you let it.

  “Do you have your phone with you?” Billy says.

  “Yes.” I can feel my heart pounding in my ears. And there she is, my little stalker, dancing happily behind Billy, skipping and spinning between lunch tables in a pink leotard. I give her a nasty look, but it doesn’t faze her at all.

  “Let’s call now,” Billy says. “Make sure you ask for Mary. She’s the one you need to talk to. Don’t talk to anyone else. She’s expecting your call. Mary.” Billy’s being really intense about this whole Mary business, but Billy is often intense about odd things. He passes me a piece of paper with the phone number written on it in his chicken-scratch handwriting.

  I dial the number. I try to breathe. A million tiny feet are tap-dancing on my heart. The little girl spins on top of a lunch table. I feel like I did in my dance studio with Billy on Halloween night, a weird combination of terrified and free.

  “Fog Harbor Dance Academy,” the perky woman who answers the phone says. “This is Belinda. How may I help you?”

  “Um, hi. May I speak to Mary, please?”

  “Let me see if she’s available,” the woman says. “May I tell her who’s calling?”

  “My name’s Lydia Lemon? She’s supposed to be expecting my call?” The tap dancing gets faster as I wait for Mary to pick up. If I have to wait much longer, I’m pretty sure I’m going to start hyperventilating.

  I look at Billy and he has this hopeful look on his face, like he’s counting on this working out as much as I am, and then the tap dancers in my chest all collapse. Their feet are broken. My heart is cracked. I never should have danced for him. He should not know this about me. He should not care this much.

  “This is Mary,” says a raspy voice that sounds vaguely familiar. Is this the tight-bunned woman who taught my ballet class as a child?

  “Oh, um, hi.” I turn around to face the Carthage side of the zombie lunchroom. I cannot look at Billy. I can barely deal with my own feelings, let alone his. But the little ghost girl is wherever I try to look. She won’t let me ignore her. “My name’s Lydia Lemon? My friend Billy said he talked to you about my coming in to audition to take some classes at your studio?”

  “He sure did,” Mary says with what I detect to be a stifled laugh. Billy must have made an impression. “Sweet kid. So when do you want to come in? Tomorrow? Teen classes start at four, so if you can get here by three thirty, you’d have time to show me your stuff.”

  I’m supposed to work tomorrow, but fuck it. I can call in sick. I’ve never called in sick before in my life.

  “Yes, that’s perfect,” I say. “I’ll see you then.”

  I turn around and Billy still has the smile on his face. “So?” he says.

  “I’m going in tomorrow.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “No.” Absolutely not. “I think I need to do this myself.”

  He’s trying not to show it, but I can tell he’s disappointed. It’s one thing to perform for him in my garage, another thing entirely to feel the pressure of his expectation as I do the most important dance I’ve ever done in my life.

  “Oh,” he says, trying so hard to look happy. “Okay.”

  It shouldn’t be this quiet in here. There should be noise to drown out the war of hope and terror in my brain.

  “Are you excited?” Billy asks.

  I nod yes, but what I really want to do is throw up.

  “Awesome!” he says. “Now I just have one teeny-tiny favor to ask you. What are you doing after school?”

  BILLY

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE I LET you talk me into doing this,” Lydia says. “If I get arrested, I’m going to kill you. The only reason I’m here is to supervise so you don’t do anything more dangerous and foolish than what you’re already doing.”

  “Thank you,” I say. Lydia just rolls her eyes.

  I know it’s asking a lot of a friend to come with you to buy drugs, especially when the drugs are for someone she hates who is technically not supposed to be doing drugs, and I do feel a little bad about it. But I know Lydia will totally forgive me when she starts taking dance classes. Except she won’t actually know I have anything to do with it at first, and that’s going to kill me, but it’ll be worth it because she’s going to be so happy she’ll forget to be mad at me, and then when she’s at the peak of her happiness, I’ll make the big reveal and tell her it’s me who’s responsible for the greatest joy she’s ever known, and she’ll be so grateful she’ll never be mad at me ever again.

  I’m trying not to wonder what Lynn A. would think about my being at a drug dealer’s house. I’m trying not to picture the gently disappointed look on her face, like, I love you, but I know you can do better.

  “Yo, did you see me on TV last night?” One-Armed Gordon says as he emerges from his kitchen with a large can of some kind of energy drink. “I did a dope-ass interview on Channel Seven.”

  To say Gordon’s house is filthy would be an understatement. My house is full of crap, but at least it’s clean crap that mostly stays in bags. But I get the impression that Gordon just throws things at the wall when he’s done with them. Soda bottles and moldy pizza boxes cover the floor. There’s a pile of chicken wing bones in the corner, like roadkill after crows have their way with it. The house smells of greasy hair and old socks. Lydia and I are sitting on the lumpy couch, and she looks like she’s trying to make herself as small as possible, as if that will help her not touch anything dirty.

  “Oh, where are my manners?” Gordon says. He’s wearing a pair of wrinkled khaki shorts with stains all over the crotch and a T-shirt advertising a local pawnshop. Only one of the sleeves has an arm coming out of it. “Do you guys want one of these?” He holds up the energy drink. We both shake our heads. “Best scam ever. You call up a company and tell them their product made you sick and you’re thinking of suing them, and then they send you a lifetime supply! I have, like, thirty cases of this shit in the back.”

  “Billy,” Lydia says. “If this isn’t over in two minutes, I’m leaving without you.”

  “It’s good to see you, Billy,” Gordon says. “Where you been? I haven’t seen you since you were a snot-nosed little kid following your uncle around.”

  “I was supposed to follow him around,” I say. “He was babysitting.”

  “You know Caleb used to live here with me and my pop?” Gordon says, sitting down on a chair across from us like he expects us to stay awhile.

  “I know,” I say. Gordon’s house is a stop on the Caleb Sloat, Lead Singer of Rainy Day Knife Fight, Childhood Tour™ after all.

  “Did he ever tell you I was
in the band?”

  “What band?”

  “Rainy Day Knife Fight, dumb-ass. I was one of the founding members.”

  “Right,” Lydia says.

  “But I don’t think the touring musician lifestyle would have really worked for me, you know?” Gordon lifts some kind of contraption with water in it from the table, grips it between his legs while the hand of his good arm holds a lighter to it, inhales, and exhales a giant cloud of sweet but slightly rancid-smelling smoke. “I like it right here in Rome. I’m a hometown boy.”

  Lydia squeezes my knee hard. “Ouch!” I say.

  “I was bummed when I lost my arm in the accident at first, ’cause I couldn’t drum anymore. But then the disability checks started coming in, and I was like, sweet, best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Are all drug dealers like this? Do they just talk and talk forever, counting on their customers to be too scared to leave?

  “Billy,” Lydia says. “Just give him the money.”

  “Disability’s great and all,” Gordon continues as I pull my wallet out of my pocket, “but not quite enough to afford the nice things in life, you know? Which is why I need to supplement my income.”

  I look at my wallet and am suddenly embarrassed. It’s the same blue Velcro wallet with a cartoon dolphin on it that I’ve had since I was ten years old.

  “I’ll tell you, things weren’t looking good there for a while after they legalized weed and everything went legit, but then luckily the King fixed that and people like me are back in business.”

  Lydia stands up. “We have to go,” she says. I hand the money to Gordon.

  “Oh,” Gordon says, obviously disappointed. He hands me a plastic baggie of dry greenish-brown clumps, and as soon as it’s in my hand, Lydia pulls me out of the house. Gordon calls, “Do want to take one of these energy drinks to go?” but the door closes before I have a chance to respond.

  Lydia says she has to go home to practice for her big audition, and she won’t let me come with her, even though I promised not to talk. I saw a therapy talk show one time about introverts, and I’m pretty sure that’s what Lydia is, so I’m trying not to take it personally.

  My heart races the whole way home because I have a bag of drugs in my pocket and I’m pretty sure everyone for miles around can smell it, and any minute now an undercover drug-sniffing dog is going to jump out of the bushes and attack me. I’m also pretty sure I’m being followed because I keep looking behind me and I swear I see the same black car that was sitting outside my house the other day, but it’s far enough away that I can’t see any details. I’ve watched enough detective shows to know that’s part of their strategy.

  When I get home, the possum under the front porch lunges at my ankles, and I’m pretty sure she knows something.

  How is it possible that in just a few weeks I went from having no secrets to having so many I can’t sleep and I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack all the time? All I used to do was hang out with my grandma and watch TV, and now I’m basically a criminal mastermind.

  LYDIA

  I REALLY, TRULY THINK I’M going to throw up. That extra corn dog I ate at lunch was a bad idea. If I’m actually going to start training seriously, I need to start eating healthier. Eggs and fresh fruit every morning. Smoothies. Grilled chicken breasts and avocados and whole grains that aren’t gluten. First I need to figure out what gluten is.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even done the audition yet. I could blow chunks on the dance floor and ruin everything, and all these thoughts about training and smoothies could be a total waste of time.

  I get off the bus and for once it’s not raining. The dance studio looks just like I remember it from when I was a kid, except the strip mall it’s in has definitely seen better days. There used to be a pizza place next door where Mom would take me after class sometimes, just the two of us. “It’s not good for a girl to eat dinner on a barstool every night,” Mom would say, but back then I still thought being a little different was like an adventure.

  I walk into the studio and luckily it’s early enough before the afternoon classes that there isn’t anyone here except the receptionist. “You must be Lydia,” she says way too cheerfully. “Mary will be ready in just a sec. Do you want to go get changed?” She motions toward the changing rooms, which I remember well. “Then go straight into the big studio and warm up, okay? Do you know where it is?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, but my voice sounds like a nine-year-old’s. The big studio is where the big girls dance.

  The changing room is dark and windowless, all splintering wood benches and shelves and cubbies. I remember how you couldn’t ever sit on the benches or else your tights would get snagged. The floor is a stained industrial carpet. The smell is moist and earthy—old wood and girl sweat. A long mirror is on one wall, with a shelf of old shoeboxes full of used bobby pins, combs, rubber bands, and tangled hairnets and bun covers. A couple of crates are stacked nearby for the little girls to stand on. I remember standing on those boxes, barely five years old, looking at my face and my mother’s in the mirror as she did my hair. I could barely stand how beautiful she was, and how proud I was to look so much like her, how when she pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail, I suddenly had cheekbones like hers, and I caught a glimpse through my baby fat of myself as a woman, and I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

  I look in the mirror now, and the sickness in my stomach has been replaced with a heavy weight. And there’s that infuriating little girl staring right back at me with her big, sad eyes, like she wants something from me, like I’m even capable of giving it.

  I wish my mother were here. I wish she could see me do this.

  Fuck. I am not going to cry. This is the worst possible time to cry.

  “Get out of here,” I tell the girl. “Leave me alone.”

  I watch her shrink into herself, become less solid. “I don’t want you here,” I say, and she dissolves even more. “I don’t want you.”

  She turns around and retreats into the mirror. I won this round.

  I want to feel a weight lifted off me. I want to feel triumphant. But the words I spoke left a bitter taste in my throat, and my heart feels heavier than ever, and even though she’s a hallucination, she’s still just a little girl, and I feel ashamed, like I want to apologize. And what sane person wants to apologize to a ghost?

  I pinch myself in the soft part under my arm. Hard. I haven’t had to do that in a long time. My elementary school guidance counselor taught me that trick after Mom died and I wouldn’t stop crying in class and parents started complaining because I was making their kids uncomfortable. In retrospect, a school counselor teaching kids borderline self-harm techniques is maybe not super professional.

  But it works. For a couple seconds, I’m distracted enough from my feelings to get my shit together. I take a deep breath and shake out my arms. I dress quickly in my ratty tights and leotard and put a couple clips in my short hair. I block all thoughts of my mother out of my mind. I ignore the little girl now sulking in the corner.

  I walk through another door straight into the studio. I never got to take classes in here as a kid, but I’d sometimes watch the older girls dance, imagining myself as one of them. There’s a piano in the corner and a stereo on a shelf, a couple speakers mounted near the ceiling. Besides the mirror along one wall and the barres on the others, that’s it for decoration. I love how sparse dance studios are, how honest, how unpretentious despite all the big egos they often contain. I trust these rooms way more than I trust the people in them.

  I find a place at the barre and try not to look myself in the eye or at the figure darting around in the mirror as I do some quick warm-ups. Just my arm, my leg, my foot. I tell myself I am only my body parts.

  After a few minutes, Mary walks in. I remember her from when I was a kid. I remember wondering if she ever took out her perfectly round gray bun, and if her hair was as long and witchy as I imagined it to be. I
have no idea how old Mary is—fifty? Sixty? Older?—but her body is still all muscle and tendon and poise. I’m pretty sure this woman lives in a ballet skirt.

  “Lydia,” Mary says. “Hello.” She shakes my hand firmly. Her lips are in the shape of a tight smile I have a feeling she doesn’t really mean. This lady means business. I am nothing to her.

  “Hi,” I say. “It’s so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I used to take classes here as a kid, and—”

  “Are you warmed up?”

  “Yes,” I lie. I only had time to do one side.

  “Do you have music?”

  “Oh yeah,” I say, “I left it in the dressing room. Can I go get it?”

  “No time,” Mary says. “The next classes start arriving in five minutes. Can you do without?”

  “Um, sure,” I say. Saying no to Mary is not an option.

  She glides to the corner of the room and leans against the piano. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Okay,” I say, moving to the center of the room. I taste corn dog in the back of my throat. I pretend not to see the girl staring at me from the mirror.

  I decide to play it safe and not do any of my own choreography. I’m doing some of the sequences I picked up from a Show Me Your Moves solo that won an Emmy last year.

  I get in position, close my eyes, and hear the music in my head. I open my eyes and start to dance, and Mary and the girl disappear.

  It only takes three minutes, but I’m out of breath when I’m done, and I feel a tweak in my right hip. I have a sinking feeling that Mary could tell I was trying too hard, that she was turned off by my eagerness, that she’s disgusted by how obvious it is that I want this more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.

  “We need to work on your endurance,” Mary says dispassionately.

  “Okay,” I pant. Hope twirls in my chest at the sound of “we.”

  “We’ll start you in intermediate ballet to work on your technique. Advanced is the highest level we offer for the contemporary/lyrical/jazz combo, so we’ll put you in that. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think you might be ready for preprofessional modern. If not, we’ll move you down to advanced. That’ll be three afternoons a week, plus a three-hour block on Saturday mornings. Are you ready to commit to that?”