The Looking Glass

by Janet McNally

  My heart is still beating so hard that I barely hear the knock at the door, muffled and rhythmic as a heartbeat of its own. But it keeps coming, that low knocking. I turn the water on and off once, twice, watching it splash in the sink. Then I open the door.

  Miss Diana’s out there in the hallway. She’s wearing a black dress and sandals, her blond hair in a braid wound into a knot at the crown of her head. Her signature Heidi hairstyle. There’s an old publicity photo of Miss Diana in a hallway somewhere here at NBT, smiling in the bright red costume she wore when she danced the Firebird, her gold braid in that same bun. She’s always seemed like someone who lives and breathes ballet, who might not exist beyond the studio or the stage. I’ve seen her at Starbucks, though, and once, in the subway station at Astor Place. I’m pretty sure she’s a real person, at least sort of. As much as a former principal dancer can be.

  “Hello, Sylvie,” she says now, smiling.

  “Okay,” I say, which makes no sense. Then I manage a more fitting “Hi.”

  “Are you all right?” she says. “I thought you were running away from me.”

  “Sorry about that,” I say. “I really had to pee.”

  Miss Diana nods. She holds up the envelope. “This came for you.”

  She hands it to me. I can see now that it’s white and padded and has no return address, just a smudged postmark in red ink, and a label with the postage on it. My name written in neat black Sharpie letters on the front, c/o Diana Sparks, National Ballet Theatre. In handwriting I know as well as my own.

  Of course I know it. And I think Miss Diana knows it too.

  My heart flutters behind my ribs like a bird in a cage.

  “Are you getting your mail delivered here now?” she says. Her voice is light, but I hear something heavy below it, a lead-weight shadow.

  “I guess so,” I say. As I reach out and take it from her, a thousand sparks go off in my fingertips. In my hands, the envelope is flat and firm, not too heavy. I picture my sister printing out my name and then Miss Diana’s. I picture Jules in line at the post office, in a room full of strangers. No one there would know who she is. She would just be ordinary. I can barely imagine that.

  I look up.

  “Must be a birthday present,” Diana says, holding my gaze. “I hope yours is the happiest. You deserve it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, though I’m not sure what she means. I deserve a nice birthday because I’m a nice person? A hardworking dancer? Or because my virtuosic sister overdosed on painkillers and then left town?

  Any of these is possible, I guess.

  Whee. Bring on the cake.

  “I’ll see you in a few weeks?” Miss Diana asks. At those words, my heart seizes a little. Intensives start just before the end of the month, and before that, I’ll be spending a week at what Tommy and I call Fancy Dance Camp. We’ll get massages and do yoga and drink smoothies. We’ll do just a little dancing, but once intensives start, that’s pretty much all we’ll be doing. Again.

  Miss Diana is watching my face, so I say yes. It feels like a step in a complex routine, something someone else is telling me to do. Because the truth is, I could use a real break.

  When I came back to the Academy after everything fell apart, the studios hushed every time I entered them. It was pure choreography: the dancers turned toward me, paused two beats, then scattered to the edge of the room. They’d try to smile but it came out as a stage grin, full of teeth and no real happiness. I just stood in the center of the room like the lone surviving character from a ballet where everyone dies, of consumption, maybe, or being stabbed. I was still living in the old world, but the rest of the company was hard at work building a new universe where Julia never existed. Which, for a while, was fine with me.

  It’s amazing, though, because before her accident, Jules was the kind of dancer teachers talked about in hushed tones, their cheeks flushed with excitement. A star from the beginning. I was too, I guess, but a smaller star. If she was a red giant, blazing scarlet, I was a white dwarf. Just a tiny pinprick of light, burning near silent in the way-off black. But now that she’s gone, everyone seems to expect me to be the red giant. They want to forget about the first Blake girl and let the second take her place.

  It’s exhausting.

  Miss Diana is still watching me, her lips pressed together. “I know you miss her,” she says. She puts her fingers around my wrist and squeezes. When she lets go, I feel like a balloon. Like

  Ijustaway.

  mightfloat

  Straight up to the ceiling, over to the window, and out across the bright blue sky. Miss Diana must see something in my face because she starts to shake her head.

  “You know, Sylvie.” Her voice is soft. “It’s okay to talk about her. We can say her name.”

  If that’s true, I want to say, then why doesn’t anyone? Even Miriam didn’t, this morning. She said sister. It’s safer, I guess. But in the next moment, Miss Diana surprises me.

  “Julia,” she says.

  She says it like it’s the answer to a question, and I guess it is. I expect the whole world to crack open or at the very least, the plaster of the ceiling. But nothing happens, at least not that I can tell.

  The moment stretches out and hollows, and there might be space in it to finally tell someone what that day was like.

  (Everett holding Julia in his arms in the lobby, waiting for the ambulance to come.)

  (The sound of the siren filling the room until I couldn’t breathe.)

  (Red-and-blue lights sparkling across white marble.)

  (My nails biting into my palms, leaving half-moons on my skin.)

  But I haven’t been able to tell that story—or any of the others—to anyone else since Julia left. I can barely tell them to myself.

  “Sylvie,” Miss Diana says. I look at her. She’s the one who taught us twenty-six bones. She says it at the beginning of every class like a mantra, to remind us that we have to work as a collective to make something beautiful, the same way the tiny bones in our feet work together. Twenty-six bones hold us up on our tiptoes, just a little lamb’s wool and cardboard separating them from the floor. Any dancer can tell you how hard it is to defy gravity, because in the end, the earth just wants to hold you down.

  I wonder now if Julia ever showed Miss Diana her tattoo. Or if she meant to, but didn’t get the chance. I want to know, too, why everything feels harder today. I open my mouth to ask, but the words feel like feathers stuck in my throat. They won’t come out.

  Miss Diana smiles at me anyway.

  “She’s okay,” she says. “I know it. And you will be too.” She tilts her head, keeps looking at me. “We’ve seen how hard you’ve been working. It’s wonderful.”

  I make myself nod. My voice is gone.

  “Take care, Sylvie,” she says, resting her hand on my shoulder. Then she turns and walks down the hallway, heading into the office at the end. I go in the other direction.

  When I turn the corner, I catch sight of an empty spot on the gallery wall. There’s still a small nail here, a dark speck on the pearl-colored paint. I reach up and touch it like I always do, like it’s a good-luck talisman. In the picture that used to hang here, Julia was Sleeping Beauty, asleep on the stage floor, cheek resting on her arm. Her tutu was a frothy pink flower around her waist, her cheeks flushed with blush. She looked like a dream. Like she might never wake up, and she didn’t even mind.

  I’ve wondered a lot where the picture went (Nancy Drew #35: The Case of the Disappearing Photo), but what I really want to know is if it was the teachers who took it down, or one of Julia’s friends. Grace, or Henry, or Irina, maybe. Did they discuss it first or did one of them just slip the frame into a dance bag one day, hook and all? Where did they put it afterward?

  (At the bottom of a drawer.)

  (In a box in the company’s archives.)

  (In the trash.)

  In the end, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need the picture to remember Julia pretending, convincingly, to be
in a sleep as deep as death. I saw her do it onstage. Then I saw her do it on the couch in our living room, when she wasn’t pretending. When she nearly died for real.

  She didn’t die, but she’s a ghost anyway. Memories come to me in flashes, like projections on blank walls. I lean into the doorway of the last studio and I see her, gone and not-gone, film-flickering in this room full of pale gray light. These mirrors held Julia once, and if I look hard enough, I can still see her, spinning her magic, balancing on all the small bones of her feet.

  My Great Escape

  OUT ON THE STREET THE sun is so bright the whole world shines white. I’ve shoved the envelope so far down in my bag that it’s totally hidden by my dance clothes, but I feel like it’s sending out a radio signal from inside the canvas. A distress signal: beep beep beep.

  I had a plan, I want to shout. I was going to leave this stuff with my sister behind. And instead I’m carrying it with me. Literally.

  I pull the hair tie from my bun and let my hair fall over my shoulders, crinkly at the ends. I look around. My first unfortunate discovery is that Yuki and Rachel haven’t left yet. They’re on the sidewalk right now, turning their huge smiles toward me like stadium lights, too bright to stare at directly. I feel dread begin to grow in my belly like a fire started on kindling, but then Emma appears in front of me in her cat-footed, ghost-spy way and I startle before I can stop myself.

  “Hi, Sylvie,” she says. I wave, which I know is weird since she’s standing right in front of me.

  She looks at my lifted hand and blinks. Her hair is still pulled back in its perfect bun, dark-magic smooth. She tilts her head like she’s hearing a sound I can’t (dog whistle, approaching earthquake, message from the aliens).

  “I hope you have a great summer,” she says. Her voice is caramelized sugar, deeply sweet and burnt in spots. Her loose T-shirt is pulled down over one shoulder, her tights the dark black of brand-new spandex. Tommy and I have watched a lot of dance movies, and Emma is basically every antagonist in every one, with her perfect look at me I’m a dancer street clothes and her sweet-burnt voice. And the way she appears out of effing nowhere when you least want her to.

  “What?” I say. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. At intensives. And, you know, at camp.”

  “Oh,” Emma says. She puts her hand just below her delicate collarbone. She’s a picture of concern, like some kind of well, bless your heart Southern woman in an old movie. Except that my freshman-year English teacher was from Alabama, and I know what Southern people mean when they say bless your heart.

  “I heard a rumor that you weren’t coming back,” Emma says.

  “Why wouldn’t I be coming back?”

  “Oh, you know,” she says.

  I look at her. “I don’t,” I say. Which isn’t really true. But if we’re having this conversation, I’m going to make her say it.

  She winces a little, theatrically, as if it pains her to say this. “Because of Julia,” she says. In Emma’s mouth, my sister’s name comes out as a whisper.

  Well, bless your heart, I think. What Emma wants, of course, is for me to get out of her figurative way. She wants the solos, all of them. She wants to be the best, and I’m the competition.

  Take the damn solos, I want to say, but instead I shake my head. “Nah, I think I’ll stick around.”

  The wind blows my hair into my eyes and I let it stay there for a moment. I feel my own heart then, steady and quick and ready to burst out of my chest.

  This is when Tommy saves me. He can’t have heard what she was saying—he was half a building away, talking to Mikhail (cute, new, Russian) by the curb. But he must have seen something in my face or my body language, so here he is. He sweeps around behind me and I feel his hands on either side of my rib cage, lifting me up. I raise my hand in a wave again (hello, goodbye) but I don’t look back at Emma.

  “Excuse us,” Tommy says. “Sylvie has birthday business to attend to.” He holds me straight up into the air so I levitate over the sidewalk. This is one of my favorite things about ballet—being able to fly without trying. Of course, you need a partner for that, and it’s not exactly easy to be lifted either. You can’t be floppy or else your partner won’t be able to hold you up. You do half the work.

  I feel my heartbeat slow. I angle my neck to look over my shoulder.

  “Life would be so much easier,” I say, “if you just carried me around all the time.”

  Tommy smiles, still watching the sidewalk ahead. “I’m not sure you could afford me.”

  I can feel his arms shaking a little, but he keeps holding me high. A silver-haired woman with a cane gets out of a town car to our right. She’s wearing a navy-blue suit with a coral necklace, and she looks utterly delighted at the sight of us.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hello,” she answers, smiling and shading her eyes against the sun.

  Tommy sails me past her and keeps going.

  “Well, now you’re just showing off,” I say to Tommy.

  “I’m providing an important function,” he says, squeezing me a little.

  “Saving my ass?”

  “Entertaining the world,” he says. “But I’m only taking you to the corner. I’m happy to rescue you, but you have to get to the restaurant on your own.”

  “Deal.” I can see sunlight in the leaves of the trees above us, and happiness bubbles in my chest. I glance down and there’s a little girl on the sidewalk in front of us. She has light brown skin and huge dark eyes and she looks totally amazed.

  “Can I get a little arabesque?” Tommy calls.

  I point my toes in my sandals and lift my left leg behind me. I’m careful not to kick Tommy in the head. This is especially hard when you’re floating in the air. I raise my arms over my head in a perfect oval. “Pretend you’re holding the moon,” my first teacher used to tell us. We were five. We had no idea what was coming.

  The little girl on the sidewalk is clapping, and her father, tall in a gray suit, red tie, and dreadlocks, joins her. I look down at Tommy and I can see he’s smiling, a real smile, shining out the kind of joy that comes with a perfect performance.

  We are ridiculous. A spectacle. I don’t know what I want anymore, but I know that if I could figure out how, I’d stay up here forever.

  I’d never ever come down.

  This Message Will Self-Destruct

  WHEN TOMMY SETS ME DOWN and gets on his train home, I go straight into secret-agent mode, all hush-hush and furtive. I know I need to open this envelope before I go to dinner, and I have to find a secure place in which to do it. When I see a tiny corner park, I dash across the street and lean back on the iron fence in the shade. Lush green leaves touch my shoulders through the fence. I take a deep breath, and then I slide the envelope out of my bag.

  The handwriting on the front of the envelope is precise and even, stark black. I look more closely at my name, printed neatly across the front. Then Miss Diana’s, and the Academy. I remember this handwriting from the bedtime notes Julia used to leave me when I was a kid and she was going to be out late: my sister’s perfect writing on a notepad shaped like a flamingo. She’d write in black ink up the bird’s slender paper neck: good night/sweet dreams/see you in the morning.

  The ticker tape in my head starts up again, counting something.

  (The number of days since she’s been gone.)

  (The number of times I leaned in the doorway of her studio and watched her dance.)

  (The number of minutes it took for the ambulance to come.)

  I don’t even know why I’m waiting. Maybe I need a password (open sesame) (swordfish) or an incantation for good luck. Maybe I’m just terrified. But a taxi honks its horn loudly, right in front of me, and I snap out of it. I open the envelope gently, as if what’s inside is fragile as a robin’s eggs or seashells, or dangerous as poison powder. There’s extra Bubble Wrap on the inside, and when I pull it apart, it lets out little pops in protest. Then the envelope is open and no one dies. At least no
t right away.

  But everything is . . . different.

  It’s just a book: small, old, hard-covered, with a matte dust jacket, edged with filigreed gold. I breathe in its scent: that old-book smell of vanilla and almonds and crushed flowers, dead and dried for years. The title is printed across the cover in raised gold letters. Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, it says. Abridged.

  I know this book. It used to be mine but I lost it, on vacation in Montreal when I was eleven years old. I left it in the drawer of the hotel’s bedside table and didn’t realize until we were three hours away in Quebec City, the next stop on our maple-syrup/ski-lodge vacation. I never saw it again, until now, when it slid through space and time, apparently, to land in this envelope, in my hand.

  I open the cover to the title page and there it is, just like it used to be: the title crossed out in black ink and another one written above. I recognize those Sharpied letters right away. Julia wrote them, of course, three words just as important as twenty-six bones. I run my finger over them now, slowly, touching every single letter. This is what they spell:

  G-I-R-L-S

  I-N

  T-R-O-U-B-L-E

  I remember.

  LRRH

  JULIA WROTE IN THIS BOOK half my life ago. I was eight and she was fifteen. She’d just been given the lead in an abridged Academy production of Cinderella, even though she was still in Level Six and the Level Seven girls were pissed. She was in the studio all the time, coming home every night sweaty and exhausted.

  We still lived in our old apartment on Riverside and shared a room back then. One afternoon, I came into our bedroom to find her sitting on my bed with our fairy tale book in her lap. When I was small she’d read to me from that book all the time, telling me about Snow White and Briar Rose and the Goose Girl, but at that point she hadn’t picked it up in years. I had, of course. I still loved how magic made the forests in the stories go all glittery and otherworldly, and how ordinary animals turned enchanted and gained the ability to talk. I loved that the parents were usually gone, the kids left to their own devices, and the heroines had to prove their goodness or their bravery to get what they wanted in the end. The world of fairy tales made its own kind of sense, and I found it satisfying. I thought Julia did too. And even though I could have read the book to myself that day, I wanted my sister to read it to me again.