by Una LaMarche
“Come on, don’t go,” you begged, following me to the door as I struggled with my zipper. “I’ll deal with her.”
“She needs to deal with herself,” I said, kicking through the detritus of empty cups still littering the entryway. Dante and his “associates” had apparently left the building. “She’s out of control.” It seemed so surreal that just four hours earlier, Liv and I had been fanning out napkins and gossiping, taking pictures of cabinets so we would know where to put things back the next morning. But life wasn’t like that; things got broken, and sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to force them, the pieces just didn’t fit together anymore.
“Did something happen between you guys?” you asked.
“No,” I said quickly. I couldn’t bring myself to admit the truth. As hurtful as it was, I knew it would sound pathetic if I tried to explain it out loud—We like the same boy! I was too proud to own up to that level of pettiness. “She’s just . . . embarrassing herself,” I mumbled. “And I can’t watch. I’m afraid she’s going to do something stupid.”
“Oh, shit,” you said, suddenly looking over my shoulder with an expression that hovered somewhere between shock and delight. “Too late.”
I turned around, steeling myself for what I was about to see. There was Liv, pressing him up again the wall, her arms around his neck, her tongue in his mouth.
Only it wasn’t Dave she was kissing. It was Ethan.
“Looks like she just made his whole life,” you laughed, holding a hand up to your grin, as Ethan eagerly wrapped his arms around Liv, dropping his drink on the rug in the process.
There was a part of me that wanted to laugh with you, to revel in the twist ending Liv had just thrown down. But I knew better—whatever she was doing, it wasn’t fueled by liquid courage. It was classic, impulsive Liv, trying to make things right. It was her own backward way of saying sorry.
“What is she doing?” I whispered. Whatever Liv was trying to prove to me, it was only going to make things worse for everyone else. Ethan had worshipped her for years, even though it was obvious to everyone she wasn’t into him. And as much as I’d hated seeing her all over Dave, I felt bad for him, too. He was standing there stunned, with a look on his face that made my heart ache.
I knew that expression; I’d been fighting it myself all day, ever since Ms. Adair had called me out before my solo. It was the look of someone watching something they desperately wanted slip between their fingers . . . and disappear.
Chapter Seven
January 9
124 days left
I WALKED TO THE FOUNTAIN on Monday with a creeping sense of dread, but for the wrong reasons. The anxieties stacked up inside me like layers of rock sediment, or maybe Dante’s Inferno (Dante the thirteenth-century Italian poet, not Dante the twenty-first-century Manhattan drug dealer, although both of them brought to mind circles of hell). On top, the most all-consuming, was the Showcase cast list, which according to tradition would be posted on the bulletin board outside the auditorium after lunch, at the beginning of sixth period. I was fresh out of pointe class with Ms. Adair, and the way she’d treated me had made my blood pressure spike. It wasn’t that she’d been cold or cruel, like I’d worried she’d be; it had been worse—she’d been extra nice, complimenting my form in front of the class, asking me to demonstrate a high arabesque, even commenting that my ribbons were laced perfectly. To anyone else I probably looked like a teacher’s pet, but I had the distinct feeling that she was just killing me with kindness to set me up for a crushing blow she already knew was coming.
Underneath that, of course, was my fear of seeing Liv—or Dave, or Ethan . . . pretty much anyone except you (though I’d even been relieved to have had pointe class that morning so that you wouldn’t be there, just to put off having to talk about any of the other three for a while). I’d lived the rest of my weekend in a sort of bubble, keeping my phone mostly silent, doing homework and helping my dad cook, watching dance movies on cable. I did check every few hours to see if Liv had texted, but amazingly, she never did. I knew she was alive, though, because she’d posted a photo on Saturday, of a toddler face-planting on a Slip’N Slide, accompanied by the hashtag #currentmood.
At the bottom of my pile of worries, throbbing faintly but unmistakably, was my right ankle. Something was wrong; it wasn’t just sore, and no amount of ice over the weekend had made the gnawing pain go away. That should have been my first priority, I knew that, but it felt like denial was the only option. I couldn’t stop dancing, not with Showcase and potential company auditions coming up, and telling anyone I was injured would only ensure that I would be taken out of the running. I couldn’t imagine my parents not freaking out, since apart from a stable income, my health was the biggest thing we fought over about ballet. I’d had this Alvin Ailey poster above my bed since I was nine that pictured a beautiful dancer clutching her shoulders, facing the camera, in the middle of an acrobatic grand jeté. I loved it because she didn’t look perfect and prissy; her face was almost in anguish, her hair flying out wild above her. To me, she looked like passion incarnate, but every time my mom saw the poster she’d say, “Look at that gorgeous body! I bet her joints are crumbling.”
In class that morning my ankle had throbbed, but keeping it warm with an Ace bandage and leg warmers had kept the discomfort hovering just above tolerable. For the time being, I could shove it out of my mind. Unlike the drama with Liv.
I wasn’t sure what the dynamic would be when we all met for lunch. It seemed possible that Dave wouldn’t be joining us after the disaster that had been our collective first impression. You had texted me at two A.M. on Saturday morning to say that Liv was safely asleep in her bed and Ethan was passed out on the couch, but that was all I knew. So when I stepped into Lincoln Center proper and saw everyone, including Dave, clustered in our usual spot, interacting in a way that didn’t seem (at least to the naked eye) openly hostile, it was a pleasant surprise. The weather had gotten nicer, too, so that the ice had melted into a slushy sheen on the pavement, and coats could be left partially unzipped without fear of frostbite.
“What up, girl!” Liv yelled when she saw me. She was sitting on the bench between you and Ethan, who was busy annotating one of his scripts with a mechanical pencil. You were wolfing down a hotdog and Liv was clutching a diet soda in one hand and her phone in the other. Dave stood in front of you, looking fine from behind in his bomber jacket and skinny jeans. When Liv called out, he turned and waved, shielding his eyes from the bright winter sun. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or grimacing. I wasn’t sure if I was, either.
“Hey,” I said cautiously, sliding onto the bench next to you.
“Hey!” You raised your eyebrows. “I didn’t think you were coming. You didn’t reply to any of my texts.”
“Oh, sorry.” I’d left my phone off since 10:15, when pointe had started. “You know Adair and vibrate.” She had an ear like a bat, able to detect faint buzzing in a packed duffel from twenty feet away.
“Yeah, well, check your shit,” you said in a low voice.
“Check what?” Liv asked, peering into her bag, which was Mary Poppins–sized, the better to hold the entire drawer’s worth of makeup and up to four half-finished Smartwaters she carried on her at any given time. “Cast lists won’t be up for at least another forty minutes.” She fished out a lip balm and glared pointedly at Ethan. “Apparently they’re being guarded like the fucking Oscar ballots.”
“No special treatment,” Ethan said, without looking up from his script. “People would talk.” He smiled to himself and moved his right hand to Liv’s legging-clad left leg. Dave looked at the ground. I unzipped my duffel and slipped my hand in, searching for my phone.
“What’s the point of all that, anyway?” you asked, balling up your mustard-smeared foil. “I mean, can’t we just get e-mails or something? Why’s it gotta be posted in the public square like we’re getting news in the
Middle Ages?”
“Seriously,” Dave said. “I’d rather get the call from my agent, even if everyone else still knows I didn’t get it.” I found my phone and turned it on, setting it in my lap alongside my container of yogurt and can of ginger ale. It looked like diet food but it wasn’t—my stomach had just been weird all morning from nerves, and I would have sooner forfeited Showcase altogether than risked an emergency Number Two situation at school.
“Isn’t your agent your mom?” Ethan asked. “That must make it weird.” My phone buzzed to life against my thigh.
“No, she’s my manager,” Dave said.
“Aw, a momager!” Liv cried.
“Yeah, I guess,” Dave said, shrugging. “It’s not as cute as it sounds.”
8:12 am: just saw e walking down the hallway like travolta in saturday night fever. asked how his weekend was and he said “transcendent.” lol wtf
“Anyway, posting cast lists is all about building expectation,” Ethan said, putting his pencil down. “Life-changing moments deserve a little drama.” He looked adoringly at Liv. “Pun intended.”
9:02 am: saw liv, she said her weekend was “boring.” the plot thickens . . . [crying laughing emoji]
And one from Liv:
10:13 am: NEED to talk at lunch. CRAZYTOWN. #helpme
“No offense, but I don’t think too many lives are going to be changed by your play,” Liv said, pulling down her cat-eye sunglasses. “And what about the losers? If you’re gonna let someone down, it should be in private. Especially after all of that . . .” she shifted ever so slightly away from Ethan “. . . expectation.” She shot me a look, hashtag “help me” in eye contact form, and I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding.
11:12 am: lunch should be interesting at least. buy u some street meat?
My stomach lurched. I didn’t feel like eating a dirty-water hotdog or talking to Liv—I definitely couldn’t do either until I found out my Showcase fate. I had been trying to keep my expectations in check all weekend. I reminded myself how every single dance major was going to cross that stage one way or another, and that I could make the most of whatever I got. In my more confident moments I even sort of hoped they’d stick me in the corps, just so I could show them how good I was, and how they couldn’t keep me down, blinding them even from the back row. But it was getting too close, and too real, for any of my lies to work anymore. If I saw the word ensemble next to my name, I knew I was going to be completely devastated.
“Yeah,” you said. “Everyone seeing it makes it that much sweeter if you get what you want. But if you don’t . . .” You looked at me, your eyes flashing with something I couldn’t quite place. Concern? Pity? Either way it wasn’t good.
“I think I’ll actually be relieved if I don’t get cast,” Dave said. “I wouldn’t feel right showing up last-minute and taking someone else’s spot.”
“There’s no taking someone else’s spot,” Ethan said sharply, draping an arm around Liv’s narrow shoulders. “It’s either yours or it isn’t.” He smiled at her and she looked down at her lap, speechless for the first time in as long as I’d known her.
“Unless the person doing the casting hates you,” I said.
“No way she hates you,” you said. “She’s cold like that to everyone. Nobody knows where they stand.”
“Spoken by the only person who’s got a lead on lock,” I said. “At this point they should call it the pas de duh.” Dave laughed, but you just stared out at Avery Fisher Hall, resting your chin on your fists.
“Believe me, I don’t have anything on lock,” you said.
“Does anyone?” Dave asked. I felt a twinge in my ankle, just as Liv squirmed out of Ethan’s awkward embrace. You palmed the tin foil from your hot dog, aimed at a nearby trashcan, and missed. It seemed like the perfect metaphor for life at that particular moment.
• • •
By quarter to one I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to go camp out in the dance hallway to await my fate.
“It’s not gonna make a difference,” Liv said, sounding almost annoyed, as I packed my uneaten lunch back into my bag. But even though I knew she wanted me to stay as her buffer, I tried to tune her out; she knew she was getting the lead in Ethan’s magnum opus whether she made out with him or not, the same way she knew she would always get away with throwing blowout parties in her thin-walled apartment building. Liv never seemed to feel the threat of true failure. It was her most glaring character flaw.
“I’ll go with you,” you said, swinging your backpack up over one shoulder, and I tried to hide my disappointment. I’d had dreams all night long about seeing the cast list, weird, surrealistic walks through a hallway stretched like taffy, where I’d come upon the sheet of paper, my eyes struggling to focus enough to read the fine print. In some of the dreams I’d find my name in a cluster near the bottom, one more body in an anonymous mass. In others, I couldn’t find it at all. And while I was pretty sure (99 percent?) that I’d be somewhere on the list in real life, I didn’t want you to be there to see my face when I found out. The only bright spot of the dreams had been that I was alone.
But as we walked back to school from the fountain, it seemed like you were mostly following me to gossip.
“Was that vibe weird to you?” you asked, trudging up the steps to campus, one bare brown knee poking through a rip in your jeans. “Like, is it just me or does Roth seem like he doesn’t even want to be there but has no other choice?”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said, watching the rubber toes of my boots hit the marble, studying the sparkling gray stone for slippery patches. “People were kind of weird to him at the party. Maybe we seem comparatively normal.”
“Sucker,” you laughed. “That party was crazy, though. You were smart to leave when you did. It was all downhill from there.”
“Why, what happened?” I feel guilty thinking back on it now; I wasn’t really listening, and the Liv/Dave/Dante layers of angst had eroded momentarily. I was just going through the motions, holding that cast list in my mind’s eye. It was like I was on autopilot, counting the steps until we reached the heavy green door that led into the basement offices, walked past the gym teachers’ lounge, climbed the back staircase to the first floor, and walked down my dream-taffy hallway to the bulletin board around the corner from the auditorium entrance. This walk was all about the destination, not the journey, and for one of the first and only times in our friendship, I wished you would stop talking.
“People just got wasted and started doing stupid stuff,” you said. “Someone put a cigarette out on the couch. There was definitely puke in the tub.”
My insides shuddered again. “Did she come down OK?” I asked.
“Uh—” We were almost at the green door, but our favorite security guard, a lively middle-aged Liberian man we all called “Coach,” was standing just outside, talking on his cell phone, so you stopped short a few yards away and lowered your voice. “Nothing too bad,” you said, “but at a certain point she was barely standing and I had to kick people out so she could lie down in her room.” Your face tensed; I could see the muscles harden under the skin. “Ethan wanted to go with her, but that seemed like an obviously bad idea, so me and Roth kept him out in the living room, talking about The Crucible or some shit, until he passed out.”
He stayed the whole time? I was ashamed that that was my first thought, but it was. I’d assumed he’d left right after the Liv and Ethan Show. I certainly would have. Or, I guess, I did.
“Do you know what she took?” I asked. You broke eye contact and shook your head, looking down at the fountain, where Liv was now sandwiched between Dave and Ethan.
“I asked her why she called Dante,” you said. “But she was so far gone, she kept swearing that her friend from middle school brought him and she had no idea he was coming.”
“Right.” The only person from middle scho
ol I’d seen at the party was Chitra Nagaraj, who had shown up at least an hour before Dante and had spent most of her time hand in hand with her girlfriend. Besides, he’d flat-out told us that someone had “called in an order.” You’d been there. You knew. “She’s lying,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t gonna call her on it. Not in the middle of everything.”
“Come on,” I sighed. “Can you at least tell Dante not to sell to her?”
“We’re not exactly close,” you said, shifting uncomfortably.
“He’s always at your house.” I crossed my arms, trying to ignore Coach, who was off the phone and shooting me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He was always trying to play matchmaker, asking us when we were going to get married.
“Yeah, well.” You squinted and tensed your jaw. “He shows up a lot of places uninvited.”
“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. I thought you didn’t care. I didn’t know you already blamed yourself—that you would always blame yourself.
“See this patch?” you asked, pulling your backpack off your shoulder and pointing to a big, rectangular swath of fabric. “It’s there because at the end of eighth grade, someone wrote ‘faggot’ on it in permanent marker, and then hung it from the basketball hoop down the street from my house.” You laughed bitterly. “Guess who it was.”
“Dante.” I didn’t realize he could fall even further down in my estimation, but now he was scraping rock bottom.
“He thinks I’m a joke,” you said. “And even if he didn’t, he wouldn’t listen to me. He doesn’t care who’s buying, he just cares about making money.”
I thought back to what Dante had said at the party—“I told you I’d get your fancy-ass school, with or without your help.” He must have asked you to hook him up with business, and you’d said no . . . I wondered bleakly what other punishments you’d had to endure for standing your ground.
“OK,” I said, forcing a smile. “We can deal with it later. Right now I need to go be depressed by a piece of paper. You coming?”