Our afternoon timetables were adjusted to accommodate the appointments with Roderick. Repertoire class was canceled and appointments were slotted into the freed time, things like pointe shoe fittings and physiotherapy. I hadn’t been scheduled for anything, and at four o’clock I found myself with nothing to do. I walked along the winding corridor from the lobby to the change room, thinking about the list. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. All the girls on it had been involved in what had happened at Coffee Time. I couldn’t help but suspect that this was more than a coincidence. It was like Roderick knew what those girls were up to. They came into the studio, leotards snug on their bodies, and flaunted the sex that was taking over their insides. They had boobs, and you could tell they were proud of them, didn’t care who knew. Roderick hated it. It was an insult to ballet. It turned the line of an extended leg into something impure, made pervs out of everyone.
I peeled off my ballet clothes and put on my bra and underwear. I pulled on my baggy T-shirt, then my corduroys. I moved to the mirrors over the row of sinks, gave my reflection a cold reckoning. What if Roderick knew that I’d been involved at Coffee Time too? My stomach twisted with shame. I punched my fist into the ceramic edge of the sink and the pain burned up through my knuckles into my wrist. I needed to be so much more careful about my behavior. I had to focus all my energies on being the kind of dancer that Roderick respected. And I had to do more than that too. I had to make sure that he noticed.
I scrutinized my eyes and nose and mouth. The last thing I had to worry about was prettiness. I pulled sideways on my cheeks. My nose flattened and my nostrils stretched. Now my reflection was defensive, like a living, breathing hockey mask. I seized the bun at the back of my head with my whole hand, made sure it was firmly in position.
I took Chantal’s raincoat from my locker, put it back in my knapsack, and went to the lobby to check the schedule. Chantal’s appointment with Roderick had started fifteen minutes ago. I climbed the stairs slowly to the third floor. I could catch Chantal as she left Roderick’s office and maybe I’d run into him too. That way he would know that I wasn’t running around with those other girls. I walked down the empty hallway toward the office. My running shoes made a squeaky sound on the floor that I didn’t like. I passed the academic classrooms that hosted math, geography, and French, before coming to the cluster of administrative rooms. Roderick’s door was shut. I moved to the bulletin board beside it, pretending to be interested in whatever happened to be posted there.
Magazine clippings about the academy were scattered across the cork. One full-page spread had a photo of Roderick correcting a dancer’s position. She was standing sideways at the barre, a muscled leg stretched high in front of her. Roderick stood behind her, very close, as though his proximity were part of the correction. One of his hands was on her shoulder, pressing it down. His other hand wasn’t visible but I knew exactly where it was. Dancers in that position will throw their hips off balance, trying to get a few extra inches of height out of the extended leg. Roderick’s hand would be on her lower back, his fingers sinking into the muscles of her upper bum, trying to keep it level. I brought my fingers to my own lower back, pinched them into the same muscles. What would Roderick have felt touching this girl? I moved my hand around the way he would have moved his hand, putting pressure on the mound of round muscle curving under toward my thigh.
A door opened. I dropped my hand, pivoted toward the sound. Chantal stepped out of Roderick’s office. She looked right at me.
“Hi.” The word scraped up my throat, rough with embarrassment.
Chantal’s mouth was straight as a ruler and she didn’t say anything. Roderick stepped out into the hallway. “Hello,” he said.
I took a shallow breath. “Hello.”
He looked from me to his bulletin board and back to me again. I was supposed to explain myself.
“I was just—” I pointed at Chantal. “I was looking for Chantal.”
“Oh.” Roderick turned to Chantal now too, as though he had momentarily forgotten about her. He considered me again for a second and his focus dipped down my body. I hoped he noticed the looseness of my clothing, how it didn’t cling to me anywhere at all. “Well, that’s very thoughtful of you, Miss Slade.” The corner of his mouth pulled up toward his cheek, a smile that crept backward. “Why don’t you girls go have a little powwow. And have an easy night, okay? Give yourselves some time to rest.” He stepped back into his office and shut the door.
* * *
Chantal and I walked up Church Street to the subway without saying much. I didn’t ask her why she was walking to the subway instead of going up to the dorm room she shared with Sixty. I didn’t ask her if she was okay because it seemed pretty clear she wasn’t. Her breathing was heavy and disjointed, accumulating every ten seconds or so in that hiccup-sob medley that kids get in the wake of a temper tantrum.
She turned to me suddenly. “Why were you waiting for me?”
I pulled the raincoat out of my knapsack and handed it to her. She looked at me like she didn’t understand. Then she accepted it slowly, as though worried I’d whip it away. When she mumbled thank you, I tried to smile. I desperately wanted to apologize for what had happened at Coffee Time, but I didn’t know how. We walked into the station, went through the turnstiles and down the escalator without saying another word.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “I thought what happened … what they made you do … I thought it was gross. I shouldn’t have said that stuff.”
Chantal didn’t respond and I realized there was no way she’d forgive me. But as the subway pulled into the tunnel, she caught my hand between both of hers in a weird hand sandwich. Her palms were soft and the clumsiness of the gesture made them pawlike. She was instantly embarrassed and let go.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, once we were inside the subway car.
She glanced over her shoulder as though she was worried someone from school might be on the same car. “I’m on probation,” she whispered. “I could get kicked out.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Is that what Roderick told you?”
She nodded, dipped her small white chin into her turtleneck. Her mouth started to do something complicated, like invisible strings pulled it in different directions. She was fighting back tears. I took her hand and squeezed it.
“Is it because you cried in class?” I asked.
She shook her head and the tears started to flow. One skydived straight to the swell of her cheek. I fished into my ballet bag for Kleenex even though I never carried Kleenex. It seemed like the appropriate gesture and it gave me something to do.
“Then why?”
“Because,” she mumbled, and grabbed her thigh to show me.
I shouldn’t have asked the question. I could see the suffering on her face and it made me feel awful. Chantal loved ballet more than anyone. I suddenly didn’t care what Veronica and Molly had said about her having no control over her emotions. Chantal had cried in class that time only because Roderick had basically called her fat. It would have made the steeliest dancer crumble. The only thing Chantal needed to learn how to control was her appetite.
“Don’t worry.” I tried to comfort her. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay! You don’t understand.”
“I think I do.” We locked eyes. I loved her sadness, the way it was so wrapped up in her devotion. “I think I can help you.”
“What do you mean?”
“With your problem.”
A dollop of hope rippled through her gloom. “How?”
“I can just—” I wasn’t sure how to explain it. “I’ll help you.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. All I knew was that we were a little bit alike, and that little bit of likeness set us apart from those other girls. We loved ballet in a way that canceled out all the stupid things they worried about, especially sex.
“I think you’re a really good dan
cer.”
Her expression started to change. She looked surprised for a moment and then, slowly, ecstatic. “I think you’re really good too,” she said.
* * *
Isabel’s conference was that Saturday. I sat on the landing of the stairwell, legs folded like a kid in kindergarten, and listened to my parents argue. My mom was in the kind of mood that my dad called operatic. It meant that she said the same thing over and over again and, as if this repetition wouldn’t do the trick, made tormented gestures with her hands too.
“I wonder how you could think that that’s normal,” my mom hissed. “Because it’s not, Larry. It’s not normal. It’s not. It just isn’t.”
“Okay,” my dad said. “Don’t come.”
“I won’t. I wasn’t planning on it. I will not be joining you. You and Georgia can go alone.”
My dad and I drove downtown together. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone with him in his car and I wanted to make the most of the event. He was in a pissed-off mood, though, muttering little things to himself and then shaking his head like the argument with my mom continued in his imagination. It was best that I didn’t bug him. Outside the window, the street was lined with cars and skeletal trees clinging to sporadic yellow leaves. I didn’t mind the silence. I was secretly in a good mood and I wanted to enjoy it. I was looking forward to hearing Isabel speak and, maybe even more than that, I couldn’t wait to see Pilar. Isabel would introduce us and Pilar would shake my hand, say what a pleasure it was to see me again after so many years, and that I looked elegant and serene, the quintessence of a ballerina. I loved it when people told me that. If there was time, maybe the four of us would go out after the conference for a snack and I’d watch Isabel and her mom discuss how it had gone, hear all the things they said to each other.
The conference was taking place on the main campus of the university. My dad paid twelve dollars to park on university property and complained about it as soon as the money left his hands. It wasn’t right that adjunct faculty were required to pour their earnings back into the administration’s purse. I told him he was 100 percent right and he nodded appreciatively. We walked into a building where bald branches scaled the bricks, and then we went up a staircase that ascended so gradually it was awkward to climb, every step a little anticlimax. The conference room was full of people. We sat in the only available seats, near the entrance, and I scoured the backs of heads for a woman who might be Pilar.
Isabel spoke well and didn’t seem nervous, except for one time when she stumbled over a word and lost her place, had to start back at the beginning of her sentence. I tried to listen carefully, to make sense of the long phrases and all the difficult terminology. She sounded wonderful in my opinion, but I tried to gauge her performance by the reactions of other audience members who might know more. When she finished, everyone clapped. I thought the applause was louder than it had been for the previous two speakers, but I wasn’t sure. My dad turned to me and made a face I recognized, the whites of his eyes expanding in mockery, like clapping was a ritual he’d never understood. Still he clapped, and maybe more to make up for it, hands raised above everyone else’s and muscled into clamshells to make extra noise.
Isabel met us in the foyer when the conference was over. I threw my arms around her and my dad patted her on the shoulder.
“Where’s your mom?” I asked.
“Oh.” Isabel frowned. “She couldn’t make it at the last minute. She’s interviewing a doctor, a psychiatrist, actually”—she looked at our dad—“at the University of Manitoba.”
“Who’s that?” he asked.
Isabel wrinkled her nose, thinking. “I can’t remember the name. But they’re starting a study together, something about genetic mapping in body-image disorders. It sounded pretty cool.”
My dad nodded like he thought this was a little interesting, but not very interesting. Isabel told us she had to go out with her colleagues but that she’d make it up to me another time. My dad and I walked out to the parking lot together. I felt extremely disappointed by the whole afternoon. It was only four o’clock but the dark sky was already dropping toward us. The dreariness of the coming evening made me lonely. I didn’t want to deal with my mom, so I decided I would go to the public library. I could browse through coffee-table books on ballet and look for information on nutrition and dieting to help Chantal. When my dad and I got home, I grabbed my knapsack and went right back out the front door.
I hadn’t been outside for more than a minute when my mom came running after me. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she’d stuffed her pajama pants into a pair of Eskimo boots. She asked me where I was going.
“Out,” I said.
“How was the conference?”
I kept walking. If she cared about the conference, she should have come herself.
“Did you meet Pilar?”
“Of course,” I lied.
She grabbed my hand and forced me to turn around and face her. “What was she like?”
I yanked my hand away. Why in the world was she asking me this? My mom had met Pilar a bunch of times, and it was stupid that she cared about her anyway.
“She was so nice,” I said. “She sounded really smart and I thought she was as beautiful as Isabel.”
My mom looked stung. Good, I thought, maybe she’d learn how to mind her own business. But then she went on. “Did she and Dad talk?”
I was so sick of all her questions, her excuses, her suggestive tone of voice. “What is your problem, Mom? Why can’t you just be normal about things!”
She blinked hard and her eyes froze into two black jewels. She said nothing. Then she turned around and walked back into the house.
* * *
The following Monday, Molly wasn’t there at the start of our technique class. My eyes kept going from the clock above the doorway to the empty meter of barre between Sixty and Sonya Grenwaldt. It was possible that she was only late. Molly lived in Mississauga and she took the GO train in to school each day. But I had a strange feeling, a numbing draft between my bones. I told myself that it was reasonable to consider her late, until it was forty-five minutes past the start of class. When forty-five minutes had gone by, I told myself it was reasonable to imagine other possibilities. Any number were conceivable. There could have been an accident on the tracks and all the trains could have been canceled. She could’ve caught some kind of virus over the weekend and be lying on her couch in front of the TV. There might have been a family emergency, which probably meant one of her grandparents had died. I pictured Molly in a long black dress, standing beside her very tall father and her mother, who wasn’t really that tall at all.
People whispered about Molly after class, but I stayed on the periphery of the commotion, head down as I zipped up my jeans and wormed my feet into my sneakers. Sixty was beside me, getting dressed too, and was similarly quiet. When I was ready to go for lunch, we locked eyes.
“Come,” she said.
I followed her up the back staircase to the residence hallways. We moved solemnly as though our muscles dragged from exertion, didn’t speak; in fact, we barely met each other’s eyes.
“There are a thousand possible explanations,” she said. “Kids miss normal high school all the time.”
We huddled on her top bunk and called Molly on her family’s land line. It was a 905 area code, so I pictured a wide street without a sidewalk, a basketball hoop with a beard of snow. We pressed our heads together, divided the receiver between our ears. There was the dull purr of the ring tone.
“Yeah?” The voice was male and sounded teenage.
I nudged Sixty to get her to talk.
“Is Molly there?”
“Uh.” There was something like a grunt on the other end. “No.”
“Is she … Do you know if she’s coming to school today?”
“Uh, no.”
Sixty shrugged helplessly. I tried to think tactically, find the best question to exact clues.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
Sixty and I hovered over the silence, my temple pressed against her forehead. I felt the clammy adhesion of skin. We heard the voice breathe.
“I guess. Yeah.”
We thanked him, hung up the phone. I leaned back on Sixty’s pillow. My silence felt superstitious, as though saying the wrong thing would make the wrong thing a possibility. But I had a strange feeling. Molly was a sex girl and I knew this had something to do with it.
Metal scraped in the keyhole. The door opened and Chantal stepped into the room. She saw Sixty first, then me, and her expression changed between the two moments. I remembered I had three books in my knapsack on weight-loss methods that I’d found at the library, but I couldn’t give them to her in front of Sixty. Chantal moved farther into the room and opened the mini-fridge. She took out a snack pack of chocolate pudding and then reached into the mug on top of the fridge for a spoon.
“Chantal,” I said.
Sixty looked at me strangely and Chantal froze. I was as surprised by my outburst as anyone. Chantal hesitated for a moment, an embarrassed muddle in her eyes, but then she dropped the spoon back into the mug and looked down awkwardly at the pudding. She made a crude show of noticing something she hadn’t before, something that displeased her. I could tell that Sixty was about to ask me what was going on, but Chantal interjected.
“There’s something on the bulletin board for you, Georgia. Some kind of note.”
* * *
On the bulletin board in the main lobby was an envelope with my name on it. Veronica and Anushka were sitting on the bench and they watched me as I took it down, untucked the flap. Sixty stood closer to me than necessary.
“It might be nothing,” she whispered.
“I know.”
I read it to myself first. Dear Georgia, I’d like to meet for a consultation. Studio A at 1 p.m. Ballet attire. The writer had signed off with a dash at the bottom of the page followed by two lazy initials, R.A.
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