The numbness I felt the night before comes back, a gassy feeling like nothing around me is real. I take my seat where I’m instructed and Beatrice Turnbull sits down in the only other spot left. I look at my lap and wait for someone to start talking.
“We need to know what happened now, Georgia,” my dad says. “Everything.”
I might be shrinking, my organs shriveling a millimeter at a time. My face is hot and the heat eats at my neck, like a candle burning up its stem.
“Where’s Mom?” I manage to ask.
“Your mother couldn’t—” He starts to answer but stops himself, annoyed, jostles his head as though a fly has landed on the tip of his nose. He reaches out and lifts the top piece of computer paper. His hand turns in infinitesimal increments and it seems like it takes forever for him to flip the picture faceup. It’s the one of my bum pressing up into the camera so that the rest of me—spine, waist, shoulders—tapers away in the background. My dad pushes it toward me, as though making me look at it is a punishment in itself. His thumb is flat on the white of my thigh and it’s like I can almost feel it, the roughness of his hand on this impossible part of my body.
“Did Roderick take these photos?” he says. “Did he ask you to take them for him?”
I can’t believe this is happening. My dad’s voice, his words, the picture in his hand. I cover my face with my hands.
“Georgia,” Beatrice Turnbull says, “you need to be honest with us.”
I breathe into my hands. It makes a pocket of warm air. I squeeze them in tighter and shut my eyes. Why did they have to bring the pictures here? They could have just told me that they had found them. It seems too cruel that they’re right here in front of me, shoved in my face.
“That’s enough.” My dad’s voice clenches. “Move your hands away and tell us exactly what happened!”
His anger scares me and my hands weaken, fall from my face. It’s like I hear it in his body, the sizzle of rage as it fries his blood.
“Right now, Georgia. We’re waiting.”
The trademark wrinkle cuts his forehead, the one I believed was a fossil of great thought. Something is happening as I look at him. He’s furious at me, but I think about my mom. I see that image of her again, as young as Isabel and dressed in her clothing. He thinks Roderick’s a perv but what does that make him? Can you tell me what happened, Dad, what you did to your own student? My hands tremble but I do something that surprises both of us. I shake my head.
He raises his eyebrows, holds them up. His face takes on an expression that’s supposed to make me feel stupid. Normally my dad’s disapproval would elicit unbearable shame in me, but not now.
“You won’t tell us?”
“No.”
He inhales very slowly and his chest expands. He scratches the back of his head as he exhales, and looks across the room at Beatrice Turnbull.
“Well, we’ve already discussed what needs to happen, then. It’s clear that this environment isn’t helping you. We think, and Mrs. Turnbull agrees, that you need a break from ballet.”
I stare into his eyes. My heart isn’t racing. It’s pounding at a regular pace, but the pounds are so fierce that they shake my whole body.
“No I don’t,” I say.
“We aren’t trying to be mean, Georgia. We’re trying to protect you. Since we really don’t have a clue what happened here, we have to take extra caution. If you were willing to cooperate a little more, well, that might change our approach.”
“Talk to us, Georgia.” Beatrice Turnbull’s voice is dead flat, her eyes like dangling marbles.
I look down at my feet. I can’t feel my heart at all now and I wonder if it’s stopped. “I took them.”
“You took these pictures?” she asks.
I nod.
“Why did you take them?”
“To give to Roderick.”
There’s a pause. “Why did you want to give them to Roderick?”
I shut my eyes for a second. I need to answer her but the difficulty is bigger than my embarrassment. “I thought he’d like them.”
“What in Roderick’s behavior led you to believe that he would like them?”
There’s a tickle in my eyes. I’d hate myself for crying. I could tell them all the things that happened between us, but I know they won’t even make sense. How can I explain it? Fury twists inside me again, because it’s not fair that I have to do this. No one talks about private things this way.
“Take your time,” she says. “Start at the very beginning.”
Even though I’m getting angrier, I try to do this. I try to think of the very first thing that Roderick did. I know he’s the one who started it, but what was it? What was that first move? I clench my fists and try to sort through my thoughts. Every second makes me more desperate. I need to tell them or they’ll take away ballet, and the hugeness of this, the unjustness, rises like steam in my body. And in a moment, it’s swallowing me, burning my nostrils, my throat, the backs of my eyes. I turn away from them so they can’t see me crying.
There’s silence in the room. I must be sobbing but I can’t hear it.
“Okay,” Beatrice Turnbull whispers gently. “That’s okay, Georgia.” I hear her get up. She places her hand on my shoulder. “That’s okay.” Her voice is different now, nicer. “This is difficult for you. We know.”
I keep my back to them. They tell me they’re going to have a quick chat outside the office and ask if I mind waiting for a minute alone. I shrug. As soon as they’ve left the room, I stuff the photographs and my thong into my knapsack and zip it up. I hear the drone of voices outside but I don’t even try to make out words. After a moment they return.
“We’re going to arrange a couple of appointments for you,” my dad says. “We’re going to have you speak to a psychologist. There’ll still be lots of questions to answer, but this should help.”
Beatrice Turnbull glances at her watch, a wiry thing that looks a hundred years old. “If you hurry and go straight to Eastern Collegiate, you’ll catch the end of the gym class.”
They clear a space for me so that I can get to the door. But I don’t move.
“What about ballet?” I direct the question at my dad, but when he doesn’t answer I look at Beatrice Turnbull.
“We’ll discuss it, Georgia,” my dad says. “Ballet is still canceled here, so we all have time to give it some thought.”
“What does that mean!?”
“It means…” He rubs the back of his neck. “We’ll see. It will depend on a lot of things and your cooperation with the psychologist will certainly help you.”
I stare at his sea-sponge face and feel a loathing creep up from my bones. The sensation is unbearable, as if all nice things in me might explode. I reach for the doorknob, but Beatrice Turnbull puts her hand out to stop me, her eyes on the coffee table.
“Where are the … did you take those items?”
“They’re mine,” I say.
She frowns. “They’re not yours anymore, Georgia. They’re in our custody now.”
I’m mad enough that I can imagine storming past both of them, my things buried inside my bag. But pissing them off any more isn’t going to help me. I unzip my backpack, take out the stuff, and hand it to Beatrice Turnbull. My thong slips off the top photo and lands on the floor. I step on it as I walk out of the room.
I leave the academy and turn right along the sidewalk. The sky is overcast, like the inside of a seashell, and the air smells like wet exhaust. I remember Beatrice Turnbull telling me to hurry, so I stop dead in my tracks and try to take the slowest step imaginable. I take another one exactly the same way. A car passes me and I can just imagine what I look like to the people inside, a weirdo impersonating an astronaut. I wonder if this is what it feels like to go crazy. I turn down Jarvis Street, tip my head back so that I can watch the clouds as I walk. Moving with your head like that distorts any sense of balance and I can feel myself zigzag but I don’t care. The word how plays over and over again i
n my mind, like a CD that’s all scratched and skipping. There’s something about the repetition of the question that I like, how it evokes the vastness of my disaster. How has everything crumbled so quickly? The clouds shift into things, giant bugs and flattened hearts, and I try to convince myself that I’ve forgotten what clouds are, what purpose they serve in the universe. I reach down and squeeze my thigh. I haven’t danced for three days now. I haven’t even stretched. It’s the longest I’ve gone without stretching in two years, and the thought slows my heart.
Eastern Collegiate is just a few blocks south of Wellesley. Out front are clusters of kids. I pass three girls first, each holding a takeout coffee. They have long hair and deep side parts; two have leather purses that cross their bodies like camera cases and they’re wearing leggings that get swallowed into their snow boots. The one on the end brings the lid to her mouth, tilts it back hard, and instantly buckles sideways, spitting. The other two bend over her and laugh. She wipes her chin with the back of her hand, yells at them, laughs too. I don’t really know how I’m supposed to get to the backfield, so I figure I should just go in the main door. There are kids lining the railings. Some wear big headphones and others have cigarettes tucked like pencils behind their ears. I weave my way around a clump of them, squeeze by a girl with blond hair and realize that it’s Veronica. She’s talking to a few guys. I see their heads over her shoulder and I notice Anushka beside her now. Then I see Sixty. She’s on the edge of the clump and she’s already spotted me. She hoists her shoulder bag out of the way and comes over.
“Hey,” she says quietly. “Did everything—I mean, was it okay?”
I can’t believe she has the nerve to ask this. Everything would have been okay if she’d kept her promise. I turn around and am walking back toward the curb when I think I hear my name. Then I hear it again. It’s a male voice and I turn around. There’s a guy looking down at me. He rubs his hand over his whole head and his hair doesn’t move at all because it’s thick as a rug and an inch from his scalp. He’s pretty tall and he has smooth skin the color of a coffee stain.
“Kareem?” I say it as a question even though it’s not a question. A heat rises over my cheeks.
Kareem jerks his chin over his shoulder a little, something between a nod and a tic. “What are you doing here? Did you transfer?”
“No—”
“Didn’t you go off to ballet school?”
“Yeah. I’m still there. I mean not this very second, obviously—”
“We need a gym credit,” Sixty interrupts, and I realize that she’s followed me. “We’re just here for gym.”
“Oh. Cool.” He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. His arms are too long to stretch in this position, but he tries to straighten them anyway and this makes his shoulders pop forward, his chest retreat in a curve.
“Well, look, we’re having a party. Oh man, is it gonna be good.” He reaches for something in his back pocket and pulls out a stack of flyers. He gives one to me and one to Sixty. “It’s a house thing. My buddy’s trying to get into promotion.”
I look down at the flyer. There’s a black-and-white photo of two skinny guys in bomber jackets leaning against a wire fence. On the other side there’s all the information: an address, directions, and the date, which is tomorrow night. It also says “BYOB.”
“I’ll give you my number.” Kareem pulls a pen out of something behind him; it’s hard to tell whether it’s his jean pocket or his bag. “You know—in case.”
He looks around for something to write on. I push my sleeve up and thrust out my arm. He inscribes his number in big blue digits across the inside of my wrist. I watch his forehead as he writes. It seems crazy that I was ever scared of him.
“All right. Hope to see ya.” He wanders back into the cluster of guys behind Veronica and Anushka.
I trace my finger over the ink to see if it will smudge.
“You don’t want to go, do you?” Sixty says.
I just ignore her, turn and walk up Jarvis Street toward the subway. I suddenly couldn’t care less about this gym class. I’m going to go home and run myself a scalding bath and soak in its ceramic drum until my muscles are warm as pizza dough, can be kneaded into anything. I have to make up for three days of not stretching, and the house will be empty, so I can do it wherever I like.
I sit on the train and stare at my interlaced fingers while I concoct a ballet schedule in my head. I’ll do adage and grands battements and fouetté turns. I picture myself not in my leotard but in something gossamer and filthy, dragged through swamps, like Manon’s rags as she nears her death. When the subway reaches my stop, I don’t bother waiting for the bus, climb the dirty staircase out of the station and move through the glass atrium to the street. The sky is still white, but there’s sun burning beneath it now. It bleaches out detail so that sidewalks and buildings and faces are coated in a colorless glare and I wish I had a pair of sunglasses. Even though it’s cold out, I think of a desert instead of a city. This is the kind of starkness that Manon died in. I can picture her elegant body go slack in a beam of sunlight. Her throat is parched like overcooked bacon and her head lolls from side to side. Still, she points her toes. When her lover finally shows up to save her, it’s too late. Her head falls backward and her body tenses in one last spasm, arching in an endless curve, arms unfurled by her ears. Then she goes limp. What does her lover do with her dead body in his arms? He probably cries. I see him grope for some life in the body he’d loved so dearly, his hands grabbing indiscriminately at waist, thighs, chest. The sun is still everywhere, like invisible peroxide gas. He rips open her dress. Her breasts glow in the light, in fact they’re practically translucent, and he brings his lips to one of her pointy nipples for the last time.
I open the front door and my mom is in the living room. I stop dead in my tracks. Does she know about the photos? They’d make her imagine the most horrible things. I step through the alcove. She’s surrounded by boxes, and I hear the screech of packing tape as she pulls it over a flap of cardboard. There are giant gaps in the bookshelf.
We watch each other, unmoving, her body behind the mess of packing and my arms hanging at my sides. We’re so quiet that I think inanimate objects are making noise instead. Electricity tickles the glass jars on the mantel. My mom’s expression doesn’t change as she moves toward me, and in a moment she has her arms around my neck. My face goes into her hair as she hugs me. She smells like cigarettes but I don’t care.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
Her voice is thin as a reed and I wonder if she’s crying. It makes me feel terrible. I’ve caused this sadness when she was already so sad to start with.
“Yeah. I’m—I’m all right.”
“Poor sweetheart.” She sniffs. “Poor baby. We’ll get through this. I promise we will. You’ll be fine.”
She takes me by the shoulders and moves my body back so that she can look into my eyes.
“Do you want to talk?”
I shake my head.
“That’s fine.” She wraps her hand around my ponytail, leaves it there like another elastic. “We’ll talk whenever you want to.”
“Where are you going?”
She doesn’t answer me. I feel her take a massive breath that lifts her shoulders and widens her ribs beneath her sweater. “We’re moving,” she finally says.
“We are?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” I say, and I nod the way I imagine a lawyer would nod, a doctor would nod, like it’s clinical information that can’t show on my face. “Where?”
“Long term—I don’t know. I’ve booked a hotel for a few nights. I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but you’ll like it. There’s a spa and an indoor pool.” She tries to smile. “It’s walking distance from the academy.”
She waits for me to say something, probably show some sign of consent. But I feel like this isn’t even my life, that nothing about it can bug me. And I like this indifference, love it maybe, because nothing mat
ters if I just don’t care. She goes back to the box she’s been packing, places another pile of books inside. I watch her for a moment. There’s something different about how she moves. Still smooth and dull, like an endless note on the piano, but in spite of everything, maybe today her body looks less sad. I move to the bookshelf.
“Are we taking them all?” I ask.
“Except those.” She points to a clump at the end of the shelf.
There are unformed boxes on the carpet. I lift one and fold it into shape. I take books from the lower shelves and put them inside.
“Are you going to get divorced?”
“Yes,” she says immediately, and then she looks at the ceiling, thinking, as though she’s taken aback by her own speed.
We keep packing the books and we don’t talk for a bit. I lift her old textbooks from the bottom shelf and lay them flat in a new box. When I’m holding her thesis, she reaches over and touches my hand.
“Do you want to ask me anything, George? You don’t seem very surprised.”
I rub my finger over the gold writing on the front, carved into the leather like a stream through rock. I think I might be the opposite of surprised. I look down at her thesis and think that this news, this divorce, explains things I’ve known for a while.
“I know the timing is awful, sweetie,” she continues. “And when I find a place in a month or so, you can decide what you want to do. I’m sure your dad will tell you what his plans are.”
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