Spin the Sky

by MacKenzie, Jill;

  Copyright © 2016 Jill Mackenzie

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination or used factitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Georgia Morrissey

  Cover photo credit Getty Images and iStockphoto

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0686-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0687-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Interior design by Joshua Barnaby

  For my girls. For showing me that in order to tell you to follow your dreams, I had to first follow my own.

  ONE

  My hands reach up to move stars, rearrange space.

  I pivot on my left foot and in one perfect circle, I turn, turn, facing all four walls of this studio. Here, I am alone. Here, I can be anyone.

  My leg extends. It is one fluid wave. Drawing in, drawing out. Governed by tide.

  The music releases its breath, and with it, mine.

  My leg comes down, torso folding, until I’m on the ground. Stomach down. Face down. Pulled flat by wicked earth.

  My hands rise, taking my heart, legs, soul with them. I run, twist, turn. Fly. Fly. Beat my chest with open hands. Crush my skeletons with my feet, inches from the floor.

  I sink. Back rounded. Sink. A semicircle. Sink. A crescent moon.

  The tempo speeds. Drums beat fast, fueling my limbs and blood.

  In the air, my body coils, never landing. But the gravity betrays me, as always, so I leap again. Fly. Soar. Dance again.

  I am invisible. I am invincible.

  If only for a second.

  George bursts through the studio door like his ass is on fire.

  His face is all flushed and his hands are clutching this flyer that is, I guess, the source of his wide, wild eyes. My stomach gets this tight, wobbly feeling. Because I’ve seen this look on him before.

  I scurry over to the side of the room and slap the OFF button on the stereo before he has the chance to grill me on what, exactly, I’m doing here in Katina’s studio. A whopping thirty minutes before class. Without him. I’ll never tell him that I often come alone. Never, when I know he’d never understand.

  He waves the flyer in my face—so close I can’t even read it—and pumps his fist in the air like he’s some kind of rock star. “They’re coming to Portland, Mags. We’ve got to be there.”

  “Who’s coming where?”

  “See for yourself. Read it and weep, suckers.”

  He hurls the page at me, releasing it inches above my face. It sails down in a back-and-forth motion, so I scramble to catch it. George’s mouth breaks into a smile that’s as wide as our Wick Beach. “It’s fate. You know it is.”

  I read the last line of the flyer out loud: “If you can dance, don’t miss this dancertunity of a lifetime!” I look up at him. “Seriously?”

  “We’re so going.”

  “No way. What for?”

  “To try out, naturally.” George jetés to the far corner of the room. When the wall in front of him forces him to stop, he spins around. “I’m good, and so are you. I think it’s about time we took our place in the limelight.” He stops short. “Wait. You’re not scared to try out, are you?

  “Definitely not scared.” I bite down on my bottom lip. “Scared of what?”

  “Then it’s settled.” His grin swallows his whole face.

  I can’t even imagine what it’d be like to smile that big. It must feel so freeing, like being able to extend your leg straight up during arabesque, no ligaments or skin to hold you back. “No way,” I say. “You know Rose and I already live under a microscope. Why would I want to make us even more seen?”

  “Because. For once, it’d be the good kind of seen.”

  I grab my bag and join Abby and Quinn and Mark in the waiting room.

  George follows behind me, whispers in my ear. “Working with Gia Gianni, Mags. Can you even imagine what that would be like?”

  I take off my flower-studded earrings and slide out the four inches of cut pillowcase I’ve concealed under my bra strap. I poke the posts from my earrings through the cloth and replace the backings. Then I shove it in the pocket of my bag before George can see.

  I know exactly what it would be like to work with Gia, to be in the presence of a legendary choreographer like her for any length of time: like the fourteen years I’ve spent getting up early and getting here before school and on weekends and working and sweating, every single day, has all led up to the kind of grand finale that makes every single minute of it worthwhile. Like I really am flying.

  Then I think of doing it on TV in front of thousands. In front of every damn person in this damn town. “There’s no way I’m going.”

  “Why?” George says.

  “You know why.”

  “But you’re gorgeous. Totally Live to Dance material.”

  “I’d also be like the world’s biggest target if I went on that show.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.” George rolls his eyes and then, when a group of skater boys passes by the window, he rolls up the front of his T-shirt, exposing abs cut like a New York steak. His gaze zeros in on the boy in the middle—the tallest of the three—the one with blacker hair than my toes after three back-to-back pointe classes. As much as I don’t want them to, my eyes follow George’s every move. Up his smooth, pale chest. Down to the menacing little V peeking out on both sides of his hips from the top of his shorts. My own stomach muscles tighten, but for a very different reason than his. I may be Live to Dance material, but I’ll never be what he wants.

  “Hey, George.”

  George swivels around and, mercifully, releases his T-shirt just as a redheaded freshman girl and two of her dancer-wannabe friends scoot through the door. She flutters her eyelashes at him in this absurdly cartoonish way that makes me think of Betty. No, Veronica. Which is worse. Way worse.

  “Oh. Hey, you.” He smiles that smile back at her, this time showing both rows of his naturally sea-bleached teeth. By the look on her face, it’s like the girl’s going to pee herself right here in the foyer of Katina’s studio.

  George turns back to the window, the boys’ backs still slightly in view. While his head is turned, the freshman narrows her eyes at me and mouths all five letters of the word that’s become like a second name to me: T-R-A-S-H. But it could be worse. It could be the other, newer name some folks have taken to calling Rose and me instead. The one that’ll never let us forget what we did. Not like we could forget it if we tried.

  It echoes in my head: Murderer.

  “See you after class, George,” the freshman says, though she doesn’t take her eyes off me.

  George waves over his shoulder but keeps his eyes on that window. The freshman ducks into Studio B,
the class next to ours.

  When the boys are totally out of sight, George looks over at me. Me, who never left him. Me, who never would.

  “Think about it, Mags. Mikhail Baryshnikov. Aimee Bonnet. Michael Jackson. They all got their big breaks somewhere. This could be our somewhere. Just think of it as a chance for us to get out of here.” He mumbles, “Maybe our only chance.”

  “Get out of here and go where? We’re good, but Mikhail Baryshnikov good? Fat chance.”

  “But think of the recognition we’d get.”

  “I’m already too recognizable.” I sink down on the bench and stretch the toes on my right foot, the bones squeezing together till they feel like they’ll crumble. When I try to do the same with the left one, this small pain shoots through my toes and up my ankle. I wiggle my toes a few times and it goes away.

  George does a couple of flawless grand battements. His legs kick dangerously close to my face. “But you love performing. You said so last year during spring recital.”

  I think about the spring recital and what, exactly, I had said about it. Love? I don’t think so. But I do remember being backstage and hearing the warm purr of the crowd as we waited to go on. I do remember Katina telling us all to dance like we needed it to breathe, love, live. I do remember thinking that dancing was the only place I felt completely, totally myself.

  But I also remember that that night, I watched as George threw down an almost perfect solo. When he finished, the whole audience clapped and whistled for him, making so much happy noise actual car alarms went off all over town. He was good, so he deserved it. But also, the cheers were there because he’s George Moutsous, enough said. When I performed my solo just minutes after him, there were only five people in the audience clapping for me: Mr. and Mrs. Moutsous; Katina; George’s archrival and the only other friend I’ve got left in Summerland, Mark McDonald; and, of course, Rose.

  But the absence of clapping, replaced by the occasional boo and hiss, had nothing to do with me sucking or not sucking—that much I know. ’Cause when I came off the stage, Katina was there waiting. She cupped my cheeks in her hands and lifted my head so that I had no choice but to let my eyes gather in hers.

  “Forget about them. You’re going places. You’re going to be the one that makes it.” Then she turned around and told the rest of the dancers how I had demonstrated what it means to dance like no one’s watching. But it didn’t matter what she said. The Thing That Happened had already happened, two weeks earlier, and was there, hanging over my head like an ax waiting to fall. But I couldn’t forget about those hisses and boos. They came from my people. They were my town. What they thought of me—of us—it mattered. No matter what Katina said, it mattered.

  I twist the end of my waist-length ponytail around my index finger. “I said I like being on stage. I didn’t say I liked performing in front of that many people and I sure as shit didn’t say I wanted to do it in front of the whole entire nation.”

  George grabs the end of my ponytail away from my fiddling fingertips. He lets my hand linger in his, a nest cradling a robin’s egg, before slowly placing it at my side. “We’ve got to do this, Magnolia. We’ve got a real shot at this.”

  “I know. But I’m still not doing it.”

  “Why? Because you could actually make your dreams come true? As if you don’t need that cash prize. You could buy a car. Go to college. Think of this as an opportunity.”

  “You mean a dancertunity, right?” I try to shake off George and his penchant for dreaming solar-system big, most of the time, without any thoughts of reality bringing him back to earth. Do we actually have a shot at this crazy thing? Yeah, maybe. But what I won’t tell George is that having a shot is actually the one thing that scares me the most. Yet somehow, his words stick me, like pins in a voodoo doll.

  Opportunity.

  Recognition.

  Ten thousand dollars.

  Not for college, or a new car. But maybe …

  Maybe once they saw me on the show—the only show Mom and I watched together and loved together for six glorious weeks every fall—they’d see. See that I’m not her, not any of the things they whisper about Rose and me when they think we can’t hear them, and even when they know we can.

  And once I won that money, I could give it to Rose so she could step away from the road she’s strolled dangerously close to every single day since last year. Since the day The Thing That Happened happened. And maybe even Mom would see me up there on TV. See us and want to come home and try one last time. Maybe then we could take her to one of those fancy places. Not like the ones here in Summerland. Good ones. Real ones. Ones where no one knows anything about Woodson girls or what it’s like to be one. Like the kind I saw online that swore up and down its glossy site that, with the right amount of money, they could change anybody’s life.

  Even mine.

  Katina pops her head out of her studio and sighs super loud when she sees us. Her hair is slicked back in her usual tight bun, which stretches her skin like Saran Wrap. George has always said she does it to get rid of the three rows of forehead wrinkles she developed when her former protégé, Mickela Ray, went and got herself pregnant by a guy who pumps gas at the Pic ’N’ Pay and then quit dance to “start a life” with him. I always laugh, but only because it’s so not true. Katina may be pushing sixty, but she’s gorgeous in that Eastern European prima ballerina way. All musk and mystery. Not to mention she’s the best damn teacher on the Oregon Coast.

  “George. Magnolia. You two are already late, yes? Quit gabbing and get your lovebird derrieres in here.”

  Katina’s words freeze my limbs while I know my face transforms from the perfectly pecan color I’m usually blessed with to hot, hot red.

  I stare at her with bulging eyes. Save me here, Katina. She winks at me before disappearing behind the door to her studio. George grins at me and then pulls me into Katina’s studio where Abby, Quinn, and Mark are already warming up at the barre.

  In the fourteen years I’ve been dancing here, Katina’s studio hasn’t changed a bit. Not one of the chipping lilac-painted walls has been retouched. Not one square of the cheap laminate floor has been replaced or repolished. And in a few select places, the floor is so worn that little pink pieces of concrete foundation are peeking through. It even smells the same as it did when I was four, when my mom first brought me here. Like a slightly raunchy, slightly enticing combination of vinegar, rotting peaches, and chalk.

  Katina walks past us, adjusting our bodies, pressing our backs down down down so that they get an inch closer to the ground.

  “Push yourself, Magnolia. I know you can reach further than that.”

  I sink lower, lower, trying my best to flatten my back and raise my leg until the muscles underneath feel like they’re tearing in two. I don’t care if they tear in two. I take a deep breath and push once more and I know I’ve never gone lower than this.

  “Good, Magnolia.” She lifts my leg a half-inch higher. “Fabulous, George.”

  When she’s past us, George pokes my thigh with his pointed foot. “If you won, you could finally quit Deelish.”

  “Why would I want to do that? Your mom and dad would kill me. Plus I love Deelish.”

  George kicks his other leg over the edge of the barre and rolls his upper body down his leg, his chest becoming one with his thigh. “Whatever. Do you really want to be scooping PB and J-flavored ice cream to summer brats for the rest of your life?”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “It’s totally that easy. There’s more to life than Summerland, you know.”

  “I know.” It’s not what I meant, but he doesn’t get it. Doesn’t get that me landing another job in Summerland isn’t the same thing as him landing one. Not the same thing at all.

  “I mean, you really think everyone would still hate you guys so much if you made this town famous for something other than digging?”

  “Okay, my people!” Katina runs her hands over her gelled mane. “Take a small br
eak and we’ll start with our pointe exercises first today. Let’s get the hardest out of the way, and then we’ll learn some new choreography, yes?”

  Mark and Abby and Quinn sidle off to the left of the room, arms linked, like the three musketeers they are. Mark gives George this wide-eyed little stare, one I know I’m not meant to see because when he sees me looking, he looks away. It kind of hurts because Mark’s always been nice to me when not many people still are, but I know what Mark’s thinking. And to be perfectly honest, he’s right: George should be hanging out with them instead of always with me.

  Even though George and Mark have been competing for the male lead roles in Katina’s productions for as long as I can remember, and even though Mark and I have been dancing together almost as long as George and I have, George has always been more in Mark’s league than mine. And the rest of them, too. They belong together. Them, born into perfect families. Them, raised by mothers who’d never, ever hurt another soul.

  Still, George heads left, away from them, like he’s got total blinders on, so I follow.

  Mark opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but then shuts it. I know he wouldn’t say it outright. I know he cares way too much about hurting people’s feelings to say anything to my face about why George still hangs out with me when almost no one else does, but he’s got to be thinking it. He may be the sweetest thing in Summerland, but he’s still a Summerland local. And being my friend doesn’t make him immune to the poison this place perpetuates. At least when it comes to me.

  And technically, Mark should be used to George forever choosing me over everyone else. Pretty much all of Summerland knows we’re inseparable, like two halves of a razor clam shell, his half shielding me, keeping me safe, making me enough. It’s the way it’s always been. And ever since The Thing That Happened happened, I’ve often wondered if everyone just prefers being away from us. Or me, anyway.

  With my back to the wall, I sink down to the floor and then reach for one of my toe shoes. I slip it on my right foot. The cool canvas surrounds my toes, encasing them, protecting them. I hold the smooth ribbons with two hands and cross them in front of my ankle. Then I loop them around the back twice before tying a strong knot—one that won’t come undone during whatever new choreography Katina’s got up her sleeve.