Beyond the Point

by Claire Gibson

  “Yes, and you’re going to love it,” Dani ordered.

  “Is she always this bossy?” Tim asked Hannah.

  “Sometimes worse,” Hannah whispered in his ear.

  “Let’s start with a basic box step,” the instructor announced. “Gentlemen, face your ladies. It’s just three steps. That’s it. Toes pointed toward toes, please!”

  Hannah and Tim both looked down at their toes at the same time, and their heads crashed together.

  “Sorry!” said Tim, rubbing his head.

  “First, gentlemen, we’re going to start with our feet together. Forward with your left foot, to the side with your right foot, and then close your feet together. Left, side, close. Got it? Then you do the same thing with your right foot. Right, side, close. Right now, just focus on moving forward! Ladies, same thing, only you’re going backward, and mirroring the gentleman’s moves. Now give it a shot!”

  Tim and Hannah took the first steps together perfectly. Soon, all around the classroom, couples were waltz-stepping like pros.

  “Good. One, two, three! One, two, three!” the instructor shouted. “Keep moving!”

  “Wait,” Tim said, looking down at their mismatched feet, “I think I—”

  “This way,” Hannah laughed, pulling him back.

  “And that is the waltz!” The instructor smiled, looking at all his progeny. “Wonderful, just wonderful! Linda! The music!”

  The song started with long slow notes, filling the ballroom with orchestral formality. Meanwhile, the instructor moved from couple to couple, eyeing them with disdain and pride, depending on their performance.

  “No, no, no! Stop,” the instructor barked once he’d reached Hannah and Tim.

  He grabbed Tim by the hips and Tim’s eyes bulged. Moving them like a unit, the instructor pushed and pulled Tim’s hips until they’d completed one perfect waltz step. All the while, Hannah tried hard not to break into hysterics. As soon as the instructor moved away, Tim’s foot landed hard on top of Hannah’s.

  “Oh—God. Are you okay?” He winced, as if it were his foot that had been crunched.

  “I’m okay,” Hannah said, rubbing her foot. “I think he meant your other left.”

  Looking over Tim’s shoulder, Hannah watched Dani and Locke, already twirling and box-stepping around the room like pros. Tim looked at her with big, puppy-dog eyes, then looked toward the exit door.

  “I guess I suck at this, huh?”

  They didn’t move for a while, just stood there, looking at each other. His eyes were a hazel color, Hannah realized. Brown with flecks of gold scattered throughout.

  “You know,” he said, “I keep looking at you and wondering how I didn’t notice you last year. How is that possible? Dani said we were in a class together . . . but for the life of me . . .”

  “I didn’t talk much in class,” Hannah said. “You, on the other hand . . .”

  “Yeah, I’ve never been one to shut up.” He laughed. “Well. It’s possible I’m sucking so bad because I’m so distracted. I wish we’d met a long time ago.”

  The compliment came out of nowhere. Equally genuine and playful, it sent blood rushing to Hannah’s cheeks.

  “It’s hard to focus on my feet, when I’d rather look at this beautiful girl I just met.”

  “No, no, no,” Hannah said with a smile, feeling her insides ache with joy. “You’re not getting off that easy. We’ve got six weeks of this, mister, and flirting won’t get you out of it.”

  “Oh, you thought I was talking about you?” he said. “I was talking about Linda.”

  They both turned to look at the pink-lipped woman in the back of the room, who was bobbing her head along with the music. They broke into laugher, then spent the rest of the class stepping on each other’s feet and smiling uncontrollably. Hannah loved the pressure of his hand on her back, the brightness of his smile, the jokes he kept throwing out to distract her from how bad he was at dancing. She felt the muscles underneath his shirt flex and move with the music. Then she felt the pang of something else—something invisible taking root in her heart.

  Love starts in the body. It starts with the tingling of toes and the rushing of blood and the lightness in the head. It feels a lot like pain, Hannah would realize later that week, as she and Tim shared slices of pizza in Grant Hall, and three weeks later, when they took a five-mile run together up Bear Mountain. There are convulsions, nausea, heartburn, and breathlessness. There is a physical ache you feel when you’re falling in love. It’s your heart making room for someone else, like a gardener is there, digging out a hole for a new plant. There is pain, and there is fear. The fear that the hole might stay forever.

  10

  Spring 2002 // West Point, New York

  Fourteen days, D. Fourteen days and we’re out of here.”

  A barbell loaded with two fifty-pound plates dropped from Locke Coleman’s hands to the gymnasium floor with a loud crash. In the mirror, Dani watched him slide the large weights off and move two forty-five-pound plates onto the sides.

  “Here,” he said. “I think you’re ready for one thirty-five. Do a clean.”

  For the last few months, Locke had made it his personal mission to help Dani fully recover from her injuries. He told her what to eat, how fast to run, how much to bench-press. And now he was monitoring how much weight she could lift from the ground to her shoulders. With a heave, she completed the move, in one snap of the wrists and hips.

  She hadn’t told him that the old familiar twinge was back again—that ache in her right hip. But it was possible that the discomfort was just residual scar tissue from last fall’s surgery, or a by-product of doing cleans with the wrong form. Plus, if she ignored the static in her joints, she could lift nearly as much weight as she had this time last year, and that was something.

  Three months earlier, at the last practice of the season, the entire women’s basketball team had written the name of the player they wanted to serve as captain next year. Coach Jankovich read the votes out loud with growing disdain.

  “Dani McNalley . . . Dani McNalley . . . another for McNalley . . .”

  Normally, the team chose a rising Firstie to be captain. And since Dani had truly only had one season on the court, this vote felt particularly kind. So she had to be better by next season—there were no excuses.

  Releasing the bar, Dani looked at herself in the mirror. Her muscles had returned, arms sculpted, quads toned and strong. The scar on her hip had faded from red to dark brown, just a few shades darker than her skin. She finally looked like an athlete again, and not a moment too soon. This summer—in fourteen days, in fact—she and Hannah were headed to Airborne School. At times, the image of her body falling out of a plane with nothing but a parachute made her shiver with nerves. According to Tim, the biggest obstacle to overcome wasn’t getting used to the height, or the equipment, or the risk. It was getting used to the fear.

  “Everyone’s scared,” he’d explained a few nights earlier, while cooking a pot of spaghetti for Hannah on a hot plate in her room. “Everything in your body screams at you to step back from the edge—your palms sweat and your heart rate goes up, and everything in your head shouts that this is suicide. But once you’re actually in the air—once you’ve jumped—all that fear goes away and you just fly. It’s crazy. Most people never step over the boundary of fear.”

  Dani liked having Tim Nesmith around. Ever since ballroom dancing, he and Hannah had been inseparable. West Point’s newest poster couple were nothing alike, of course. Tim was loud, opinionated, and spontaneous; Hannah was quiet, reserved, and thoughtful. But somehow, together, they were like opposite sides of a magnet that refused to separate.

  “They’re so attractive, it’s annoying,” Avery had whispered to Dani a few days earlier when they were passing between classes. Tim and Hannah were ahead of them, allowing the backs of their hands to touch every few steps. Academy rules prohibited holding hands.

  “It’s like, I can’t decide who to look at,” Dani
said. “Him or her? They’re both so beautiful.”

  They’d cracked up, mostly because it was true. The lovebirds looked like a Hollywood couple that had accidentally put on uniforms, and while Dani could admire their newfound love without growing a root of jealousy, she was pretty certain that it was becoming a difficult feat for Avery. It seemed hard for Avery to be content when faced with evidence that Hannah was happier with Tim than Avery had ever been with her fleet of boyfriends. Three weeks earlier, disregarding Hannah’s new relationship status, Avery had planned a girls-only trip to New York City.

  “We deserve this,” Avery had said. And knowing it was their last B-weekend of the year, Hannah and Dani had complied.

  Wendy Bennett had dropped them at the Garrison train station, and they’d taken the commuter train into Grand Central Terminal, stepping off the train and into the dirt, grime, and electricity of the world’s most beautiful city.

  “Soho,” Avery had said decisively while they were on the train, pointing to the southwest corner of Manhattan on her map. “Then Greenwich Village or midtown. There are supposed to be some great clubs around there.”

  “The clubs all ID,” Dani had said.

  In response, Avery displayed a collection of freshly laminated driver’s licenses like playing cards. “Here you go, Agatha. And you.” She passed one to Hannah. “Juliette Ramsey.”

  “I don’t know about this,” Hannah had said. She turned her head to the side to inspect her alias.

  “We won’t use them unless we have to,” Dani had said to Hannah, warding off Avery’s annoyance. “And if we get some better clothes in Soho, I’m guessing we won’t have any trouble getting into the clubs.”

  After a hearty brunch of French toast and coffee at a bakery on Bleecker Street, they’d meandered in and out of the stores in Soho, purchasing clothes that they’d later change into in the bathroom of a Starbucks in the Flatiron District. At Express, Avery had chosen a slinky black dress. Dani replaced her jeans with a tight miniskirt, to show off her newly sculpted legs. A fire-engine-red dress had called Hannah’s name, and even though she’d cringed at the amount of skin it exposed, the girls had forced her to carry it to the checkout line.

  They spent the night dancing, and when a limousine of FDNY firefighters pulled up next to the club they were trying to get into, Avery had talked her way into their party, securing their entry into every club for the rest of the night. Because of their heroic efforts after the attacks on September 11th, the city still treated firefighters like celebrities, keeping their drinks full and their tabs on the house. At two A.M., Hannah had started to grow weary, rubbing her heels and staring at Dani pleadingly.

  “Let’s leave,” she’d shouted over the music. “I’m ready to go back to the hotel.”

  “No, no, no,” Avery had interjected. “Rally! Come on. This is our one chance to be in the city.”

  Hannah asked for a bottle of water from the bartender, who rolled his eyes as he delivered it to her hand. “Tim’s going to love hearing that I partied ’til dawn with a bunch of bachelor fire fighters.”

  “Well—with all due respect—Tim can suck it,” Avery had shouted back over the din of the music. “You’re not doing anything wrong. And we’ve earned a little fun.”

  “She’s kind of right,” Dani had said, pinching Hannah’s elbow. “Be a college kid for once. You can go back to being responsible tomorrow.”

  Hannah shook her head and chugged her water. Then she said, “It already is tomorrow.”

  “He’s going to hold her back,” Avery told Dani once they’d returned to life in uniform the following week. “They’re both so serious.”

  “They’re seriously in love,” Dani had replied. But the explanation fell on deaf ears.

  Lately, Avery had been sneaking around with God knew who at God knew what hour of the night, as if by the sheer volume of people she dated, she could find what she was looking for. Dani had started to wonder what had happened in Avery’s past to make her so ravenous for attention. She was like a diabetic, only instead of sugar, she couldn’t absorb love. Or, maybe, she absorbed it too quickly, and constantly felt the need for more. Whatever the problem, Dani wondered how long Avery could go on like this. Rather than dealing with her deficiency, Avery kept running, working hard to prove her worth and amass awards and achievements and admirers. But to Dani, all that effort seemed exhausting. She wondered if Avery would ever stop running. She wondered if she’d ever have the courage to stand still.

  If she needed any advice, Dani knew where she could turn—after all, she was becoming an expert at being single.

  “That looked good,” Locke said, bringing Dani out of her thoughts. “Go again.”

  She picked up the bar, completed another perfect clean, and let the bar drop to the floor.

  AFTER DINNER, THEY went back to Locke’s dorm room to study for West Point’s Term End Exams, known as TEEs. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill played from Locke’s computer speakers, mingling rhymes of revolution with Dani’s pack of physics problems. While she measured velocity and torque, she grew distracted by other sounds coming from Locke’s computer. A door creaking open or slamming shut. The sound of a loud cha-ching, indicating that someone special had come online. The constant ba-da-bing of an incoming AOL instant message.

  “You’re popular tonight,” Dani said, putting her pencil down on the paper in front of her. “What’s happening up there?”

  In truth, she worried Locke might be chatting online with some other girl, even while Dani sat comfortably on his floor. In the last six months, he’d had countless opportunities to make a move. Throughout the ballroom dancing lessons, they’d moved across the dance floor with more chemistry and ease than anyone in the room. She’d grown tired of feeling his hands spotting her in the gym, rather than reaching for her to pull her in for a kiss.

  A few weeks earlier, Dani had been sitting in Wendy Bennett’s kitchen, talking about this very thing, when Wendy had firmly set her coffee cup on the counter and sighed.

  “You’re going to drive yourself crazy waiting around for him to make a move.”

  Tears had welled in Dani’s eyes, as if the truth had unlocked some inner door, letting the emotion free. A tissue box appeared on the kitchen table, but swallowing hard, Dani forced the tears back to where they came from.

  “That’s not true,” she’d insisted. “Locke and I are friends. I don’t want to lose that.”

  “You’re going to lose him one way or another. One of you will start dating someone else. Someday you’ll both be married. It won’t be like this forever.”

  “So what? Stop being friends now because maybe someday we’ll marry other people?”

  “No. I’m saying you should tell him how you feel.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Of course not,” Wendy had said. “Doing the right thing never is. That’s how you know it’s the right thing.”

  Locke’s broad shoulders hunched over his keyboard, his eyes trained on the computer screen. And suddenly, the thought of spending two more years in relationship purgatory overwhelmed Dani with frustration. Wendy was right. She deserved an answer, but she would never get it waiting around on Locke’s dorm room floor.

  “Hey, Locke,” Dani started. “I think we need to—”

  “Oh man,” said Locke, interrupting her. “D, you’ve got to come see this.”

  The somber tone of his voice and the shock on his face sent Dani’s eyes directly to his computer screen. There, a collage of images assaulted her—pale white limbs, curves, pink nipples. Dani pushed Locke out of the way. She scrolled quickly, her eyes reflecting the bright light of the computer screen, the images of one naked female body, over and over again. Locke stood behind her, biting his lower lip.

  “Where did these come from?” Dani snapped. She looked back at Locke, who raised his hands in the air—Don’t shoot.

  “Someone on the football team just forwarded them to me. It was a zip file. I didn’t know .
. . I . . . What are you doing?”

  Clicking maniacally, Dani toggled through the photos, pressing Print on each one. She snatched the photos off Locke’s printer. The pages felt warm in her hand.

  “What are you going to do?” he repeated. “Where are you going with those?”

  Without answering him, Dani limped out the door. As she made her way down the stairs and outside, Dani couldn’t stop thinking about Lisa Johnson. Three weeks earlier, she’d found Dani in the library and tearfully admitted that in the fall, she was transferring to Tulane.

  “I can’t do it,” Lisa had said. “I can’t go to war, D. And even if that wasn’t happening . . . Coach Jankovich. She . . . she’s ruined this place for me.”

  For her part, Coach Jankovich had acted as if it was a personal victory. “It was only a matter of time,” she’d said in response to the news, as if Lisa had finally been outed as a weakling, rather than acknowledging her role in breaking her down so far that Lisa no longer saw a future for herself at West Point. Dani had spent hours trying to convince Lisa to stay, to no avail. It felt like a personal failure, losing a teammate. Her first failure as the next team captain.

  And she wasn’t about to let these photos be her second.

  IN THE HOLLEDER Center, most offices were reserved for football coaches. Since spring football practice was in session at Michie Stadium, and the rest of West Point’s coaches were on recruiting trips, the entire place was empty and quiet. Unfortunately, it was harder than ever to recruit competitive players, now that the U.S. was engaged in an all-out war on terrorism—whatever that meant. Dani still didn’t understand the long-term strategy of a war against a network of people that had no flag, no country, no identifying characteristics other than hate.

  How do you defeat fear? How do you defeat evil? It seemed like a never-ending task that could lead to never-ending conflict. How would they ever know that they’d won?

  But the war was only one reason that recruiting had become so difficult. Fluorescent lights lit the corridor outside of Coach Jankovich’s office, and one flickered, like a fly had been caught in its electrical circuit. It couldn’t hurt to change a lightbulb or put a little effort into updating the facilities, Dani thought. But West Point wasn’t like other colleges; they practically needed congressional approval to turn up the air-conditioning. And if recruiting had been difficult for Coach Jankovich before, it was about to get much harder. No one wanted to send their daughter to a place where she’d be treated like a piece of meat.