All Girls

by Emily Layden

  The soccer coach smacked our asses as we went in off the bench. He also refused to buy pinnies for practice, and had us play shirts vs. “skins” (in our sports bras). The girls with the biggest boobs were always put on the skins team.

  My Dorm Parent used to write me little love notes on my sign-out card. It was the sweetest and most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me. It may still be.

  The cross-country coach groped us under the guise of noting the areas of our bodies that were “weighing us down” (e.g., he would run his hand up and down my inner thighs, slowly, and say, “You don’t want these to touch.”).

  “What is this?” Sloane’s voice is a half whisper; she wonders if Kyla notices the catch in her throat. No one has ever said anything like that to her, but she knows how thick hands feel on a small body. She has seen them stretch across leotard-covered torsos and press in, saying, Tighter.

  “This person—JamisonJennings95—added all of us on Snap. I think these might be from the consultant interviews? Like, based on the username.”

  Sloane pulls her phone from her jacket pocket and thumbs into her own Snapchat, where JamisonJennings95 has, in fact, added her. She watches the story again, searching among the ribbed turtlenecks and fuzzed alpaca sweaters for any hint about where they came from.

  Blake’s head appears over their shoulders, her chin jutting between them. “You think this is because of last night? Because of what I asked about the administration protecting Breslin over its students?”

  Brie turns from where she sits in front of them. “Gotta be, right? Clearly this person—whoever did this—wants us to know that they can’t, or don’t. Protect us, I mean.”

  “Or won’t,” Blake adds.

  “Shh,” Kit hisses suddenly, and they realize that Mr. Hills is standing at the front of the bus. He is not the kind of teacher who yells or hushes; he waits, as he does now, for attention to come naturally, with the bemused look of someone prepared for any number of modest-size disasters or disappointments.

  “Ladies,” he says, “I’m going to ask that you stay together through our check-in. After that, Ms. Doyle and I will distribute the scavenger hunt sheets, and you’ll have two hours to find as many things on your list as possible.”

  “Do we get extra credit?” Coming from someone else, the question might have seemed grade-grubby, but Blake and her Yale ambitions are so perpetually high-strung that she gets away with it.

  “Successful completion of the hunt earns you five bonus points on the project or exam of your choosing. Didn’t I already go over this?” Mr. Hills pauses to watch his students frown apologetically. “Never mind. Let’s just get inside. Follow me, please!” he says, leading the way down the bus steps, his red windbreaker billowing behind him like a smallish parachute.

  * * *

  Sloane grew up going to the Met, of course, like any born-and-raised New Yorker whose preschool experience was managed by a stay-at-home mom: they spent rainy and cold days at the Met but also at MoMA and the Museum of Natural History and, once or twice, the Frick; nice weather called for the Central Park Zoo or Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Sometimes, she thought she could chart her life by her favorite rooms at the Met: like all little kids, she loved the Temple of Dendur, the way it felt like her own private pyramid, the glassy atrium wide and bright with room to run around as the rain made rivers on the walls around them. In fourth grade she’d watched a TV movie about Joan of Arc and developed a paralyzing fear of burning to death—she had nightmares in which, through some medical malpractice, she was mistaken for dead and sent to be cremated—after which Jules Bastien-Lepage’s portrait of Joan of Arc, at the top of the stairs through the Great Hall, became her favorite painting; she loved the dead-eyed look the artist had given the future saint, an expression that was supposed to imply her visions but which also looked, Sloane thought, flatly insane.

  By sixth grade, it was the French impressionists, for obvious reasons. She couldn’t wait to see them in the Louvre and the British Museum and in the Borghese Gallery, all places ballet would take her before she graduated high school. Once she went to Juilliard—if she even went to college, if she wasn’t dancing professionally by then—she’d become a Young Member, and her favorite way to see the Met would be by nightfall, at cocktail parties on the balcony bar or at the semiannual galas.

  That sort of future seems a long time ago, now, and with it has gone the particular intimacy she used to share with the city. She was surprised by how quickly it left her: how soon she lost the ability to exit a subway station, to emerge from the bowels below and know without straining to read the street signs at both corners which direction is north; how easily she lost the precise patterns of turns in the park that lead to Strawberry Fields or the Balto statue. You don’t realize until you leave Manhattan how quickly everything changes. To a permanent resident it might be charming, the rotating cast of characters, but for Sloane the result is that something like retracing the route from her first home on Riverside Drive to the Museum of Natural History has taken on the quality of a fun house, a hall of mirrors: everything is generally the same but not quite.

  * * *

  Chloe nudges Sloane with an elbow as they follow Mr. Hills toward the steps, breaking the trance she’d fallen into. “You probably came here all the time, huh?”

  Next to her, Kyla—who knows better than to talk to Sloane about New York—rolls her eyes quickly, a look meant for only Sloane to notice.

  “When I was little, yeah,” Sloane says, not quite meeting Chloe’s glance. She knows that Chloe will interpret this as bitchy, and might even run to Kit or Brie and ask: Hey, why is Sloane in such a bad mood? Or Is Sloane mad at me? But it doesn’t matter. Anyway, most of Sloane’s classmates are used to Sloane’s spikiness; they’ve learned how to take wide curves around her edges.

  Behind them, Blake is still tapping through Snapchat. “Do you think those are actually pictures of people who were interviewed?” she says, her voice hushed, as if it might be lifted on the city wind and carried to Mr. Hills’s ears fifteen yards ahead of them.

  Sloane thinks again about Addison last night, the naked narcissism of her question about Atwater’s reputation. Blake’s question here is almost as transparent: they’d all wondered, to some extent, who among the current students the school would select to join the alumnae and parents and trustees who’d volunteered to participate in the consulting firm’s investigation. Girls like Blake and Louisa, who were usually chosen any time the school needed official representation, seemed personally offended as the days and weeks wore on without invitation.

  Brie shakes her head, her face half-hidden by a thick chunky scarf. “I don’t think so. Why do the headless thing, in that case? Like, if you’re going to dox them, just go for it, you know? I bet they’re like, a metaphor—bodies that represent the girls who’ve said these things happened to them.”

  “Why do you care?” Sloane asks, turning to look Blake right in the eye, stopping short.

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you wish it was your picture in there?”

  “Jesus, Sloane—” Blake doesn’t even look mad: it’s shock, followed by disgust, that ripples across her face.

  “Sloane, easy—” Kyla places a hand on Sloane’s upper arm. “I think we just want to know where this person is getting their info. Right?”

  “Girls?” They hear Mr. Hills’s voice carry down the steps from where he stands, an arm holding open the museum door. “A little less chitchat, please!”

  “Come on,” Kit says, her voice low.

  To Sloane’s right, north of the steps, vendors set up tables of tourist art: posters of the subway grid; street signs; tiny oil paintings of the skyline, one inch by one inch. To her left, Seventy-ninth Street funnels into the park, the stone wall open like a mouth at the traverse. She hangs back for a minute, and feels her nerves pulse like someone on the verge of doing the irrevocable: she recalls her first shot of vodka, or the first time she slipped a lacy t
hong from the Victoria’s Secret sale table into her purse.

  Kyla turns over her shoulder, the last of the juniors to enter the museum. She shakes her head slightly, not judgmentally but like, Good luck, and lets the door slam behind her.

  * * *

  As freshmen, Sloane and Blake had tried to choreograph a dance for the spring arts show. It had been extraordinarily high-concept for a pair of fourteen-year-olds, a routine that involved twining their bodies together in a sort of symbiosis, like flames of the sun licking up from a central source. But they hadn’t fit together, in the most literal sense; Blake was too tall and too strong, Sloane too tiny and too slight—each time they reviewed the film of their rehearsal, Sloane saw herself as a parasite, gnat-like and clawing. She’d blamed Blake—in the end she called her an attention whore—and bailed on the production a week before the show. They’d never worked together again, and Ms. Allen took to booking the individual studio for them at opposite ends of the afternoon so that one never even warmed up in front of the other. Their friends started calling them frenemies, didn’t even bother to say it only behind their backs.

  Sloane knows that most of their classmates—although they’re aware that Sloane has special permission to satisfy both her art and athletic requirements through dance, that she fulfills her volunteer hours providing lessons to four- and five-year-olds for two weeks every summer at a studio in Tarrytown; although they may have heard that an eleven-year-old Sloane danced as Marie in the New York City Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker—consider Blake to be the more talented and committed dancer between them. It’s Blake who takes the train into New York on Wednesday afternoons for dance; it’s Blake who leaves Atwater most weekends for forty-eight hours of practice in her studio in Manhattan. It’s Blake’s schedule that impresses Atwater faculty and staff—at least those who don’t wrinkle their noses at the obvious privilege that affords such a schedule—and that sounds very serious to their classmates, most of whom do not possess any practical understanding of ballet beyond what was accrued in a preschool class.

  But Sloane also knows this: that a truly serious young dancer will spend four or five hours a day dancing, every day; that the most promising high school–aged dancers negotiate their academic schedules around rehearsal, rather than vice versa, through the employ of an army of tutors or enrollment in a nontraditional high school like the Professional School or, if the dancer is particularly prodigious, completion of an online GED program. Of all of Blake’s classmates, it is exclusively Sloane who has the power to crack the veneer of Blake’s rigor, of her very identity; it’s Sloane who knows that nothing in dance matters except the decision to go all in, to surrender entirely.

  This is why their friendship has a kind of simmering tension; their destruction is mutually assured. They both know the truth about the other: that Blake will never be a professional dancer, and that Sloane could have been had she not thrown it all away.

  * * *

  The Upper East Side was never Sloane’s domain, although her mother used to take her to Serendipity 3 after a Saturday morning at Barneys when she was very young, and so she turns—as if pulled by a magnetic force—toward Seventy-ninth Street and the park. At the traverse she hangs another right and then a quick left, descending on the footpath and dropping quickly beneath the sidewalk.

  Central Park always feels like a kind of insular bubble, a little microclimate in the center of the city. In the summer months it bakes, a crater in the middle of an overcrowded metropolitan, too-tall buildings and millions of bodies trapping heat like an industrialized rain forest canopy; in the winter, the same topography shields it from the wind that whips across the streets between the rivers. Either way, the park—particularly the network of meandering footpaths at the edges, far from the chaos of the reservoir or the boathouse—takes on a kind of eerie stillness.

  The paths are mazelike; even when she knew them best she still navigated by an internal compass rather than a mapped route. At the first fork she stays to her left; at the next, she chooses right, until she ends up along one of the drives that only cabs can seem to access. She crosses the road at the boathouse, easing between the stay-at-home moms and model types out for their morning jogs and the middle-aged men with flexible schedules in hedge fund management out for their bike rides. They all look like her dad: soft, round faces; a little bit of a gut spilling over their thighs as they hunch over the handlebars. They ride incredibly expensive-looking bikes, and are each outfitted with all the gear: fingerless gloves and wind-blocking booties slipped over their shoes and yellow-tinted sunglasses.

  * * *

  She began dancing at the School of American Ballet when she was seven, three years and a few months after her very first trip to the ballet. The story is that Sloane exited the theater spinning, twirling across Lincoln Center in tiny sloppy rotations. It is such a devastating cliché that she is not sure it really happened; whatever she did that day, it was enough to persuade her parents to enroll her in classes at a studio around the corner from her preschool, where the teacher encouraged unselfconsciousness among her four-year-old students by asking them to move like storybook creatures: butterflies, mermaids, exotic birds. Sloane hated it. She recognized immediately the pandering; after the first hour-long class, she sat in the back seat of a cab, her body pressed against her mother, her face ruddy with tears and frustration, squeaking between sobs about her desire to do “real” ballet.

  The instructors at Little Slippers nodded sympathetically when Sloane’s mother explained her daughter’s dissatisfaction. They were used to parents who believed their children were exceptional. What they tried to instill, they explained, was an ability to be playful and loose; to work with the body rather than against it. Early childhood lessons that focus on precision yield stiff, anxious dancers. Plus, they added: the truth is that for so many of these girls, dance is only a passing phase. “In five years, it won’t matter if she can jeté,” they said. “But it will matter that she has a healthy communion with her body.”

  So Elizabeth Beck struck a deal with her daughter: Sloane would continue to attend the classes where she swayed her body like ribbons of seaweed and she would receive, in the evenings once per week, private lessons from a thirty-year-old waitress who’d recently retired from the ABT corps, her Achilles tendons so rigid with scar tissue that they creaked like door hinges when she walked. What Annie told Elizabeth, after just three lessons with Sloane, was that her daughter was not at all at risk of being too precise. “She’s fearless,” she explained. “It’s like she’s desperate to know what her body can do, what shapes it can make. She’s too curious to be anxious.”

  Shortly thereafter Sloane withdrew from classes at Little Slippers and into a full week of private lessons, a routine she maintained until first grade, when her teacher at the time suggested Sloane attend open auditions at the School of American Ballet, a feeder institution for the New York City Ballet and where Sloane would meet Caroline Keegan.

  Although she was a year older—a chasm in elementary school growth and maturity, and an even greater distance in ballet skill—Caroline was small for an eight-year-old, a little soft in the cheeks still, with dimples that lingered like shadows after she’d relaxed her smile. She hadn’t started dancing until the year before; Sloane still remembers the pang of territoriality she felt at this reveal, the unfairness that a girl so late to the game could be at her approximate skill level. In the end they both made the cut: Sloane would dance with the six- and seven-year-olds, Caroline in the eight- to ten-year-old group, and for both of them the door to a different kind of future opened just the tiniest bit wider. (Of course their daughters were exceptional, their parents thought—how foolish of them to have ever doubted it.)

  And then when Sloane was eleven and Caroline twelve—still small for her age, still waiting to see whether puberty would thwart her ballerina dreams—they were chosen to dance as Marie in NYCB’s production of The Nutcracker. That fall, six days a week for eight weeks, Ca
roline and Sloane danced together in private rehearsals, hours and hours and hours just the two of them and the children’s ballet master, a dark-haired, fair-skinned woman named Maureen who was surprisingly warm and patient with her two young steads. They were prickly around each other initially, their fifth- and sixth-grade brains imagining their sixteen- and seventeen-year-old selves vying for the same spots in the SAB-NYCB apprentice program. But the exposed vulnerabilities of hours of training a day will bond you to a person, and by the end of their Nutcracker run in December, Caroline and Sloane were best friends.

  * * *

  For a while she stands just across the street, in the triangular patch of park where Broadway and Columbus intersect, pigeons hooting at the ground around her. She thinks it looks as it has always looked: smooth and polished and still.

  There’s no reason for her to go any farther, but there was no reason for her to come all this way in the first place, and so she flicks her head quickly to the right before hop-stepping across the street, not bothering to wait for the light to change. She comes to a standstill in the middle of the three-sided quad, near the fountain but not quite at its edge, listening to the water gurgle over the sound of the Upper West Side’s thinning traffic.

  Her memories of Lincoln Center blur together in the way of routines: she has scampered up these steps so many times that she is not sure she can pick out any particular day. There are moments that should stand out, but they are ones that were recorded elsewhere—in playbills and on the pages of the Times and in a documentary about child professionals—and reflecting upon them has the uneasy opacity of remembering a long-dead relative, one who exists around the house in family photographs: Does she remember them, really, or does she only remember the pictures?