All Girls

by Emily Layden

  What has always, always struck Sloane most about Lincoln Center is its absolute tranquility; something about the way it sits far back from the street—like a Greek acropolis, imposing, the kind of place that makes you triple-check with yourself before entering—makes it seem preternaturally untouched. (It is also not itself a tourist attraction—it houses the attractions; on a nonperformance day no sightseers crowd its sidewalk, lingering and selfie-taking.) And so when a figure emerges at the edge of Sloane’s vision, in the space between the opera house and Fisher Hall—no doubt performing a cut-through to Broadway Sloane herself has walked a thousand times before—she notices. The woman wears loose-fitting joggers, cuffed around the ankles, and has shrouded herself in a large blanket scarf semi-tucked into a mid-length puffer jacket. She wears the kind of mid-height Nike sneakers only very skinny people can pull off.

  Despite the inevitability of it—of course she would be here, in the middle of the day in the middle of the week—Sloane is surprised to see her, like someone whose impossible wish has come true. Her stomach somersaults. Sloane thinks about the way the Instagram comment—knowing, empathetic—might have latched like a harpoon, reeling her in across two states and over rolling midsize mountain ranges until she was close enough that all she needed was a final push.

  * * *

  After the Nutcracker, Sloane and Caroline were funneled into a different channel, even at a place like SAB: they were repeatedly called up to perform child roles in various NYCB performances, and their schedules were increasingly removed from the regular division progression and replaced with semiprivate lessons and rehearsals. They started working with Michael, a twenty-four-year-old soloist and teaching fellow with sandy hair and mottled blue eyes like overripe blueberries, on original choreography, in some kind of allegedly mutually beneficial relationship that allowed the girls to receive individualized instruction and that gave Michael the opportunity to hone his choreographing style.

  Sometimes she thinks it didn’t actually happen, that’s how hard she’s worked to suppress this one memory above all others. But of course it happened, and watching Caroline stride across the black-and-gray pattern of the plaza in Sloane’s direction brings it rushing back, her brain flooded: Caroline’s arm in her fist, the dull thud of her head against the glass; the neat smack of Sloane’s body against the synthetic tile of the studio floor, her wrists behind her, instinct nurtured over a thousand falls taking over even in this absurdly unlikely scenario. Before that: Caroline and Michael, their faces close; Michael’s hand on Caroline’s waist, then his knuckle at her chin, lifting her lips toward his; a kiss that seemed to unfold over the course of an eternity.

  Sloane would never have said that she had a crush on Michael. When she’d hear the older girls say he was hot, especially his longish hair, she’d nod and smile, but to imagine Michael in this way was an absurd mental exercise. What she and Michael and Caroline had was a closeness that transcended such a regular description. But on the walk home that night she replayed the image over and over and over, trying to discern exactly how wide Caroline’s eyes had been, to figure out whether she smiled like she knew what was coming—was it curved at the edges, like a smirk?—or like she was nervous, her front teeth gnawing slightly at the inside of her lip? She couldn’t remember; each time her mind rewound the tape Caroline’s face shifted, a chameleon inside Sloane’s head. And Michael: Did he reach for her chin tentatively, cautiously, only after the tacit approval of his hand on Caroline’s hip? Or did he reach his hand to her face possessively, with the confidence of experience?

  By the next day, the sight had inked itself on the insides of Sloane’s eyelids. It set up camp deep in the pit of her stomach. At thirteen, she had not yet experienced heartbreak, and so she could not identify the maelstrom of jealousy and self-loathing and obsession she felt as anything except outright fury. In class that morning—it functioned as a kind of tune-up, no new skills, just reminding the muscles and tendons what they had to do—she took her usual place against the barre in the back corner, next to Caroline. They’d known each other for more than six years, nearly half of Sloane’s life, but as they rotated through plié squats and calf raises she found herself looking at Caroline as if they’d only just met, the entire history of their relationship reengineered through this new revelation.

  “You’re being weird,” Caroline had said at one point, almost dismissively. She fiddled with a bobby pin at the nape of her neck, one of the ones she used to secure the small flyaways she hated.

  Had this gulf between them been there all along? Sloane wondered. And what about her own relationship with Michael—had she imagined it? All the times he’d placed a palm tenderly on the small of her back; the way he’d take her hips in each of his hands, rotating her pelvis forward under the guise of moving her body into precisely the correct position but doing it with such care, a kind of gentleness she’d never felt with the slew of Russian women who’d trained her before this; how he’d take a seat on the floor as she stretched after class and wrap a calf in his hand, sliding her tiny body closer to his, dropping her foot into his lap and rubbing it, kneading the knots in her aching arches. She drew herself a spectrum of affection, placed Caroline at the very top. Where did all this other touching land?

  Sloane still couldn’t say who’d been off-tempo that afternoon in rehearsal—whether it was her timing or Caroline’s that caused them to collide, knocking them off-balance and sending their bodies crashing onto the floor. They were exhausted, too, the day long and the choreography complicated. It wasn’t unusual for the competition between them to flare in little spats, laser-like glares and snarky digs. Maybe to Caroline it had just seemed like an escalation, if a disproportionate one. Sloane still remembers the way she popped up after falling, then the feel of her palms against Caroline’s chest, the stunned way Caroline stumbled backward into the mirror. Sloane is not sure why she didn’t stop here—it was enough to shove someone; that alone was something she’d never done.

  As Caroline teetered into the mirror, Sloane advanced. She pushed again, harder this time, and the back of Caroline’s skull collided with the glass. She dropped to the floor, in a kind of defensive and pained crouch, one hand against the back of her head, her opposite forearm curved up and over her body like a shield. Sloane started kicking at first, weak thumps that seemed inconsequential in her pointe shoes, furious at the irony that the shoes could inflict so much pain on her own feet but none on another body. She reached down for Caroline and pulled at her, shrieking Get up get up get up. Had she wanted her to fight back? Or was she trying to erase it, to have Caroline stand to prove that she was fine? The longer Caroline stayed down the harder Sloane pulled, clawing at Caroline’s arm, her tiny soft nails pushing deeper and deeper into her friend’s smooth skin.

  Michael pulled them apart, in one swift movement extricating Sloane from Caroline and pulling Caroline to her feet. He held them like that for a moment, one ninety-pound body in each fist, both of them panting, both too shocked to cry. Where he gripped Caroline’s arm just below her wrist Sloane could see thin jagged lines rapidly purpling, tiny blossoms blooming beneath the skin.

  “What the fuck, Sloane?” Caroline shouted, one hand still cradling the back of her head.

  Michael released Sloane and moved to Caroline, leaning close to where her skull curved under toward her neck, his nose inches from her softest parts.

  “Get out,” he said to Sloane. “Go home.”

  “I’m sorry—” Sloane mumbled, as if by reflex.

  The school had spoken to her parents by the time she walked in the apartment door. They would be asking Sloane to withdraw. A whole future folded in on itself, crumpled as easily as a paper fortune-teller, origami crushed into garbage. Her mother told her Caroline needed six staples. Sloane wondered why the mirror didn’t break.

  * * *

  Caroline is barely ten yards away now, too close for Sloane to avert her eyes, too close for her to flee. She halts, her stride pulled up
. “Sloane?” she calls.

  Sloane waves, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world that they should run into one another here. People are always saying how small New York really is, aren’t they? “Hey, Caroline.”

  Caroline crosses the remaining space between them. She puts her hands in her pockets, burrowing into herself against the cold. Sloane searches her face: Is she angry? Afraid? “What are you doing here?”

  Sloane pauses. “Just out for a walk,” she answers.

  “Are you guys on break this week?”

  “Huh?”

  “Aren’t you still at Atwater?”

  “Oh, no. I mean, yes, I am. But no, we’re not on break. I’m here on a field trip, actually.”

  Caroline frowns, clearly puzzled.

  “Anyway—how are you?”

  “Me? Fine. Busy. You know how it is.”

  “Hey—congrats on Juilliard.” The price of this congratulations is, on the one hand, complete humiliation: it admits a certain attentive following of Caroline’s Instagram, where she recently posted about the acceptance in an infuriatingly noncommittal caption that suggested she might not actually enroll at the famed conservatory (presumably—Sloane understood, although surely most of Caroline’s followers did not—because it might make more sense for her to begin dancing professionally). On the other hand, acknowledging their Instagram relationship—that they did not unfollow one another after the incident, that they’ve each maintained a degree of investment in the other’s life—is acknowledging that Sloane did, in fact, see Caroline’s comment on her post; it makes possible the idea that they could cease haunting one another, that the phantoms of their usernames could be made solid.

  “Oh, thanks.” Caroline cracks her neck slightly, a graceful twist back and to the side. “I don’t know if I’ll go, which is sort of a hard thing to explain to most people.…”

  Caroline doesn’t say this like she’s humblebragging; she says it like she’s legitimately sad, like she’s been searching far and wide for someone who might understand how difficult it is to navigate each precarious transition in a ballet career, for someone who understands the cost of a single miscalculation.

  Sloane nods. “What do your parents think?”

  Caroline shrugs. “I think they’d like me to get a degree. But they sort of leave me to my own devices now. I guess they think”—she sighs, searching the sky above them—“I’ve earned it.”

  In their first summer in the new house in Westchester, Sloane’s mother found the shed exoskeleton of a cicada nymph perched on the railing of their two-story porch. Amber-colored with lobsterlike claws and a massive, swollen abdomen, it fascinated and repulsed Sloane: she convinced her mother to let her keep it, and she perched the shell on its haunches on her desk lamp. It weighed nothing. It could be crushed by an errant breeze. Most of the time that summer Sloane herself felt made of air, only the remnants of the thing that shrieked and clicked when the sun went down. She still feels that way, sometimes.

  “You know they fired Michael, right?” Caroline says, suddenly.

  Somehow, she doesn’t collapse in on herself. Her shell withstands the blow.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know?” Caroline looks away again and shakes her head. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. They did a really good job keeping the whole thing under wraps. You know how this place is about PR. Still … you of all people…” Caroline trails off.

  “Why? What happened?”

  Caroline’s eyes narrow. When she speaks, she cocks her head to one side. “He was kind of a creep, Sloane.”

  Sloane feels completely detached from the news, from this entirely sudden realization that her ballet career was thwarted by a pedophile. No one had ever flipped the image this way; when her parents made her go to therapy, she never explained the inciting incident. The therapist laid her assumptions onto Sloane and her outburst like a lithograph: Dr. Leahey had seen the movies; she knew how competitive and jealous ballerinas could be. Sloane was an easy one, the case closed as soon as it was opened.

  “Did a parent complain?” It is the smallest detail, but Sloane finds herself ravenous for the logistics. How did it happen? Who sounded the alarm? Her craving for the facts is unbearable, the deepest kind of aching hunger. She thinks of Karen Mirro and her curly blond hair, reaching across the decades to tell her story. She considers all that they don’t and will never know.

  “You saw him, Sloane,” Caroline says, shrugging. “He was so handsy, always telling us we were beautiful, rubbing our shoulders, massaging our feet—” She sounds almost weary, like someone who’s had to explain this part of her life a thousand times before. My Dorm Parent used to write me little love notes on my sign-out card. Sloane understands, now, how something can be simultaneously catastrophic and banal; ruinous but ordinary.

  “But there must have been something that put them over the edge.” Sloane scans Caroline’s face, searching, waiting. She wonders if all this time Caroline understood, if Caroline doesn’t actually blame Sloane for the series of tiny centimeter-wide scars that ladder up the back of her scalp. Maybe it’s Caroline who’s sorry: for not having told sooner, for not having said, No, this was all his fault. Maybe she heard about the scandal that has plagued Atwater this year, and she thought of Sloane and said to herself, Jesus, what are the chances? Everywhere you go, this kind of thing.

  But all Caroline says—her phone slipped from her pocket, distractedly checking the time—is: “He became a liability, I guess. Anyway, listen, I gotta run. It was really great to see you, though.” She holds her arms wide and pulls her old partner into a quick embrace, their jackets squishing against one another but their bodies ultimately still inches apart. “Text me the next time you’re in the city. We’ll get coffee or something.” She smiles and gives Sloane’s arm a quick squeeze before darting down the steps and across Columbus, her body easing between a gap in the traffic. Sloane follows her until she can no longer be sure which shapeless coat is hers.

  * * *

  Sloane’s phone is lit up with messages: from Kyla, from Chloe, from Mr. Hills. They’ve gathered on the Met steps and have noticed her absence. They’re supposed to be leaving, walking across the park as a gaggle to the New-York Historical Society.

  Where r u? Chloe asked, then sending again:???

  Tried to cover for u, Kyla wrote. Hills is freaking.

  I’m fine, Sloane thumbs back to Kyla. I’ll meet you guys at the Historical Society. I know where it is. She doesn’t wait for a reply. She’s in trouble; it is what it is.

  It’s a fifteen-minute walk, one block over and ten up. She crosses Sixty-third, where Caroline dissolved into the lunch crowd minutes ago, then crosses again so that she can walk along the park side of Central Park West. She passes a few dog walkers, each with a fistful of leashes, guiding an improbably well-behaved pack. Their work is one of New York’s greatest mysteries. As she walks she wills herself to replay her conversation with Caroline, to try to discern the exact tenor of Caroline’s voice—but she finds herself unable to concentrate, her mind drifting to the wreckage of her failed or failing relationships: with Caroline, with Blake; most recently with Bella. With her parents. With ballet. All of it has left her like this very island, windblown and steely.

  She thinks about the night her parents told her she would be attending Atwater, sitting at their new dining table in their big and impersonal new house. The plan had been for her to continue dancing in a new studio while attending Chapin. That evening, her mother began by saying that they just wanted Sloane to be happy and healthy. Sloane remembers her mom’s wide eyes, the outsize smile, the desperate pitch in her voice: It was how you talk to someone who’s experiencing a psychotic break. Atwater was a very lush, expensive, more socially acceptable version of institutionalization. They think dance made me go crazy, she’d realized. But what she never understood was why they had to leave New York, too, if they were just going to send her to boarding school. It never made any sense: he
r mother loved the city; she would pull Sloane in for a hug as the hot air from a subway grate exhaled on her shins and say, “Do you know how lucky you are to grow up here?” The truth flickers briefly, something Sloane can only begin to see, the world of parenthood mostly an abstraction to her: the place where their daughter was hurt had been ruined for her parents; they, too, felt a kind of betrayal. Knowing what they knew about Atwater now, did they feel they’d upended their lives for nothing? Or are they just grateful that at least this time it was somebody else’s little girl?

  To Sloane’s left, the well-preserved faces of prewar buildings stand at attention, imposing and serious; above her, the naked trees stretch their branches in knobby fingertips. The bustle of the intersection at Seventy-second offers contrast, a chaotic and lively hubbub: three food carts, filling the air with the sour haze of sweating meat; a cop on mounted horseback and two on foot, their hands resting on the weapons at their hips; a man balancing on a pedicab calls to a pack of tourists at the opposite corner.

  Next to her, where the path widens to accommodate a sidewalk that curves down into the park, a street musician takes a break, repositioning his fingers and his bow. Sloane gazes into his case, strewn with a few dollars and tattooed with peeling stickers. He’s young, only twelve or thirteen, if Sloane had to guess: an entrepreneurial kid using the practice time his parents set aside to make a few bucks.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” Sloane says to him.

  The boy shrugs and grins, his hair flopping across his forehead. “Parent-teacher conferences.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  Sloane laughs, digging into her pocket. “Hey, you want my dollar or what?”

  The boy raises his eyebrows, scheming, before resting his bow against the strings. He takes a breath, purses his lips, and starts to play.