I Wanna Be Where You Are

by Kristina Forest

  Larissa emerges from her building and I stare at her in shock. Her thick, curly hair is gone. She’s now sporting a slicked-down pixie cut. And she’s wearing baggy denim overalls with rips in the knees. Her face used to be glamorously made up every day, and now it’s bare.

  She jogs toward us, and the bright smile on her face dims as she gets closer. She hugs Eli, but she quickly pulls away, frowning. “Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing the dog?”

  “I did tell you,” he says.

  “No, you didn’t. I would have remembered.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Especially since we can’t have animals in the dorm! Eli, what am I supposed to do with him?”

  “You can sneak him in,” he suggests. “We did that at our hotel last night. It was difficult, but doable.”

  She sighs and turns her attention to me. “You’re finally here!” she says. Her embrace is warm and secure. I take a step back and marvel again at how different she looks.

  “Larissa,” I say. “Your hair.”

  She pats her scalp. “What about it?”

  “It’s … it’s all gone!”

  “Oh.” She laughs; it’s loud and unguarded. “I cut it forever ago during sophomore year. It’s been so long since we last saw each other.”

  I nod dumbly. “It has.”

  “But who cares about me? You are gorgeous, Chloe.” She grins, and it reminds me of Eli.

  My cheeks heat up, and I shake my head.

  “Yes, you are. Just look at you!” She grabs my arm and twirls me in a circle. Eli starts to laugh.

  “Look at her,” Larissa says to him, delighted. “Isn’t she absolutely gorgeous?”

  Eli stops laughing. He turns away and clears his throat. “Can you let us inside, Riss? I need a nap.”

  “I’m serious about the dog. I can’t bring him inside.” She pulls out her phone and starts texting quickly. “Maybe Will won’t mind if you bring him over there.”

  Eli smirks. “Of course he won’t. He’s trying to score brownie points with his girlfriend’s little brother.”

  “Be nice, Elijah,” Larissa says, smiling at her phone. “Will said it’s fine for you to bring Geezer there. You remember the way to his house, right? I’d go with you, but I have class in a few minutes and I don’t want to be late.”

  Eli frowns. “I didn’t know you had class right now. Why didn’t you say something when I called?”

  “Probably because I was half asleep! I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time. I thought you guys could just chill in my room until I got back. I didn’t know you had the dog.”

  “But your only brother in the world is here,” he says. “Can’t you skip?”

  “No, it’s one of my favorite classes and we’re prepping for an exam.”

  “I pass exams that I don’t prep for all the time.”

  Larissa shakes her head. “Yeah, high school exams. Anyway, it will be nice for you to spend some time with Will for a little bit. You’ll get to hang out with me soon, I promise.”

  “Fine,” Eli huffs, throwing his duffel bag over his shoulder. He looks at me. “Ready?”

  Before I can answer, Larissa links her arm through mine. “Wait, Chloe, you should definitely sit in on this class with me. It’s called Femininity, Beauty, and the Black Female Body, but we say FBBFB for short.”

  I look between the two of them. To go with Eli or to stay with Larissa?

  Duh, I’m going to choose to stay with her over being stuck with him.

  “I’ll stay with you,” I say.

  Eli nods like he figured that’s what I would say. “Have fun with BFFF.”

  “It’s FBBFB,” Larissa corrects him.

  “That’s what I meant,” he calls over his shoulder as he walks away, steering Geezer down the sidewalk.

  Larissa shakes her head and watches him with a faint smile on her face. She turns to me. “All right, let’s go.”

  * * *

  First, she takes me inside her dorm so she can grab her books. The dorm is co-ed, but she lives on an all-girls floor. Someone is blasting Kehlani, and there’s a constant rising and falling of voices and laughter.

  She opens her room door and motions to her side of the room so that I can put down my bag. Her side is organized and simple, and her comforter set is plain and cream-colored. Beside a neat stack of books, there’s a framed photograph of her and Eli on her desk, and a pair of black Doc Martens and white Stan Smiths sit by the foot of her bed.

  Her roommate’s side of the room has a little bit more going on. There’s a pile of colorful clothes on her bed and over a dozen posters of dancers on her wall: salsa dancers spinning and break-dancers frozen in position. My stomach tightens, remembering the way I was too afraid to volunteer for the street performance in D.C.

  “Is your roommate a dancer?” I ask.

  “Yeah, that’s Wei,” Larissa says. “You’ll probably meet her later.”

  We head to her class, and the campus feels so alive. Everywhere I turn, there’s something happening. A club holding a bake sale, or groups of friends sitting on the lawn, laughing and listening to music, or students passing out flyers for upcoming events. A lot of people say hello to Larissa. It’s not surprising. She was popular in high school, too.

  Larissa introduces me to her FBBFB professor, Dr. Booth, a tall woman with dark brown skin who wears a bright orange dress with a matching head wrap. Larissa tells her that I’m a student from her old high school and that I’m spending my spring break visiting colleges. Dr. Booth eagerly agrees to let me sit in on the class and explains that FBBFB analyzes how Black women have been depicted in media over the last fifty years. Once we sit down, she quickly launches into a discussion about the angry Black woman stereotype on reality television.

  Larissa hands me some notebook paper and a pen, and she spends the rest of the class vigorously taking notes and raising her hand to ask questions. She gets into a heated debate with a classmate over whether or not reality stars should come clean about what drama is scripted and what drama is real on their shows, and by the time class ends, she’s practically glowing. In all the years I’ve known and danced with her, I’ve never seen her look this happy.

  On our way back to her dorm, we stop at a campus café so she can get coffee, and she buys me a chocolate cupcake from the bake sale. As we walk, she explains what she loves about dual-majoring in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies.

  I’m listening, but I’m also paying attention to everything that’s happening around me. I realize this is the life I could have, the life Mom probably wants for me. I could walk through a beautiful campus every day, take cool classes, and maybe major in dance and minor in whatever I find interesting.

  But even as I think this, I know I could never be as happy as Larissa is here.

  “Do you ever miss it?” I ask, interrupting her.

  She raises an eyebrow. “Miss what?”

  “Dancing,” I say. “Ballet.”

  “Sometimes.” She smiles a little. “My mom’s still low-key mad that I quit. But now she has a long list of other things that make her mad. My hair is short. She thinks I dress like a little boy. She doesn’t think my majors will lead to a good job. Let’s just say I’m definitely not looking forward to being at her house for Easter.”

  “But you’re happy,” I say.

  Her smile grows. “Yeah. I’m really happy.”

  “At least Eli will be going to UNC and eventually to law school like your dad,” I offer. “Your mom can be happy about that.”

  She blinks. Slowly, she says, “Yeah … I guess that’s true.” She tosses her coffee cup in the trash and puts her arm around me. “So, speaking of Eli, he told me all about your audition. Avery Johnson, huh? He’s so amazing.” She gives my shoulders a little squeeze. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” I say honestly. “I thought I was at first, but now I don’t think I am. I haven’t felt the same about my dancing since my accident.”

  “Don’t doubt you
rself, Chloe.”

  “You’re the second person this week who’s told me to stop doubting myself, but how do I do that? You’ve always been confident. It’s easier for you to say.”

  “Confidence starts here,” she says, pointing at my heart. “You have to take hold of the world and demand that it gives you what you want. That’s what I do. It doesn’t always come easy, regardless of how it looks. You are already doing it now by choosing to go to your audition.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” I say.

  “It sounds like you need to give yourself a little more credit.” She looks at me closely. “Sometimes people might believe in themselves, but it’s not enough when they feel like they don’t have support. How does your mom feel about you auditioning?”

  “She doesn’t know,” I say. “She’s on vacation.”

  Larissa starts to laugh, almost as uncontrollably as Eli did last night when I started barking on the phone. After she catches her breath, she says, “I knew it! I just knew it. When Eli told me you were with him, I thought to myself, there is no way Ms. Carol let her daughter travel all the way to Virginia with my brother.”

  “I don’t like that I had to lie to her,” I say, feeling the guilt rise up.

  “I know, but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do, right?” She shrugs. “But, like I said, it starts here.” She puts her hand over her heart. “Now you say it.”

  I stare at her. “Say what?”

  “‘It starts here,’” she repeats. “Come on, say it.”

  I sigh. Weakly, I say, “It starts here.” I feel silly.

  “That was terrible. Say it again. With feeling this time.”

  “It starts here,” I repeat, tapping my chest.

  “Louder!”

  “It starts here!”

  “Louder!” she shouts again.

  “It starts here!” I pound my chest. “It starts here!”

  People walk by and stare at us. But I don’t care because shouting like this really does help.

  Larissa smiles. “That was good. Sometimes we need to just shout it out, you know?”

  “I really wish I could just sneak into somebody’s dance studio for an hour,” I say. “I need to get in the right mind-set.”

  “I think I might have a solution for that.” She grabs my hand. “Come on.”

  Chapter 18

  Dance Is Art

  Larissa takes me back to her room so I can get my bag and change into my dance clothes. We hurry across campus and then stop in front of another building. Students carrying instruments are milling on the steps.

  “This is the performing arts building,” Larissa explains as we head for the door.

  Inside, I hear the sound of someone playing the piano coming from one end of the hall. Larissa leads me downstairs to the basement, where the dance studios are. I get jittery as we pass each one, glancing in at what looks like a jazz class.

  When we reach the end of the hall, Larissa pauses. Reggae is playing on the other side of the door.

  “I’m pretty sure they still practice here,” she says. She quietly opens the door and peeks her head in. “Hi, ladies!”

  Someone shouts, “Riss!”

  Larissa pushes the door wider to reveal two girls standing in the middle of the studio wearing sneakers and sweats. One girl is tall and lithe; her shiny, dark hair is cut into a blunt bob.

  The other girl is short and curvy, with long braids that fall to the middle of her back. She walks over to the speaker and cuts off the music. “And to what do we owe this visit?” she asks.

  “I want to introduce you to someone,” Larissa says, gesturing to me. “This is my friend Chloe Pierce, from back home.” She nods at the girl with the bob cut. “Chloe, this is my roommate, Wei Chen, and this is our friend, Sinead Harper.”

  Sinead smiles wide and friendly. “You can call me Sin for short. That’s what everybody calls me, for obvious reasons.”

  Wei rolls her eyes and steps forward to shake my hand. “No one calls her that.”

  “I need a favor,” Larissa says. “Chloe has an audition tomorrow and she needs somewhere to practice. Can she use this room, pretty please?”

  “Of course,” Wei says. “We were mostly just messing around, anyway.”

  Wistfully, Sinead says, “I thought you might be here because you wanted to rejoin the dance team.”

  “Rejoin?” I repeat, looking at Larissa.

  She smiles a little sheepishly. “I was on the team for a couple months—”

  “More like a couple weeks,” Sinead interjects.

  “—freshman year, because I wanted to see if a different style of dance might be more fun. Turns out I just needed a complete break.” She points at me. “Don’t tell my mom. I’d never hear the end of it.”

  I cross my heart. “Promise not to.”

  Larissa says she’ll be back in an hour or so, and the girls leave the room to me. As soon as the door shuts behind them, the jitters take over my body again. Energy courses through my veins, because my body knows that it’s finally about to dance.

  The first thing I do is hook up my phone to the stereo system. At the Philadelphia Center for Dance, there’s a pianist who plays classical music during class. But whenever I dance alone, I listen to my own playlists. “Nothing Even Matters” by Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo begins to play.

  I sit down in front of the mirrors that span the entire wall. I take off my Chucks and point and flex my toes. They’re rough and calloused, and my toenails have to be kept short for my pointe shoes. Right now I have a particularly nasty blister on my big toe that’s finally starting to heal since I haven’t danced in a few days. It takes hard and ugly work to make ballet look beautiful.

  I wrap my toes with tape and put on my toe pads before I slide my feet into my pointe shoes, wrapping the ribbons around my ankles and tying them with secure knots. I always take longer when wrapping my left ankle so that the ribbons do a better job at covering my scar.

  I stand up and shake out my legs and stretch my arms. I place my hand on the barre and breathe deeply. Ballet is as mental as it is physical. It’s not enough to just hold your center and move gracefully, weightless like a feather. You have to be that feather and visualize the center of your body remaining poised and firm, floating through the air.

  At the barre, I square my hips and elongate my neck, and begin with demi-pliés, bending my knees in first position, then second, third, fourth, and fifth. I move on to grand pliés, tendus, and dégagés, before I rise up on my toes and balance in soutenu for as long as I can. Then I work on combinations across the floor. My favorite is tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, jeté. It looks like I’m gingerly stepping and brushing my way into a leap, but it’s a lot more work than that, of course.

  After my surgery, I’d expected everything to come back to me easily. Sometimes that was the case and sometimes it wasn’t. What I didn’t expect was the intense anger and disappointment I felt when I faltered and missed a simple step. Those were the days that I danced harder and came home with bigger blisters and bloodier toes.

  I’m tired of the doubt riding on my shoulders every day like a heavy creature, and I’m tired of the nightmares. I know what I have to do. I stand in the middle of the floor and close my eyes, pretending to be Odile, the black swan in Swan Lake who tricks Prince Siegfried into believing that she is the white swan, his true love. Odile does thirty-two fouettés. She is not the type of girl who would doubt herself.

  I prep and start whipping around, using the reflection of the stereo in the mirror to spot. I ignore the sound from my dream of my ankle bone cracking and push myself to keep turning. But then Avery Johnson’s face pops into my head, saying I’ll never be the dancer I once was, and it’s not easy to ignore. I come out of the turn and catch my balance before I fall. I shake out my legs again and pause, trying to catch my breath.

  Thirteen fouettés. It’s way more than I’ve done in my nightmares, but less than how many I’ve done before in real
life.

  Sometimes people might believe in themselves, but it’s not enough when they feel like they don’t have support.

  It’s interesting that Larissa followed that statement with asking about Mom. Ballet is the only thing that makes me feel completely free, and now she’s trying to keep me away from it and I don’t understand why. Other than my accident, I’ve never given her any reason to believe that I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself. But I’m finally deciding that I can’t carry around any more doubt, hers or mine.

  I prep again and begin turning. I can do this, I repeat every time I spot my reflection in the mirror as I spin. When I make it past thirteen, I turn faster with a new rush of energy. With each turn, it feels like I’m letting go of anything and everything that’s been holding me back. When I make it to twenty, I finally stumble out. It’s not thirty-two, but I stand in the middle of the room in awe. Twenty is more than I’ve done in months.

  I walk back to the barre and steady myself against it. My face is sweaty, my cheeks are flushed, and my bun is sloppy. I look and feel unraveled. But not in a bad way. I feel weightless.

  I catch a movement in the corner of the room, and I turn around to find Eli standing at the door, watching me.

  “How long have you been there?” I ask.

  “Not that long.” He steps into the studio, and I notice he’s holding his sketchbook. “I was looking for you. Riss said you’d be here.”

  “Oh,” is all I can think to say.

  “Did you miss me?” he asks.

  I can’t help but roll my eyes. “Not really.”

  He smirks and walks farther into the room. Sunlight peeks through the top of the basement windows and shines onto his face. “It’s wild how you do all those turns. I lost count after a while. Is it hard?”

  “It is at first.”

  I lean back against the barre, and he walks to the opposite end of the studio. Now we’re staring at each other across the room. I look down at my pointe shoes, acutely aware of how sweaty I am.

  “Where’s Geezer?” I ask.

  “At Will’s house. I wanted to bring him, but there’s too many people on campus. He’d get agitated.”