I almost gave up. At night, I prayed into the darkness: “Please give me special powers. Please, please, please.” I don’t know any official prayers, just a Cherokee chant and things like that, which I threw in for good measure. What had I done exactly right in that moment? Was there something special about the kitchen? Or was it the time of day? I thought about that glass sliding across the kitchen table, the way it glissaded as if it took ballet from Madame Natasha at the Ballet School, too. The Ballet School was in Boston and every Saturday my mother drove me to my class there, even though it was an hour away. Not only did kids from the Ballet School get to try out for The Nutcracker, we also had the best chance of getting into the Boston Ballet’s junior company. So even after we moved to Providence I got to take my class there with Madame.
I decided that to perform more miracles maybe I needed to be in the kitchen, so I moved all of my efforts downstairs, and waited until the afternoon light sent rays of amber and violet at just the right slant through the stained glass window above the stairs. Then I sat and stared. At the sink with its white and silver old-fashioned knobs that said hot and cold; at the only drawer that didn’t stick in our new house (new to us, that is; it’s actually really an old, old house); at the bare bulb that hung over the kitchen table, the one that first had a long string hanging from it and then, because it still wasn’t long enough for me or Cody to reach, also had a coat hanger covered in the fuzzy pink sash of my mother’s old bathrobe.
According to my mother, someday we would get enough money to fix the house up and make it beautiful, like the other houses in our neighborhood. Those other houses had polished wood floors instead of scuffed-up ones like ours and lights that were covered up and walls painted clean white or rich deep colors like dark red or Christmas green. This house was an embarrassment. Right in the next yard, there was a fancy, elaborate play set, with colorful tunnels that led to curly slides and a small rope bridge and lots of swings and a Tarzan rope that swung across a goldfish pond.
The girl who owned that play set was named Sophie and she was beautiful, with straight blond hair always held off her face with a different headband: checks or stripes or solid colors topped with a small bow. I didn’t have very many friends in Providence, and the ones I did have felt like friends of convenience. Like the daughters of women my mother was friends with, or other new kids, or Mai Mai Fan from school who was so busy being a chess champion that she was willing to be anybody’s friend because she could never actually do anything like go for pizza or watch DVDs. The only reason why Sophie was my friend was because she lived next door and sometimes got so bored she actually invited me over. And even though I didn’t like her too much, I went. Sometimes, we even had fun together. But not usually. Whenever I told my mother I was going over to Sophie’s she would say, “But I thought you didn’t like Sophie,” and I would just shrug. Our relationship was complicated.
Sophie was beautiful. I am not beautiful. My mother said I would grow into my looks, the way she also says I will grow into my too-big winter coat and the sweatshirt that I have to roll up the sleeves of whenever I need to use my hands. Madame said I am unusual-looking. “This is good for the ballet,” Madame said. Which I guess means not good for all the other parts of my life. My hair is coarse like straw and the same color. If I push it behind my ears, they stick out like the ones you screw on Mr. Potato Head. My nose has nostrils like a horse’s, long and narrow. They flare whenever I get angry, which is pretty often lately. My lips are long and narrow, too. My mother has those lips. The nostrils come from my father’s side; all of his sisters have them.
What I do have are beautiful, perfect ballerina feet: high arched. I can jump better than anyone at the Ballet School. My feet, lovely and shaped like the arched bridge on the Brio train set that Cody wanted for Christmas, are my best asset. An asset that no one can see. So I go barefoot whenever I can so people can see them and admire them. I can stand very erect and lift one leg so that it reaches my face, and flex my beautiful toes, in case someone hadn’t noticed.
That winter, whenever I wasn’t experimenting with my powers, I stood outside in my leg warmers and that too-big—“It’ll last for years and then Cody will wear it, too!”—cherry-red down jacket, my fuzzy hot-pink earmuffs, the purple and black and green mittens my father brought me from Ecuador, one blue snow boot, and one bare perfect foot that I brought carefully up to my face and then flexed, over and over. My breath came out in small puffs and my nose ran. But I didn’t care. Some things I did for God. Other things I did for art. I wondered if the library had some kind of list of saints and what they had suffered for, beside the obvious stuff like world peace and justice for the poor. Maybe I would become the first saint who was a ballerina.
“That’s totally weird,” Sophie said from her yard.
She was peering through a hole in the fence that separated the two properties. It was my parents’ responsibility to fix that hole, but they had no intention of doing that when they needed new plumbing and rewiring, not to mention having the floors sanded and polished, the walls painted, and insulation installed.
I didn’t answer. For one thing, I hated her something fierce, standing there with her headband and private school uniform. For another, the flexing kept my foot from going numb and I needed to concentrate.