I nodded, keeping my face stoic, even though that was a request she made when someone was screwing up so badly they’d lost all perspective on their body.
In the mirror, I watched myself go through the warm-up again. It took several measures to sink in, since I was so used to seeing myself the way I usually moved. The smooth mental image needed time to be wiped away and replaced with what I saw: a jumble of elbows, jerky knees, awkward arms, wrists off-kilter. The harder I tried to force my body in line, the worse it got. Actually, as far as my brain could tell, I was doing it beautifully. But somewhere in between my mind and my body, the signals sputtered out and were lost.
When the warm-up ended, I couldn’t move. The other girls scurried around me for the next part of class. I looked at myself in the mirror.
No. That wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. I was out of practice. It would come back. I had to push through.
We cleared the barre and lined up to cross the floor for a simple combination. Rowena made small gestures with her hands and called out what she wanted (“Tombé, pirouette, relevé and extend, pas de bourrée, and balancé, balancé . . .”), and I counted off, waiting for my turn.
As soon as I started across the floor, I knew I was not simply out of practice.
I knew why it had felt odd to get dressed for dance.
I knew that I had done something terrible.
In my head, I could see the steps, could feel the way they would work together. With eyes closed, it felt almost like it always had.
But with my eyes open and a wall of mirrors right in front of me, I could see what my body actually looked like.
Stiff. Jerky. No smoothness, no graceful transitions. Angles all wrong. Arms over-rotating. Legs pigeon-toed. If it hadn’t been so terrifying, it would’ve been funny, like a scene in a movie where a romantic heroine who bluffed that she could dance was being proved grotesquely wrong.
I focused and tried harder. But the me in the mirror looked as out of joint as before. I could not make corrections when I had no way to calibrate them; I could not fix what already felt like perfection.
When I pushed even harder, ignoring the signals my body was giving me and relying purely on the mirror, I managed to hit myself in the face with a hand, and I lost my balance, falling right in the middle of the floor.
The smack of the floor on my hip—that I felt. The humiliation—those synapses were working fine.
The piano stopped. The other girls looked down at me, still lying on the floor, their faces full of pity and also disgust. Who falls in the middle of a simple combination?
Not me. I was going to be in the Manhattan Ballet junior corps. I was going to get out of here and make everyone proud.
I didn’t trust myself to stand. Rowena appeared next to me. She took hold of my elbow and hoisted me to my feet, making it look as much as possible like she was only offering support. But without her I’d have stayed on the ground flailing like a turtle on its back.
In the hall, she didn’t let go, even when I sat on the changing bench. Her fingers were daggers in my skin. “I’m okay,” I said. She still didn’t let go. “I’m fine.”
Cautiously, she released my arm. “You should take as long as you need, Ariadne.”
“I don’t want to take any time.”
Rowena shook her head. “Sometimes the body knows what the mind does not.”
That sounded like one of those solemn dancerisms that could explain anything from a stiff hip to a nervous breakdown, but still I wondered if she was right. The pulse of my bad wrist felt like it was spreading through my whole body, and I could barely feel anything else. Not even shame.
“This is the thing you can never plan for,” she said. “One of life’s tragedies.”
“Yes, but . . . New York.”
“When are you leaving?”
“August first.”
“Two months. Plenty of time to prepare.”
“Jess and I—we’ve been planning for years. It’s my chance. I have to be ready.”
“Then you will,” she said simply. “And I have to go back to class. Stay, and we’ll talk more?”
I nodded, but as soon as she left the changing room I pushed myself to my feet and ran, awkwardly, out the door.
My body didn’t feel like one muscle anymore, and it didn’t feel like twenty muscles. It felt like thousands. The parts of me that weren’t working weren’t out of practice—they were out of my control completely.
I had traded in my ability to dance for some stupid boy. A boy I probably would’ve broken up with anyway when I moved away to New York. That boy somehow was worth nine years of effort, practicing five hours a day, auditions and competitions and pain, everything I always thought I would be, the only thing I’ve ever been any good at. In order to forget my past, I’d obliterated my future.
The me of yesterday had been a selfish, foolish bitch.