“So explain it. It’s not good to let these things fester.”
The truth faded farther away with each breath. How could I open my mouth now and say “I’ve done something terrible,” tell her about Win and the side effects, after arguing so hard for New York? Jess loved me, and she would understand, but she’d pity me, too. She and Diana and everyone else. They’d know I wasn’t strong enough to handle some sadness. They’d know I cared more about some boy than I did about dancing, which was impossible. I didn’t know who I was without dancing. I didn’t know how to live without it, because I’d never had to live without it.
And I wouldn’t. This couldn’t be the end—this couldn’t be forever. I would dance again. I had to dance again. I was moving to New York August first, and that was the most important thing—more important than a stranger named Win, anyway.
“Fine,” I said to Jess. Fine, I would go to the therapist. Fine, I would pretend.
I would let them believe that I remembered this Win Tillman. It would make them feel better, not disrupting what they already believed to be true, and I wouldn’t have to explain the inexplicable. And I’d figure out how to dance again.
I got serious about dance soon after my parents died. Jess moved into town from San Francisco to take care of me, breaking up with her girlfriend to do it. I’d only met Jess a couple of times before that, so she was practically a stranger, mourning her older sister and brother-in-law and crying over her busted relationship.
Out in public, everywhere I went I was reminded that I was different from everyone else. They all had parents. I had none. It was bad enough when someone at recess casually mentioned their mom or dad. Worse was when someone had obviously been told about me, and so carefully avoided saying mom or dad or even fire, which eventually meant carefully avoiding me.
Jess didn’t avoid me, but she didn’t know what to do with me, either. She took me to the hekamist for the trauma erasing spell, so I wouldn’t have nightmares about seeing the house collapse with my parents in it, and then she left me alone as I crept through our new house, trying not to jump at every creak of the floorboards. I listened to a lot of music to cover any weird sounds, on the iPod I had somehow saved from the old house—the one possession not lost in the fire. I slept with the window open even in winter, in case I had to jump out in the middle of the night. I checked the burglar alarm three or four times a night.
Jess didn’t know what kids were like and she didn’t know what I was like before; she didn’t know this wasn’t normal. (Plus she never noticed I checked the burglar alarm at all. She could sleep through anything—which made me even more anxious.) She probably would’ve caught on eventually, or I would’ve started acting out even more. But instead, I threw myself into dance.
I’d been taking the beginner classes casually for a couple of years, like everyone else. But that year, class became something else. For an hour at a time, I didn’t have to listen for strange noises. It didn’t matter who I was or what had happened to me. I could make myself move beautifully. Even early on, I could tell that I had control in a way the other girls didn’t.
When I told Jess I wanted to start going to dance every day, she didn’t blink. She nodded and added it to the giant calendar she had taped on the kitchen wall. She picked me up from school, drove me to dance, and picked me up again when it was over, and she never complained. And we became a family.
So dance saved me. Not only because Jess and I were forced to interact for that hour a day we spent in the car, but also because dance itself—when you do it with your whole heart and being, and when your training sinks into your bones—is transporting. I was lifted out of my body and into the music. It became the thing I poured myself into, the container for my messy, wobbly, bursting-at-the-seams emotions. I let myself flow into ballet, and it remade me into someone who was strong, capable, and free.
I remembered that. I flew.
Without dance, I was back again to nothing, a shadow creeping through the house, different and alone. For weeks after the funeral, I watched videos of famous prima ballerinas on the internet, or Aunt Jess’s sneaky shots of my performances at competitions or shows.
I knew how it felt to make those movements, familiar as a favorite song, but as I watched I also felt a creeping hot anger that started in the back of my neck and spread up to my cheeks and down through my arms and back.
The worst part was, I didn’t have anyone to be mad at. I’d done this to myself. Old Ari—the Ari that was—had taken away the only thing that made any sense to me. The only thing I was good at. The only thing I loved.