A week and a half after the bonfire, with less than three weeks left until we moved to New York on August 1, I drove to the beach and walked to approximately the spot where Echo had found me.
I sat in the sand for the whole ninety minutes of “class,” which is where Jess thought I was. I watched the tourists and the seagulls, trying to think of a way to get Echo to leave me alone, forcing myself not to turn and look at the spot where Diana fell, imagining what was going to happen to me the longer I did nothing.
1. I would never work through my side effects.
2. Echo would tell everyone I had the memory of Win erased.
3. They would be furious/disappointed/repulsed.
4. Dancing would be impossible forever.
5. I might never get out of Cape Cod.
6. If I did get out, the Manhattan Ballet would kick me out of the junior corps on the first day.
7. I’d die here, having accomplished nothing and been nowhere.
None of these were worries I could share with Dr. Pitts, the therapist that Jess made me go to. So when I sat down for our appointment, I disappointed her again. Not opening up. Not sharing. Not showing the proper sorrow. I tried to push through the session so I could go back to attempting to dance again, but I had to say something to pass the time.
“I’m not that girl anymore,” I said. The vaguer and more apocalyptic, the easier it was to lie.
“What do you mean?”
Uh-oh. “I mean . . . I feel different. There’s the me before Win died, and the me now.”
“Different how?”
Sometimes I thought Dr. Pitts was quizzing me. That she suspected I wasn’t right. “In ballet, some girls can’t recover after they get their period. It’s not just that they have boobs and they’re taller. They get scared. Their brain won’t let them jump anymore, or they start to doubt their balance.”
“Did that happen to you?”
“No.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s a metaphor.”
“How so?”
I blinked. “Well. I guess that some people react to a loss or a change or whatever by freaking out and losing themselves in grief. And then some people—like me—manage to be different but not let it change them completely.” That sounded good.
“So you don’t think losing people changes you?” She tapped her legal pad with her fancy silver pen. “Grief over death—it’s something only weak people succumb to?”
I shrugged.
Dr. Pitts leaned forward. She was wrapped in scarves like a mummy; I didn’t even know if she was fat or thin, because she always wore them, along with huge flowing pants and boots that went up who knows how high because of all the fabric engulfing them. “Grief is not a weakness, Ari. It’s not something to push down and power through. Yes, it can change you, but that’s what people do—change, grow. It concerns me that you’re in denial.”
I felt my face flush. “I’m not in denial. I . . . miss Win.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really! Maybe I’m not, like, prostrate every day, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sad. What kind of therapist are you, insisting I act as sad as everyone else in the world? That’s sick. I’m dealing with this in my own way.”
Dr. Pitts looked satisfied for a few seconds, which was extra infuriating. “Anger is good,” she said, and it made me want to upend a coffee table and storm out. If her plan was to get me angry, bravo. “Tell me about your parents.”
“No,” I snapped before I could control myself.
“Why not?”
“They died almost ten years ago. It’s not relevant.”
“You lost them. You lost Win. It makes sense to be angry.”
“I’m angry at you, not because people keep dying!”
She nodded, as if people said they were angry with her all the time. Maybe they were.
I forced myself to lean back on the couch. In my mind, I moved smoothly, and the motion suggested I was relaxed, at home, unbothered. But I knew very well that to Dr. Pitts I probably looked as jerky and angry as I actually felt.
I thought of my new tapes. Every morning I got up, turned on the camera, put on some music, and attempted a simple sequence of steps: something from a showcase; an audition piece from the Institute; even the chorus girl choreography from last year’s musical. I remembered them all perfectly. In my head, I performed them perfectly, too.
I forced myself to go through each and every motion, even though I tripped and fell, even though I knew what the camera would show. Me, making a mockery of ballet. Me, like one of those girls who lose their nerve after puberty, except a thousand times worse, since I had the nerve—I just didn’t have the control.
In dance, you have to feel the music in order to express it. I used to be able to summon the love, fear, anger, joy, or whatever else the piece demanded. The music brought the feeling forward, an alchemical process in my mind transformed that feeling into steps and motion, and then when you watched me, you felt it, too.