The attic had its pros and cons. Pro: the king-size bed and the huge circular window that overlooked the frozen river. Con: over the bed, on the bare wooden walls, hung a giant deer head that looked so freshly dead I expected it to blink. Strong pro: I had the room to myself, so setting an alarm in the middle of the night to shower wouldn’t be conspicuous. Strong con: The bathroom was down the stairs and two hallways, past the rooms where four of the guys would be sleeping. More sneaking than I’d hoped for.
I’ll make it work, I told myself, leaving my suitcase by the bed. I jogged downstairs. In the great room, Trav and Mama were lifting a coffee table, clearing the center of the room. From the kitchen, the scent of sizzling hot dogs flavored the air, flooding my mouth with saliva.
Trav set down his end of the table. “Lunch,” he called, “then choreo.”
“I can’t dance,” Marcus said beside me. “At all.”
“Everyone can dance,” I said.
Half an hour later, Marcus was doing his very best to prove me wrong. Mama demonstrated for about the fifth time how to turn over the left shoulder. Marcus spun the wrong way for the fifth time, looking green.
“Here,” I said, stepping in. “Right foot over left, okay?”
“I’m the worst,” Marcus mumbled.
“No, you’re not. You just gotta learn it. Then it’s done.”
“How do you know how to do pivots and stuff?”
“Theater. I’ve taken a dance class every year since I’ve been here.” I didn’t want to tell him that this hardly qualified as actual choreography. Mama had referred to it as “choralography,” which sounded about right. A lot of walking on-rhythm into different formations, dramatic lifting of arms, and quick shoulder movements. Nothing that would interrupt our breath support.
I settled for saying, “You can get this. It’ll look so simple by the end, you won’t even remember how you had trouble with it.”
Marcus planted his right foot over his left and spun so enthusiastically, he wheeled off-balance into Nihal, who let out an undignified splutter.
Mama sighed, coming to a halt beside me with his hands in his pockets. For a moment, we watched the others practicing the steps. “I wanted to stick in some hip-hop,” Mama muttered, “but Trav vetoed it.”
“Put it in anyway,” I muttered back. “Make him do it.”
We exchanged grins, watching Trav. He moved like a robot that hadn’t been greased for a couple decades.
We worked straight through the afternoon. This was tough for Marcus, but tougher for me. While he could gripe about his lack of coordination, I couldn’t say a word about my issue: a vicious set of period cramps that—over the hours—escalated slowly from “mild abdominal discomfort” to “my entire uterus is getting extracted with a spoon and sacrificed over a violet flame to the unholy uterine gods who are placated by naught but pain.” I escaped a few times to knock back Advil like a seven-year-old popping Skittles.
By the time we finished choreographing the first two songs, the sunset was glowering, and sweat made my T-shirt cling to the small of my back. We collapsed before the fireplace, slices of gooey instant pizza making our fingers drip with grease, and ate until the spread of windows that flanked the chimney held a grayish dusk.
Jon Cox went about building a fire in the hearth, striking a long, thick match that hissed as it flared. When the fire was popping merrily up the chimney, Mama slid a video game into a thin black console and a dim logo glowed into life on the screen above the mantel. I settled back into the sofa as Trav navigated through a hellish horror game, complete with oozing monsters lurching out of the dark.
Trav’s reflexes with that arsenal of weapons were frighteningly fast. I averted my eyes from the screen as he took a meat cleaver to a monster’s arm with a messy-sounding squelch. A fitting soundtrack to the carnage I’d endured all afternoon.
Nestled in the sofa, I rubbed my stomach ruefully. If life had taught me one invaluable lesson, it was that being aware of the walls of your internal organs is universally a bad thing. Right now, if you’d given me a Sharpie, I could have traced a perfect outline of my uterus onto my abdomen. Like using translucent parchment paper to trace an image beneath, if that image was of a war-torn battlefield or a sun exploding or three hundred simultaneous shark attacks.
Nihal had his sketchpad in his lap next to me. I glanced over and got a jolt—my own face was staring back from a line of facial sketches. The seven of us who were here. Isaac’s face was conspicuously missing.
“I texted him,” I muttered.
Nihal’s pen slowed against the page. “Yeah? He say anything?”
“Nope.”
Nihal shook his head and outlined one of Erik’s arched eyebrows.
My phone lit up, blaring my ringtone. Isaac, I thought. That was some timing.
I grabbed my phone and stood, but when I glanced down, my grip went rigid. The number on the screen didn’t have a contact associated with it—just a string of digits. Of course I recognized that number, though, even if it’d been half a year since I’d deleted it.
The last time Michael and I had talked, he’d been considering a gap year. I resented my curiosity. Had he ended up at NYU after all, or was he auditioning for Broadway shows instead? Had he gotten that union card and started racking up Equity points? Why was he calling—was he okay, was he safe?
The urge to pick up was so strong that I wondered for a moment if I was still in love with him. These days, Michael-related thoughts had faded from omnipresent to sporadic—more in the lower single digits per day than in the upper doubles, less of browsing the Internet and wanting to send him everything that made me laugh or think.
These days, the only ways he lingered were the ways he’d changed me. I knuckled my forehead in late-night exhaustion like he always had, sitting by the Burgess fireside. I highlighted my scripts in two colors, the darker shade reserved for beat shifts; he’d told me I should try it sometime. Really, it helped him memorize, helped him pick what to care about the most. Love was a sea of red ink, and once you folded under the waves, there was no solvent that could scrub it out of your skin. You could only wait to discover what you were when you wandered out of the shallows: something rose, or crimson, or carnelian.
I hit the Decline button and sat back down on the sofa, exhaustion sinking into me like heat. Even my cramps had suddenly subsided, as if they’d decided that I had enough to deal with at the moment. I couldn’t believe I still wanted to talk to him. You’d think I would have gotten sick of hurting.
“Who was that?” Nihal said.
“Ex,” I said before I could stop myself.
“Ah.” He raised one eyebrow. “Recent?”
“June.”
“Not a good ex, I’m assuming.”
From my other side, Jon Cox grunted, “Good exes are a conspiracy theory.”