I flip through my old sketchbook, the one that holds my art-class history, some of which looks a lot like Gretchen’s. The shading assignments, the attempted still life, the practice on perspective. I’m tempted to tear the house picture out of the new sketchbook and place it in here, as if to say, yes, this is who I am now. But the picture seems too fragile for that, as though handling it in the wrong way could make its pencil lines retract from the paper, back into space.
Gretchen smiles and hands the picture back to me, laying the sketchbook lightly on the palms of my hands as though she knows how important it is. I will fill this sketchbook, maybe inside the Estate, maybe here in art class, maybe somewhere else entirely, but I will do it. I turn each page—blank and white, full of possibility. A zillion people have said that before me, but I think at last I understand.
Wait—there’s a page in the center that has a telltale Sharpie marker stain on it. I flip another page to find what bled through. In one corner of the page, there is neat handwriting in bright blue.
If you still want to work here, come see me. I need you to do a self-portrait.
Ah. Edie was right. I have my new project.
eighteen
MRS. CABALLINI HAS never not been worried about me.
“Are you sure you want a second cup of coffee?” She squats beside me and looks straight into my eyes.
“Oh, yes,” I tell her.
Meanwhile, Victoria, the refuser of dessert and coffee, is sitting in the chair across from me, drinking water as though it is the only thing holding her together. Her hands tremble and her face has almost no color. She has the Juilliard flu.
“Hey, Vic,” I say, “let’s go over your outfits for the trip one more time.”
She takes several long seconds to realize what my motivation is here. At least she doesn’t say something like, Why would I need fashion confirmation from someone who always wears the same pair of purple shoes? I take my coffee to go and we head to Vic’s room.
She flings herself onto the bed, and I settle on the desk chair, which is willow-tree-draped with clothes of all kinds. I set the cup of coffee—which, okay, I didn’t want or need—on top of a stack of books on the desk. Paperback novels, probably her comfort reading for the trip.
“You haven’t packed, have you?” I say.
“I haven’t even gotten the suitcase out of the closet.”
“That’s commitment.”
“I know.” She smiles. “I keep thinking about what I would be doing this weekend if I wasn’t going to test the effects of extreme stress on my nerves in Miami.”
“I don’t know.” I try to lock eyes with the picture of Martha Graham on the opposite wall, but it’s impossible. Martha is staring at a point in the distance, and she’s waiting for that point to move, but I don’t think it ever will. “Maybe at practice?”
“No. That’s what I mean. Even you can’t imagine me out of that world—this world, I mean.” She gestures around herself, at the stack of dance clothes topped with pointe shoes next to her on the bed. “I can’t be anything but this.”
“You can if you want. No one’s stopping you. I mean, your parents might be sort of pissed, but they’d get over it.” This is true. If Vic decided to take up physics in place of dance, her parents would spend about a week in mourning before buying her a graphing calculator. “But like you always say, you dance because you love it.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m sure this is just a temporary annoyance.”
“Vic, go to the audition. If you decide you don’t want to go to Juilliard, then you will have at least met some interesting people and taken a trip to Miami.”
She nods—well, bobs her head up and down, as though tricking me into thinking she’s nodding. God, I hope Vic doesn’t pull something outlandish, like telling her mom she’s going to the audition and then disappearing to spend a Catcher in the Rye–type weekend alone in Miami, having an odyssey of booze and self-discovery.
She studies the toes of a pair of pointe shoes. “I hope things aren’t weird between us when I get back.”
I grip the stack of clothes on her chair, their fabric soft on my hands, though the skeleton of the chair pokes out. “Yeah, I feel the same.”
“It seems like you’ve got some magic or something, dearie.”
Another second thought about the cup of coffee. I swallow a gulp. “It’s not mine. I mean, I looked for it and found it, but it’s still not mine.”
Martha Graham keeps her eye on the prize, and I stare her down instead of looking at Victoria.
Martha, girl, you’re so focused, but on what? Was your whole life about artistic expression, or was there something else you needed? When you wanted to tell someone how you felt about them, did you use words, or did you just downward-spiral your way across a stage and hope they understood?
It’s not particularly graceful, but I cross the room, take her suitcase from the closet, and flop it open on her bed. I leave myself enough room to sit on the corner of the bed, with one of the four carved posts jutting at my back in uncomfortable places.
Vic shakes her head at me. “I almost want to ask if you’ll take me back to your art studio, but I’m scared of what might happen.”
“Me too,” I tell her.
And we are close again, almost as close as we were that night at the Estate. Her right leg is up against the suitcase, and I grab the leather corner of it so that we’re touching the same thing. She hates confusion. She hates the feeling of being on edge—she needs the steps and counts laid out for her. And yet, here I am, throwing deviations in the path of hers that leads neatly from here to Miami and then to New York. The look on her face is one I haven’t seen before, and I’ve got a whole catalog of Rare Looks of Victoria Caballini from which to draw. The look from ten seconds after she broke up with Connor Hagins, as she strained to stay completely cool while he walked away. The look when she found out she was doing the Rhapsody in Blue solo in the first Gershwin show. Even the look when I brought her flowers to the theater. None of those. Or any of the dancing looks or any of the late-night looks or the early-morning looks.
“We shouldn’t, though.” Vic brushes her hair back and spits these words at the suitcase. “This audition is everything, and I just . . . I can’t shake my confidence before it.”
“Yeah, your audition for a school you’re going to drop out of.”
“Shh!” Vic points to the door. Then she pulls the suitcase to the middle of the bed and throws a pair of pointe shoes and an armful of tights and warm-up clothes into it. She’s committed. For all our talk of possibilities, when it comes to Victoria, there is only one.
But after everything, after years of dance classes and companies and performances, the possibility quivers.
“You’re scared,” I say.
“Duh. We’ve covered this.”
“No, I mean, you’re scared of not getting in, but you’re scared of succeeding, too. You’re scared of dropping out of Juilliard, or not having the life you want by the time you’re supposed to drop out of Juilliard. All of it scares you.”