When he starts to play, I close my eyes and listen, trying to let all my nerves and discomfort seep out. It’s easier than I would’ve expected—he plays so beautifully it’s like the song is a piece of him that’s reached outside his body to meet me, and it’s drawing me out of myself too, leaving no walls standing between us. The way he plays piano makes me wish I could see him play football too. I bet he’s graceful like Matt, but less subdued. I imagine he plays untamed, unfettered, un-self-conscious, the same way he plays the piano. With simultaneous tenderness and abandon, making mistakes that only serve to make those periods of perfection seem more beautiful and real, overflowing with life and possibility. He plays the piano like he’s falling and, at any second, his fingers could completely miss the keys. Seeing people do the things they love has always fascinated and inspired me. Seeing Beau doing the thing he loves now actually makes me want to dance, to live so big my life swallows the entire world.
I start to move. It’s nothing like doing jazz or pom routines with the Ryle dance team. It’s like that first ballet class I took. I’m a tree growing; I’m sun warming the earth. An avalanche and a wave glancing off rock, and oil sliding through the palms of ancient hands, and in all that time, I’m also me and nothing else. I’m not my mother’s straight-backed walk or my sister’s beating hummingbird wings, and it’s fine.
It is good. The people I love are in me, little flecks like mica in a creek bed. There are strangers in me too, with my face and hands and feet, a voice that spoke to me while I was nothing but a peanut-sized inkling in her belly; a hand that held mine as we walked down the street. This hurts, but it’s good to move and be all the things I am but can’t explain. It’s good to let my body bear the tension instead of my mind. I try to become the music, to absorb a piece of Beau into my limbs, and soon I’m lost in the darkness of the room, the swirl of the piano keys, the sweat wetting my hairline, my neck, my armpits, my legs as I leap and roll and hinge and turn. I am muscle and sinew, crunch and push, gather and swell. I am roundness, fullness. I am smallness, a tiny important thing tearing through the Earth.
My mind wanders. I fall deeper and deeper into the song, into the dance, into my own memory. The song fades away, and still I keep moving until the last burst of energy thrusts out of me and I feel myself fade and settle like once-disrupted sand falling back asleep on the ocean floor. When all of me has finally stilled, except my overworking lungs, I look up into the mirror and see Beau behind me, standing beside the bench. He’s leaning against the piano, eyes visibly soft even in the darkness. “Why’d you stop?” he says quietly.
I run a hand over my neck. It feels like it’s been hours since I last spoke, and my heart is still racing. “You stopped playing.”
“No, I mean, why’d you quit?”
I cross the room to the far wall, whose top half is composed of windows overlooking the campus, and lean against the barre. Beau follows, splays his hands out on the wooden post. He waits and watches. “It’s hard to explain,” I tell him.
He doesn’t push for more, and maybe that’s why, after a minute, I offer it to him. “My mom was a dancer. Not my biological mother—my mom,” I say. “And my little sister, Coco. She’s talented, wants to be in musical theater.” Beau looks at me patiently and waits for me to go on. “My dad was into sports, and my brother, Jack, is on the football team. They look like our parents too. I mean, the portrait on our mantel could be an ad for the nuclear family, and then there’s me standing off to the side, ten shades darker. Mom used to always tell me: It doesn’t matter how things look—we’re family. And we are. I know that. But I guess after Grandmother left, I admitted to myself that it wasn’t only the way we looked that was different.”
“So?” Beau says.
I sigh and try to regain traction on my thoughts, which all swam out of me while I was dancing. I feel emotionally stretched out, loose and relaxed, unable to track down my usual knots.
“So as a kid, I felt different from everyone, and the way I combatted that was to make sure no one else noticed, and that meant doing a lot of things I didn’t really want to do. But after Grandmother left, everything I’d done to fit in just made me feel sick. I didn’t want to be around anyone, other than Megan, because I was so self-conscious that I was pretending, and I didn’t know how to stop.
“And then one night, my whole family went to one of Coco’s recitals. She and this kid Michael Banks were doing a rendition of the duet from La Sylphide. It was beautiful. She was beautiful, completely in control and elegant. I’ve never danced like that in my life. Dad and Jack were practically asleep, but then I looked over at my mom and she was crying, and the way I felt right then, it was stupid, but I was jealous and hurt and I hated it. And then that night, I went home, and I started Googling Indian reservations in Alabama. I’d thought about doing it a million times before that, but I always felt guilty, like I was betraying my parents. That night I just didn’t care. There was a word, something my birth mother called herself the one time she visited me, ishki. So I started with that. It means mother, in Chickasaw and Choctaw, so I had a pretty good idea she came from one of those nations.”
“Did you find her?” Beau asks.
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I only really looked at one reservation before I kind of freaked out. There were pictures of people from the tribe, and I guess I didn’t expect that.”