“Because one of them might’ve been your birth mom?”
I nod. “But on their home page there was this interview with a girl from the tribe who’d just gotten a teaching job at Brown, after finishing a grad program there. I clicked on it mostly just to get away from the photos, but she was talking about how Brown was such a great place to learn and meet different kinds of people, and how before she went to college she didn’t really appreciate her home or her heritage, but that getting some space helped her see it differently, and now she knew she wanted to come back eventually but first she wanted to inspire young people to care about their histories and their traditions. And I want all that—to study something I love and meet people who are like me and not like me and graduate with a plan for how I’m going to make the world better. And I want to stop competing with my siblings and doing things just so people see me a certain way. And maybe someday I’ll like board games and window-shopping and movies about sports teams and dance team kick-lines, but right now I just want to start over, somewhere far away where no one expects anything from me and I can just be myself. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense,” he says, “but I think you’re wrong. Maybe not about all of it, but about dancing. Maybe you don’t dance like your sister or your mom, but anything with eyes could tell that it’s a part of you, Natalie. I’ve never seen you look more like yourself.”
“More like myself, huh?”
A small smile pulls at his mouth. “Don’t make fun of me. I’m tryin’ to be serious.” His lips settle into a straight line again. “You shouldn’t give dancing up just ’cause you think it belongs to someone else.”
I sigh. “What about you and football?”
His head tilts back in a silent laugh. “That’s different.”
“How?”
“Wasn’t my choice.”
“Beau, be honest with me. Were you scouted?”
He runs a hand down the back of his hair. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Natalie, I only graduated high school because teachers made up my grades so I could play. You think I’m gonna go off and get a college degree?”
“I think you could. I also think college athletic departments are every bit as corrupt as high schools’, and they’d probably make up your grades there too.”
“Maybe,” he says. “And in the meantime, Mason would be here, losing the house, and I’d be sitting through class, going crazy.”
“Couldn’t Mason work more or get a roommate or something? It’s four years, Beau, and it could change your life.”
“Maybe I don’t wanna change my life,” he snaps, and when I recoil from him, he settles against the barre again and runs a hand over his mouth then fixes his eyes on me. “I don’t want all that. That’s not what matters to me.”
“Okay,” I relent. “What do you want, Beau?” He stares at me for a long moment, and I start to feel shaky and full. “Beau, what is it you want?”
“A porch,” he says softly. He says it like it’s my name, and right then, I think, what both of us want more than anything is something we can never have. “All I really want is to build a house with a nice, big porch that gets used every day.”
24
On Thursday morning, after a particularly unsuccessful appointment with Alice, I head over to the school to get Jack. I pull around behind the field house as practice is winding down, roll down the windows, and close my eyes while I wait. Now that the Jeep is back in working order, I’m back to dropping off and picking up Jack, and now that I’m spending the middle of the night at the dance studio with Beau, the mornings are insufferable.
Life feels too fast and bright right now, but my brain feels foggy and slow. During the day everything hurts less—I don’t have the energy to worry about Grandmother, or even Matt, whose mom texts me a steady stream of Bible verses alongside pictures of Get Well Soon balloons, with very little actual information. But when I’m with Beau each night, the world snaps into clearer focus and I’m terrified again. Terrified and awake and a little bit on fire. I spend the whole time we’re together worrying he’s going to kiss me again and then, when he doesn’t, feeling devastatingly disappointed.